Hair Peace

This was to be Keith Young’s last day as a virtual circus sideshow, the final few emotionally racked moments of an insult-laden life as a modern-day American werewolf.

He rose shyly from his chair in his doctor’s book-lined UCLA office. And then slowly, button by button, facing a horde of reporters and TV camera people, he undid his orange dress shirt.

For one long uncomfortable moment, the freakish image shocked a usually thick-skinned bunch of newspeople into silence.

Young was covered with hair: a swirling carpet that covered his chest in dark ringlets, swept down his stomach and around to his back and shoulders.

For most of his 32 years, the suburban Chicago resident has worn his thick mane like an emotional scar, bearing the brunt of the stares, the comments, the laughter.

On Wednesday, the bashful machinist was in Los Angeles to endure just one more day of glaring in exchange for salvation. After trying countless remedies such as waxing, shaving and electrolysis, Young heard a syndicated radio talk-show host last summer tell of a breakthrough in hair removal, pioneered by Dr. Edward Tobinick of UCLA’s Institute of Laser Medicine. The show spontaneously offered free surgery to the winner of a “Hairiest Man in America” contest. Young won easily and came to Los Angeles to collect his prize.

Even in a city where shameless publicity stunts are staged almost daily, this was a particularly poignant one. After gaping at Young, who stood with his hands on his head, police pat-down style, the reporters began firing questions.

“Were you teased as a kid?”

“When did you grow your first beard?”

“Do you get any dates?”

Young, a self-described “Average Joe,” took the whirring cameras in stride.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, turning in circles. “Is that long enough?”

If he had to make a spectacle of himself one more time, all right, he said. “Anything to get rid of this hair. But 15 minutes of fame is enough for me.”

Tobinick, whose procedure was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration, said too many Americans are distressed by hair they believe is in the wrong place. Sometimes the problem surfaces in mustaches on little girls, beards on women or thick eyebrows on men.

Using a process called photolysis, the laser therapy destroys hair follicles without damaging the surrounding skin and with no aftereffects, Tobinick said.

But in treating about 5,000 patients, the doctor had never seen anyone like Young, who sprouted a thick rug of chest hair at age 12. Two years later, he grew a full beard and could walk into bars without ID.

But the hair kept growing. In his 20s, Young rarely removed his shirt in public. “Women tell me chest hair is fine,” he said. “But once it starts growing on your back, you look more like an animal. It’s repulsive.”

On hot summer days, people laughed when a sweaty Young removed his shirt while camping. They pointed and threw things at him if he bared his chest on a long bike ride.

The friendly advice he received to just shave his hair, Young said, was like telling an obese woman to just lose weight or a short man to just grow a few inches.

The cruelest blow came when a woman he was dating spotted him with his shirt off. “Suddenly I’m face to face with the girl who’s supposed to be head-over-heels in love with me,” he said. “You could see it in her face. It was all over. Just like that.”

That was six years ago. Young said he hasn’t dated since.

In July, he heard about the hairiest man contest on his car radio. Without a pen, he scrawled the number in the dust on his car dashboard.

“I went out onto my deck and cried like a baby the night I found out” about winning, Young recalled. “It was better than even winning a Mercedes.”

Wednesday’s eight-hour procedure to remove the hair on Young’s chest, back and abdomen normally costs $5,000. But the doctor picked up the tab in exchange for the publicity.

And so Young took his shirt off and posed for reporters. And then--sadly but resolutely--he did it a second and third time for successive groups in Tobinick’s office.

Later, Tobinick applied a gel and then slowly eased the hand-held laser pencil across Young’s shaved back--the vaporizing hair sending up smoke that filled the room with an odor of burnt hamburger.

Through it all (reporters were allowed to watch as much of the procedure as they wanted), the patient kept his sense of humor.

Earlier, he removed his cap to reveal what he called a perverse twist of fate: a balding pate.

He pointed to his chest and then to his scalp.

“I’m waiting for the invention where they take hair from here and move it to here.”