HAIRCUTS

For men, one of the many unknowns when relocating is who will cut their hair. I was
reminded of how variable the barber hunt can be when my wife and I moved to North
Carolina from New Jersey. The time rolled around for a trim, and I was at a loss. One
evening I walked past a hairstyling shop that would not have caught my attention except
for the proud sign in its window: “Men’s haircuts – barbering.”

I knew for sure I had placed myself in the wrong hands when an aproned stylist asked me
to lean my head backward into a sink for a shampoo. “You want to wash my hair?!” I
exclaimed as if she had offered to examine my prostate. Nearby patrons tittered with
amusement. “I washed my hair this morning, thank you. I was hoping for a basic haircut.
Your sign said you do that.” I wanted to clarify who was to blame for this uncomfortable
impasse.

My stylist asked how I would like to proceed, in the manner of many New York taxi
drivers who have asked me which route they should take from LaGuardia Airport into
midtown – as if I were the seasoned pro with years of traffic observations under my belt.
“How the hell should I know? I just got off a plane!” is my favored response. But
rudeness plays better in New York than in a genteel southern hairdressing shop.

“Actually, I’ve never really noticed how it’s done,” I remarked truthfully enough. “I was
hoping you’d know.” A little more blame for good measure.

She snipped ineffectually for a while, released me to the outside world, and I had a few
weeks to plot my next move. The second shop I visited is the place I still go to. I knew I
had found my haircutting home when the elderly gent in whose chair I plopped grabbed
my head and started cutting without a word. My version of “You had me at hello” would
have been “You had me at your mute and impersonal demeanor.”

I had gotten too close to my New Jersey barber, and was looking for a more anonymous
relationship. In Princeton, Bert and Tony owned and operated the Continental Barber
Shop, the only traditional, unfancy barbershop in town. Courtly Italian gentlemen both,
they held forth with old world charm in a small, three-chair shop on Witherspoon Street,
a half block from the main gate of Princeton University. Small World Coffee was a few
doors away, the epicenter of Princeton’s espresso culture, and it was perfectly acceptable
to stroll over there to get a drink without losing your place in Bert and Tony’s queue.

There was usually a wait; always on Saturdays. Bert and Tony were not slow, but neither
would they be rushed. They were never pretentious about it, yet there was obvious pride
in delivering a careful, thoughtful haircut every time. A small-town atmosphere prevailed.
Mothers would drop off their kids and collect them an hour later. Every few minutes Bert
smiled and waved through the broad glass window as a customer walked by. When I was
in town I would always try to catch his attention, even when on the other side of the
street.
I suppose Bert was in his sixties during my Princeton years, and his connection with
customers was familial and longstanding. He worked on the children of men whose hair
he had cut when they were children. I was a transplant, and in the context of Bert’s
historical contribution to the town there was no reason for us to establish much of a
connection. I encouraged a friendship out of envy. Having recently settled down from a
checkered life of serial dabbling, still single, I wanted to pretend that I matched
Princeton’s generational spans. Waving at Bert through the window and receiving his
warm welcome in the shop allowed me to imagine that I belonged in a societal club
whose foundation principle – stability – was in fact utterly lacking in my life.

Busy as the Continental was, it became more jammed when Tony took ill. Tony was the
elder partner, and his age affected him most from the waist down. He had good hands and
fine skills with sharp tools, but he moved slowly. I sometimes eyed his unsteady
navigation around the chair with apprehension; it was easy to imagine him toppling over
and taking a customer’s ear with him. When Tony was out for a few days with a cold,
nobody thought much of it. When Bert reported that his condition had escalated to the flu,
everyone conveyed their best wishes. After two weeks of Bert going solo the town started
to seem underpowered in the haircutting department. Sometime later the concerned
queries faded as it became clear to all, without any announcement that I knew of, that
Tony would not come back.

My connection to Bert grew stronger during the many months that he serviced
Princeton’s haircutting needs by himself. I should mention that there was another
barbershop in town, around the corner on Nassau Street, fitted out with an outdoor candy
cane barber pole. It was staffed with women who knew how to cut a man’s hair decently
and also do the hair-washing thing for women. In my observation that shop did not pick
up much overflow from Bert; his vast regular clientele proved amazingly willing to wait
for him. I logged hours in the Continental, reading magazines. I took my laptop and
worked. Commonly, eight men would be idling for a cut. I felt a sense of belonging as I
staunchly held my place in line.

It would be fun to report that Princeton as a whole grew shaggier during Bert’s gallant
solo period, but that’s a difficult estimation to make in any college town. What I can say
is that Bert performed heroically and with a fully developed sense of his importance. He
worked 12-hour days. During these marathon sessions he took no breaks. Some days I
brought him orange juice, and offered to get food. He always refused the food. I
understood the difficulty of breaking for lunch when men were waiting for service. While
cutting my hair, Bert would describe his feeling of responsibility to the town and his old
friends.

Bert sold the Continental to a plump German woman in the haircutting business, but he
remained in the shop four days a week. This tactic, though probably a windfall to Bert’s
finances, didn’t immediately help his bottleneck. Nobody wanted to give the German
owner a whirl, so she helplessly watched over a full waiting room most days and Bert
continued as a slave to loyalty. Then the owner hired another barber, a young Serbian
fellow who learned his skills at the feet of his father and uncle who were famous regional
barbers in his home town, and who made his way in this country with no understanding
of English at the start, only his awesome clipping skills, and who, by the way, knew how
to give a good haircut by the age of twelve, and he learned how by watching his father
and uncle, who were quite famous locally, and when he came to this country he couldn’t
even speak English.

So went an unbroken loop of personal revelations when I needed a trim on Bert’s day off.
Thing was – I got a damn good haircut that day. Everything shifted. Bert no longer
represented the best haircut in town. I learned later that the new owner had poached the
Serbian dude from another barbershop where he was in high demand. Smart move: He
might bring some clientele with him, and as customers like me realized how good he was,
the loyalists herding around Bert might thin out and start sitting in the other chair.

I still waited for Bert at the next few cuts, but the delay lost its point. One day the
Serbian’s chair opened up, I was next, and the young hotshot met my eye with a clear
unspoken question: “Well, where do we stand here?” With a pang of guilt that at the same
time felt ludicrous, I mumbled something to Bert about having a busy day and climbed
aboard. The guy regaled me with the same life history I had already memorized. I could
write the Serbian’s biography, insofar as it pertains to learning how to handle shears and
the trials of building a barbering career in a foreign country. Am I such a good listener, I
wondered, that he cannot stop himself from confiding personal details? Why, I must be a
wonderful companion, a breath of fresh air in this fellow’s repetitive work routine, and
I’ll bet that’s why Bert has always taken such a shine to me, too! I am a gift to this shop,
from start to finish.

But when I stood up, Bert let me know that my God’s-giftness would henceforth be
returned for credit. I moved toward him to shake his hand. Bert inexpressively stepped
backward and nodded his farewell. None of the broad smile I was accustomed to, the
warm clasp of hands, the affectionate “Goodbye until next time, my-a good friend.” The
waves through the window, the orange juice, the Courvoisier at Christmas – all zeroed
out by accepting a haircut from Bert’s colleague. I looked good, too, which might have
pissed off Bert. Perhaps if I had been left with straw bale bedlam, strands sticking straight
up and a part that went down my head like the Potomac, he might have been satisfied that
justice was served and accepted me with pity back to his inner circle. In my brief time left
in Princeton there was no more special connection between Bert and me.

-=-=-=-

For men who were raised on traditional haircuts, the regular trip to the barbershop
provides a rare, unbroken link to childhood. I received crew cuts in my childhood years.
The main difference between the crew style of those days, and the modern buzz cut, was
the vertical front wall – built by leaving the front hairs a bit longer and lacquering them
upward, presumably to fortify children against the Communist threat. I was never prouder
than when freshly coiffed. The front flourish sadly degraded after the first day, but I never
applied hair goop to keep the defenses strong.
Two tectonic changes wrought havoc in my hair universe: I became a teenager, and The
Beatles instigated the hippie era. I was too young for full-bore hippiedom, actually, but
that didn’t stop my long-hair yearnings, or my deviation from what my parents assumed
would be invariable haircut programming. Throughout high school my personal
curricular imperative was to permit the hair on the sides of my head to gain purchase over
the tops of my ears. This tiny allowance, forbidden by most parents as if it led directly to
heroin overdose, changed the basic frontal outline of my head – in the coolest possible
way. I know this because I briefly succeeded a few times, strategically smoothing down
pioneering strands so their covert advance upon my ears was not noticed at home. Then I
would fluff out the hair in public, letting it casually (and barely) touch the tops of the
ears. I was a man in control of his own image! I was free and in stride with the hippest
public personalities of the day. Never did a whole week go by with such dash, though, as
my parents still controlled the haircut timetable. Back I would go to square one, glad at
least to be done with the childish crew cut, and never imagining that one day I would
return to it.

After leaving home, my rebound from haircut dictatorship was excessive. Newer friends
are astonished to learn that in my twenties I had a ponytail. A long one. Sometimes when
I tell people about that mane, I know I am compensating for a present state of semi-
baldness that causes my desperate vanity to search the past for alternate sources of pride.
Not until my hair started thinning, which made my post-lovechild conceit look seriously
ridiculous, did I reacquaint myself with regular visits to the barbershop. It was then that I
began appreciating simple haircuts as special connections to childhood.

A haircut from a barber is casual in a way that might be difficult for women to
understand. Styling strategy is brief or nonexistent, and instructions are usually sparse.
The most common suggestion from the barber is, “Keep it pretty much the same, then?
Neaten it up?” That usually seems like a brilliantly thought-out plan to the guy in the
chair, and is normally accepted without further advisement. Occasionally you hear a
mumbled request to shorten the sideburns, or stay off the top, but most men don’t want to
be perceived as worrying over coiffure – though of course we have a long history of
doing so. Any petition for a specific end result is most often so meekly voiced that if the
guy in the next chair does overhear, he’ll perceive that, in the end, the haircut’s outcome
is of no real consequence. There is little variety in barbershop haircuts. They are the Sears
men’s department of hair style.

But the process of traditional barbering is surprisingly personal. After basic trimming and
neatening, out comes the straight razor, an implement of antique origins, for the shaving
of the neck. This rite is conducted in several steps, and involves a startling degree of
intimacy between two men in a non-romantic setting. First, heated shaving cream is
massaged into the back of the neck and up behind the ears, all the way around. The
shaving occurs straightforwardly enough on the neck, and with tiny precise flicks around
the ears. Finished with this delicate operation, the barber moistens away the shaving
cream by means of a languorous swabbing with a heated damp towel. Then comes the
application of after-shave, topped off with a generous sprinkling (using a barber’s brush)
of talc. The scent of these combined products is distinctive, and wafts about the head for
a few hours afterward.

When I was growing up, the neck shave was taken for granted as an essential part of the
haircut. It is still taught in barber schools, but some graduates drop it from the standard
repertoire given to every customer. One of the pros at my current shop told me that many
men decline the shave. I would never refuse a neck shave unless the barber had
Parkinson’s. There is a paternal quality to it, though to carry forward this metaphor I
sometimes have to close my eyes and forget that the barber could only be my son, not my
father. But for most guys of any age, barbers are the only men besides their fathers who
touch their heads with such tenderness and care, combining acts of grooming and
cleaning that are intimate in a father-son way. I don’t explicitly remember my father
washing me or cutting my hair, but I recognize a certain consolation I receive in the
barber’s chair as arising, incongruously if you must, from the deep and ancient need of a
boy to be loved by his dad. For me the side benefit of shorter hair is activation of my
inner child.

Is this why I hooked into Bert and pursued a connection? Perhaps a reciprocal
consolation was somehow, for some reason, activated in him. He had sons, but they were
grown, and I wager he no longer cut their hair. Maybe Bert’s reaction to my choosing a
different barber, right in front of him, was not as shallow or narrow in scope as I gave
him credit for. It could be that we each harbored little empty spots inside ourselves that
matched up, accidentally solving each other over the timeless rite of barbering. And
perhaps I suddenly seemed like a haircut whore who just wanted a good neck shave from
anyone with a straight razor and a warm towel.

A therapist would ask whether my father was alive during my time of friendship with
Bert. My father died a couple of years before, actually, and when he did I took all his
clothes. To my surprise, the most personal item turned out to be a pair of black leather
gloves. I had never favored that style of glove, but I began wearing those because putting
them on let me imagine that my father was holding my hands. While out with friends one
night the gloves disappeared, and the next day I called my mother, distraught. She
immediately bought me a new pair. At first the gift seemed like an empty solution to an
incommutable loss. But memory of my father turned out to be more real than cloth, and
when I wore the new pair my dad still held my hands.

“So much of this occurs in the mind,” my mother said. I didn’t know whether she was
talking about life, grief, or comfort. But it does seem as if hidden memories silently
inhabit our daily objects and events. The meaning of things, even gloves and haircuts, is
illuminated by subtle cues of long forgotten experiences. What meaning Bert might have
gleaned from our haircuts, if any, I’ll never know. But the next time I get back to
Princeton I’m going to walk by that broad glass window, step into the shop, and see
whether my old friend is still cutting hair. If he is, I’ll wait as long as necessary to sit in
his chair.