I was at a party in Brooklyn a few months back, grabbing a beer, when I ran smack into a guy I hadn’t seen in a few years. "I didn’t recognize you," he said, adding, "Your hair, man! It’s all gray!"

So that’s what it feels like to be shivved.

I noticed my first gray hair in high school, and by the time I’d graduated from college, more dominoes had fallen. By 33, I was getting used to the Anderson Cooper jokes. Which would have been funny if Anderson Cooper weren’t a decade older than me. If that guy was prematurely gray, what did that make me? Immaturely gray? The thing is, I’d never considered doing anything about my fast-aging hair, partly because I’m a cheap mofo, but more out of fear—fear that I’d wind up looking like Wayne Newton. Dyed hair always struck me as the equivalent of going to McDonald’s and ordering the Angus Burger. I mean, who are you kidding? But after that late-night showdown in Brooklyn left me embarrassed, and after President Obama was spotted with suddenly darker hair in January before a state dinner, I felt (yes) man enough to call a salon. To call Clyde.

Clyde Elezi is the owner of The Drawing Room, a downtown-Manhattan salon that looks like the inside of a Virgin Atlantic cabin and specializes in—besides great haircuts—dialing back a man’s gray. Clyde explained, "The hope is that people will say, ’What’s different?’ but they won’t know exactly." To leave some gray, he said, is the key to avoiding that retired-ESPN-anchor look. The experience turned out to be more just-for-men than Just for Men. There was no toxic high-school-chemistry-set odor, no gloves and Vaseline along my hairline. Rather, the color director, Alex, employed a much gentler process. The technical name for his dark-arts wizardy is "freehand gray-hair blending" (call a few local salons that cater to men and ask if they offer it), though Alex just calls it "camouflage." For about an hour, he hovered over my chair with a small brush, painting individual strands with Redken Color Camo while I answered e-mails. Simple. When it was over, I paid my $95 and walked out feeling groovy.

Unfortunately, that confidence lasted all of ten minutes. I boarded a New York City subway car and caught my reflection under the fluorescent lighting. I no longer saw my father staring back at me. I saw my mother, a woman who’d been dyeing her hair since before my bar mitzvah. Oy.

Over the next week, I fought off medical-marijuana-grade levels of extreme paranoia and found myself avoiding certain seats in our office conference room—afraid the direct overhead lighting would betray me. I forced myself to go out in public, feeling (I imagine) like a woman with new fake tits, obsessed with the question: Does it look real? But as I stared in the mirror one night, it finally hit me: It’s not that I looked younger, though I certainly did, but rather that I looked like me. Or my brain’s pilated notion of me. And I realized I might be going back to the Drawing Room on the regular. Because, true to the salon’s prediction, while I got a few vague compliments ("Have you lost weight?"), not a single friend or family member pinpointed the change. But no one made an Anderson Cooper joke, either. And that alone was worth the $95.

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