Haircuts - Part 2

Obviously, part of a series.

When we last left our protagonist, he was talking about how before college, he had only been to a single barber in his life.

For most of college, my barber was, well, nobody. My girlfriend (now wife) liked my hair long, to the point where she cried the only time I had to cut my hair and shave my beard for a job. I decided on a goal: Grow out my hair until it could be put into a ponytail. My hair reached shoulder length, and my girlfriend tied my locks up for the maiden voyage, and the feeling of constantly having my forehead yanked backwards was so annoying, it was gone within a few minutes.

Eventually, I had to have my hair cut for internship interviews, and settled on a barber a 10 minute walk from my apartment with a guy who we'll call Trevor. Trevor was a mid-30s something man with frosted tips who was...well, I don't want to comment specifically on his sexuality (because you never really know), but he styled the wigs for all the drag queens in town. If Trevor wasn't gay, he was like a viceroy among monarch butterflies - he had the entire world fooled with his clever disguise.

Trevor was fun to talk to. He shared anecdotes about his daughter (yes, daughter) and her trials and tribulations in high school. He gossiped with the soft-spoken (male) receptionist about their friend group, who seemed to be mostly people about the same age who were only just now becoming adults. His barber shop was full of fashion magazines and trendy little local papers with stories about up-and-coming local artists and indie movies (they were rather light on the misadventures of puppies, though). I paid my ~$12 bill by swiping my card on the store iPad, tipping by tapping the appropriate button when prompted. Ultimately, though, you go to a barber for a haircut. Trevor was skilled - he was usually booked usually for a week in advance - but the styles he chose for my hair were inevitably a stylish, androgynous look that made it look like I was on my way to a scene music concert or on my way to an important meeting I had just set up through Grindr, and it just wasn't the style for me.

From there, I bounced around to various barber equivalents of a doc-in-the-box: Chain salons where stylists of uneven quality cut similarly uneven hair. I used to be puzzled at jokes about getting an ear cut while getting your hair cut, but after spending a harrowing 30 minutes under the knife while the distracted hairdresser behind you talks enthusiastically about how an underground, exclusive tattoo artist is in town, and she's doing everything in her power to get him to do a sleeve on her in a day, you start to worry not about whether they're going to casually draw blood, but what type of hepatitis shot you're going to need to get afterwards.

It's not that every haircut I got at one of these places was bad, but there was always something off each time I went. One time, it was that the stylist managed to remove almost all the length of my hair without even touching her thinning shears; as I said before, I basically only get a haircut when it's so overheated I can't take it anymore, so it kind of defeated the whole purpose of the affair. Another time, I was having a wonderful conversation with an Indian barber about the pain and horror that xenophobia and hate cause the human race, when he excitedly began talking about an episode of an "ancient aliens" show he watched that claimed that the Bhagavad Gita was primarily about (wait for it) aliens. Apparently, he found their argument pretty persuasive. I still paid my ~$20 and tipped by marking it on the receipt, but lost equal quantities of hair and faith in humanity.

Recently, my wife has made friends with a stylist at a place just down the road; her stylist's boyfriend is a barber, and my wife and her stylist friend decided that I needed to go to him for my next cut. Unfortunately, his shop is a bit further away, but my wife made the appointment for me by text (the shop doesn't have its own phone - each guy just uses his own personal cellphone).

The barbershop is a black barbershop - at least, most of the barbers and clientele are black, and when I was looking for the (nonexistent) phone number online, I found a few posts of black mothers looking for a good place in town to get a fade for their sons, and being referred to it. I listened to a rap radio station from an iPhone plugged into a speaker while admiring the posters of boxers hung on the walls. My barber was a man most likely in his 20s, arms (and legs, visible beneath baggy shorts) covered in tattoos.

Unlike Randy's private room, the store was wide open from front to back; this meant that the whole shop had one group conversation. The topics were 1) ragging on the owner's poor decision to spray paint his tires, use paint remover on the spray paint, and then ordering new tires to replace the ones destroyed by paint remover and 2) a rival shop across town that was slandering them for their higher prices, while the rival shop was apparently so bad that after a haircut, people were forced to have buy the second, more expensive haircut to fix the first one. Another effect of the wide open floor plan was a direct view of the street: Whenever an attractive woman walked past, all conversation and work stopped until she was out of sight.

I paid my $20 and tip in cash - they didn't take card - and left with a nice haircut that unfortunately seems like the kind you need to have repeatedly to keep it looking correct. As you can guess, my hair doesn't look quite correct right now.

I still haven't quite found what I'm looking for in a barbershop.

Haircuts

Guess I'm using this thing again.

I've got a lot of ideas I want to write, and I'm not really sure where I want to post them, so here's good enough.

I recently got my hair cut. I have an odd cycle with my hair and beard that mostly goes like this:

1. Hair and beard get so annoyingly long, itchy, and overheating that I'm forced to get a haircut.
2. I hate the way my hair looks with the haircut and feel like I paid money to make myself look worse.

3. Once my hair grows out again, I like it a bit.

4. Avoid going to the barber for as long as possible.

5. Repeat.

The more I thought about this cycle, the more I realized I have an even more bizarre relationship with my hair and haircuts, extending well back into childhood.

For basically my entire life up until a year or two after starting college, getting my hair cut meant going to a guy named Randy. Randy was a guy in his 40s - or 50s - or 60s. It was kind of hard to tell. He had a face that seemed kind of old until you realized that he'd had it for like two decades of your life, and it hadn't changed. Regardless, he had a haircut of his own that looked like it came out of an old black and white movie, wore nothing but khaki slacks and polo shirts, and listened to do-whop and swing-era music. If you didn't know any better, you'd say he walked right out of the filming of an Andy Griffith Show revival. Sure, there were touches of other aspects of his personality - there were pictures up of friends and family in camo and neon orange (this was Appalachia, after all) - but mostly, he was this anachronistic island of late 50s/early 60s Americana.

I liked going to Randy for a haircut. Randy was a fun guy. He'd tell you stories about travelling Italy during his time in the Army, and the appalling state of the pizza there (no tomato sauce, heavy on the fish). Mom would give us a dollar to give to Randy as a tip; one of my brothers taught me the hip, happening secret of putting the dollar in the palm of your hand and slipping it to him in a handshake. After the haircut, Mom paid the receptionist ($10), and the receptionist gave me a piece of gum in a bright blue and yellow wrapper that would be savored for nearly 5 minutes until it lost all of its flavor.

There were always the same books and magazines laid out on a table. When I was younger, The Pokey Little Puppy was a personal favorite of mine. Randy's room and the other male barbers were on the right, while the female hairdressers (including the one my mom went to) were on the left: A forbidden hallway no doubt full of cooties and mysterious liquids never meant for the eyes of mortal man like "conditioner."

Going to a haircut with Randy was a ritual. It was like going to church, only instead of tipping the preacher for making you feel bad about yourself, you tipped the barber for some good conversation and the privilege of everyone saying to you for a week or so, "Whoa! You got your ears lowered!"

I still didn't particularly like the way my hair looked after it was cut, but I went to a private Christian school with a fairly strict dress code. It wasn't Randy's fault that he had to cut my hair shorter than I wanted.

I put quite a lot of time and effort trying to make my hair look good all the way through high school. My primary role model for how I wanted my hair to look was this LEGO head. Despite my best efforts, this was difficult because 1) I don't have red hair, and 2) the aforementioned dress code required that hair be above (not even touching) the eyebrows). I still tried to get a proper "swoosh" and crispness in my hair, usually by applying liberal amounts of hairspray and/or hair gel (which cracked and filled my hair with little white flakes that made it look like I had horrible dandruff). Mostly, my efforts made me look like an enormous dork  (which, though truth in advertising, was not my goal).

The summer before college, while visiting family, I woke up one morning and didn't go through my usual routine - my aunt's bathroom was on the other side of a fairly long house, and I didn't feel like walking that far. My mom walked in and told me, "Hey, your hair looks good." I was kind of shocked, but I kept trying it for the rest of the summer. Unsolicited, multiple friends of both genders complimented me on my "new haircut," which was the old one, just without the half-hour of applying product to ruin it.

When I got to college, Randy was too far away for me to pop in after school, and he had some health issues that forced him to stop cutting hair for a while altogether. Relaxing from the pressures of Christian school dress code, I let my hair and beard grow long (a few comparisons from various acquaintances: Amish, rabbi, terrorist, hobo, lumberjack). Generally, the less I did with my hair, the more compliments I got about it - so much so that I stopped wearing my beloved fedora because it wouldn't fit on my head with my newly enlarged locks (probably dodged a bullet there). A few of my friends starting referring to me as "the guy with the great hair," and with only a small amount of humor.

Since then, I've had little to no desire to go get a haircut, except in the summer when the heat becomes unbearable or when I have a job interview looming.

Soon, I'll write about the other barbers I've been to since Randy.