What it sounds like inside my head when the hair is being removed from the outside of it
Yeah, as usual: quite short on the sides and front, with something kind of like this, you know?
Maybe even a little bit shorter. Sure, that’ll be good.
I’m a little overdue for this. I hate it when I put it off too long, then it gets all poofy and crazy, and if I put gel in it the day I do finally make it to the frizer it gets all sticky when she mists it. Magda gives me shit if I use gel, “I didn’t know you were one of those guys”, but it gets all out of control at the end of the cycle if I don’t stay on top of it, I need to use a little gel during the last week. When I was a kid my mother gave me virtually every haircut right up til I went away to school. First barber chair I ever sat in was Joe’s in Lawrenceville. Had the complete Time-Life set of World War II books, what was that about? I sit in these chairs and come up with stupid theories, for example, you can judge the quality of the barber’s work by the magazines they have available: the older and drier the reading material, the snappier the haircut you’re going to end up with. Like most theories, it’s got a fatal flaw: Bob the Navy Barber behind the Custom’s House in Portland. Always had that day’s Boston Globe, New York Times, the Sunday magazine sections, lots of borderline pr0n, but he still gave a damn good cut. One of the few barbers I could make small talk with, too. I hate small talk, especially guy small talk — the assumption that I give a flying fuck how the Sox’re doin’. Bob’s conversations were memorable whether I was participant or Maxim-reading eavesdropper. I recall my haircut of August 2000:
Bob: You take any summer vacation this year?
Haircuttee: I’ll go downeast for a coupla weeks. You?
Bob: Yeah, matterafack I just got back from France.
Haircuttee: Oh, no kidding. How’d you like it?
Bob: You know somethin’? Didn’t like it.
I think Bob was slightly offput by my coming regularly once a month and then disappearing for years at a time. I still make a point of getting in there for a cut when I’m back in Maine visiting. Christmas 2001:
Bob: Hey, how’s that house a yours comin’ along? That thing finished yet?
Haircuttee: They’re hanging the drywall now.
Bob: Oh, yeah, drywall. Comin’ along.
Haircuttee: G.C.’s a pretty good guy.
Bob: Now, what kinda a house is that exackly?
Haircuttee: Ranch.
Bob: Ooh, yeah, a ranch. I like a nice ranch.
I can get my hair cut in Slovene, but I can’t make small talk. I can eavesdrop half-decent, but have yet to find a haircutter in Nova Gorica the conversational equal of Bob The Navy Barber. In Argentina I used to force myself to make small talk, and could manage, I liked the barber, and my haircutting vocabulary was the better for it. I never did become terribly fluent in sporty Castellano small talk despite being infinitely more interested and invested in local football there than I ever have been about the Sox since like 1972. So my English sporty small talk is weak anyway.
No, no need to cut those, they’re okay.
In college I went to that French Canadian place tucked in behind the K-Mart. Seemed appropriate. No small talk there. Later I was always able to find a girl friend (the space is critical) to cut my hair. Trish would do it in her room at the top of that building that used to be Phi Delta Theta. No. Lamda Chi? Something with a Delta, the hockey frat. Lacrosse frat. Whatever. Hmmm. That is going to bug the hell out of me… She had one of those weird chairs with no back and a sloping seat, like Lisa Simpson has, supposed to be good for your posture. It was really good for the haircutting purpose, made you sit up all straight. She cut my hair one night in Boston, too, summer of 1984, that apartment she was renting and she had a kitten that would run laps around the place and vault out the open window onto the porch roof, using the small of my back as a launch pad. Not a good night’s sleep. I can’t remember what the quid pro quo was for a Tricia haircut, but in Florence Heather used to cut my hair on the balcony overlooking Piazza Savonarola. The hair would just blow away over the piazza, in theory anyway, and I’d buy her a bottle of wine in payment. Good haircuts. On All Saints weekend in 1984 Bill and I went to Caen to visit Nathalie and she cut both our hair and that was probably the most ass-kicking haircut I’ve ever had. I’ve got a blurry picture of myself with that particular haircut, I’m walking through the Vondelpark in Amsterdam. But that can’t be right, because Nathalie cut my hair after we left Amsterdam. Hmmm. That’s weird. Maybe it’s a Heather haircut in that picture…
I hope my sister finds that journal. I’d like to figure this out. I wonder if I can google that frat-house question. They shut them down before there was an internet.
Of course they cut our hair in basic. Shaved our heads right down to the skull, and little-known fact? You have to pay the guy. You don’t have to tip him, though. That obviously wouldn’t work. Then the sons of bitches shaved us again a week before we went home at Christmas, just to be spiteful. Our hair had grown out and we were just looking human again, not like a bunch of interchangeable baby birds. I got to like it short. The cut I had at Huachuca was pretty extreme. That one was by choice. “High-and-tight”, a mohawk, basically. Good for the heat.
I always kind of wonder what makes a person decide to become a barber. It seems like a nice enough way to earn a living, I suppose. I think it’d make me crazy, though, always having other people’s hair on me, in my nose, blowing around. When it’s really hot in the summer I can barely stand to get my hair cut, let alone imagine doing it all day, it’s a million degrees and you’re all sticky and clotted with itchy hair. I guess in a lot of cases it’s a family thing. This woman is obviously her daughter. And that place on Main Street in Missoula I ended up going to pretty regularly was a father-and-two-sons operation. Pretty good place and I swear to god that shop hadn’t changed in any way since Norman frickin’ Maclean got his hair cut there. Except for the Field and Streams. Probably still hasn’t. What was the name of that place? ‘Main Street Barbershop’, maybe? That’d be predictably creative. Near the Grizzly Hackle…
Man, what is she doing? Didn’t she already do that? This is taking forever.
Why do I get so impatient in the barber chair these days? Does it really take twice as long as it used to?
Ned was legendary. He was probably the most sought-after barber I’ve encountered, only cut hair by appointment, no walk-ins except for like Thursday mornings or something. I actually liked that, because you could count on getting in and out of there fast, you just had to plan ahead. And if you did try to go the walk-in route, you’d be in there for two hours because he was so popular and guys in Ellsworth don’t plan ahead. Ned’s reading material was, like, exploded diagrams of Pratt & Whitney turbines, medical journals from 1957, that kind of stuff. You’d die of boredom waiting for a Ned cut, but it was worth it. I knew guys who’d drive an hour to get a Ned cut. And the old riddle about how the barber with the worst haircut himself is the guy to go to? Because the other barber must’ve given it to him, and you don’t want him cutting your hair? Wrong in Ned’s case: he was the best-coifed man in Ellsworth. I swear that man cut his own hair in the mirror every single night of his life.
He might’ve been a little psychotic. He was like George McFly. Good haircuts, though.
No, no gel, no need. Mmm hmm, looks fine. Yes, back looks good, thanks.
No, the change is for you.
Now let me outta here. I got some stuff I gotta go google.
The first real barbershop memory I have is somewhere in Southern California. I was just a little shaver, but I remember distinctly there being Playboy and Penthouse available for the gentlemen. Sadly, once this discovery was made, Mom decided that Fantastic Sam’s was a more appropriate place for her impressionable child to get a haircut.
There was a place next to a video store when I hit middle school that was run by a guy called “Big Mac”. My little brother and I called him that because his name was Mac. Also, he tipped the scales at about 350. He was one of those redneck guys who was so obese that his tongue was fat. His eyelids had cellulite. It made him all squinty and vaguely Oriental looking with his fat tongue unable to fit in his mouth. It poked out defiantly even when he remained mute.
He would recommend “I Spit Upon Your Grave” as an excellent viewing choice to my then six year old brother. This was doubly ironic as his swollen tongue made every soft consonant a shower of expectorant and his gruesome visage was much scarier to us than any horror movie.
In college, I had the great honor of going to Woody’s, Georgia’s oldest operating barber shop. In bidness since 1926. I used to get my hair cut by the guy who had been working there since it opened. He went to high school with Jefferson Davis or something. Much scarier than Big Mac, this fossil had the tremors and would cut hair with the lit cigarette dangling from his trembling lip. The normally enjoyable straight razor and hot shaving cream on the back of the neck became an exercise in fear and fortitude as the potential for massive blood loss was imminent. The old bastard gave a great haircut everytime.
Our basic training haircuts, by contrast, became excellent tools for spotting who was yanked out of the womb with forceps and who was not.
Comment by Sarcastro — Saturday 18 November 06 @ 17.32 MST+2.00
My memory, which of those years is fuzzy at best, tells me that the hockey frat was DKE, and that it was at the top of one of the the “Hillside” buildings next to Taylor. I also have memories of that very same frat’s post-abolition clandestine meetings on the second floor of the house whose first floor I co-rented in what back then was the cosmicallly named High Street. The purloined sign for which I still have. On a rafter under my porch. For old time’s sake.
Comment by SquamLoon — Monday 20 November 06 @ 06.35 MST+2.00
I met my wife while getting my hair cut. A friend offered to shave my head using her flatmate’s clippers, and Paola was visiting her at the time and offered to help out. It was love at first shear…
Comment by simon — Monday 20 November 06 @ 10.21 MST+2.00
Rashid: I can see that this topic brings out the memories in you, too. And you and I must’ve shared quite a few barbers in our time, I reckon. Funny that none of them have stuck. I can’t even remember the first basic cut, though I pretend that I can. When I picture it, though, I am John Candy in “Stripes” holding his hair in cupped hands and weeping like a schoolgirl. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what I looked like, minus 300 pounds.
SquamLoon: you’re right about DKE being the hockey frat, but it was on frat row between Lambda Chi and Phi Delta. The Hillside fraternity you’re thinking of was KDP (where ‘P’ = Rho) and they are probably the ones who co-rented your place on Wicked Baked Street or whatever it was called. I still cannot remember the name of the house that was part of “frat row” but was not on the row itself. Picture the path running from Roberts to the art building, it was near that and the big parking lot. As you can see, this is still bothering me. Thanks for trying.
It also occurs to me that I saw you, SquamLoon, like 20 hours before that Nathalie cut. I was arriving from Amsterdam and you were en route there. You loaned us your dorm room and we ate your gigantic jar of Nutella. I had a sinus infection. Bizarre.
Simon: that is so damn romantic that I am going to have to ban you.
Comment by sgazzetti — Monday 20 November 06 @ 10.24 MST+2.00
Dood-
No props to Saul?!?!? No discussion about the straight razor? What about my Playboy Rule?!?!?
Damnit man you are slipping.
Comment by Matt — Monday 20 November 06 @ 13.58 MST+2.00
Matt: you are right, it was shoddy workmanship to post this with no mention of Saul or of the virtues of the straight razor (which Ned used, too, by the way, and I *know* you had some Ned cuts in your time).
So, are you saying that I stole your media/quality theory? It’s an alarming and plausible possibility, and would be just like me…
Comment by sgazzetti — Monday 20 November 06 @ 14.35 MST+2.00
MacGregor,
I have two standards when measuring a barber for authenticity:
1) Does he use a straight razor and warm cream to clean-up over the ears and the neck?
2) Does he have Playboys?
Both are musts, otherwise he is hairdressers.
Comment by Matt — Monday 20 November 06 @ 16.07 MST+2.00
Like some of the girl friends in your past, I’ve been cutting other people’s hair since college. I now cut both husband’s and son’s. Why I never thought to charge a decent bottle of red is beyond me.
Comment by juliloquy — Monday 20 November 06 @ 20.08 MST+2.00
[...] movie, but just from the marketing campaign this is my feeling exactly. Isoglossia offers a meandering post on getting a haircut, which happens to be one of my favorite topics for meandering posts. Jabberin [...]
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