I ran around the block from work, thinking I can get a real cheap fix on my current hair problem. It was outgrown in all the wrong places, not giving the kind of impression I would like. I looked like a scrub. I had been there before. That time a 19 year-old barber palmed my head like a basketball while concentrating heavily on creating a perfect line while ignoring the greater whole. He spent 75% of the time on the "back." As in "how do you like da back?" I had picked up the term "natural" as a way of saying no geometric patterns.
He made a perfect line that delineated the connecting border between the back of my head and top of my neck while pushing my skull deeper into it. It was almost too much, between the vice grip on my head and the chisel work on my neck, I nearly freaked out. I didn't say anything to him about it though. I was scared. Or maybe I hoped he would hear and see my discomfort, somehow recognize me as being part of the same human community. I don't like criticizing people about their careers anyway.
I walked into the 6' by 25" room right next to a Juice shack that has a similar layout. I see new 19-year old kid reading the Daily News and a Slavic woman in her early 40's. No brainer. The women vacates her chair and I sit down. "Short on the sides, and if you could thin out the top." I guess I don't give off the most charming vibe when getting my haircut. I am strictly business. I don't chat, or attempt to ingratiate myself. My Social Anxiety Disorder prohibits such familiarity in a public space.
She begins very well, the way she lays out the apron, a gentle touch. I take my glasses off and practice my Clint Eastwood squinting. After the first pass with the electric razor, I sense something is about to go wrong. I start to get nervous. I smell beer on her breath. I am expecting the back/sides razor pass, then the ears and "back", then to the thin out the top with water, scissors, rush, then part and taming of the errant strands. She is stuck on the ears! Time is running out and she can't get past the ears. She goes from one to the other making the most microscopic advances to my hairline, as if it were a team of mountain climbers making a difficult ascent. Bit by bit.
I started thinking about good barbers. How they are gentle but strong. They are decisive. They understand the nature of hair and know how to work with it. They don't fear consequences. I am getting very nervous now, and know it will end badly. She doesn't seem to notice my growing anxiety until the owner of the barbershop comes in, puts on his smock and sits in the chair next to the one I am in. Now everything is tense, she speeds up. She gets past the ears and goes straight to the top with only the most perfunctory glance at the "back." Suddenly, I feel all the frustration of her life pouring into me through her fingers and implements for the next 60 seconds. She doesn't want to cut hair, she hates hair, and she hates the people whose hair she has to cut, she hates her boss, she hates the 19 year-old brat that has the better chair, she hates it all! She sets down the scissors and picks up the blow dryer, a signal that she is done.
I look retarded, I mean really retarded. The sides slope up like a grass hut with a radish garden on top, my bangs hang like a rusted collapsing rain gutter. Before she can yank the disposable fabric softener sheet like tissue from my neck, I ask if she can buzz the top. She goes back to the scissors and commences round two. My hair is losing the fight. I wait for a break in the melee to be clear that I would like it cut the same length as the sides. A tempest arises. Things are tossed around with disgust, then she shaves my head like a child erasing a drawing it was unhappy with, while exchanging terse comments in Czeck with the owner. "You szould have said four" is the final sentence of that conversation, she says directly at me, accusingly, "For next time, by number, four." The owner joins in now " If you want that hair cut."
At once, depressed and pissed off I respond, "I didn't want a number four." But now I have one. I went from scrub to County Jail escapee in under 20 minutes.
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