My regular barber was on holidays so I went to First Choice. They were too busy so I went down the street to another outfit which I won’t name for reasons which will soon be obvious.
I hate getting a haircut but it seems like a necessity at times, that is if I want to appear like a normal functioning member of society. So I sit down in the chair and a young man in a baseball cap and tattoos puts the barber bib around my neck. My regular barber, Carmine, is a “mature” Italian fellow who seems to know exactly what a cranky old man like myself is there for, that being a haircut as opposed to a bon bouffant or a gelled magazine worthy coif. The young ball capped tattooed Warren Beatty* wannabe asks me how I would like my hair done. I tell him and he says “Don’t worry man, we’re going to make you look beautiful.” I wasn’t worried until he said that.
I start to think about the Bugs Bunny “Rabbit of Seville” skit where he barbers Elmer Fudd while singing Figaro. “Welcome to my shop, let me cut your mop. Daintily.”** Then I start to think about making up an emergency in order to make an unceremonious exit. Then I am thinking, too late I’m in the chair already, I am evaluating worst case scenarios and then rationalizing staying by trying to convince myself that “it will grow back someday”.
He asks me if I want a number 3 and having not gone to hairdressing school I am unfamiliar with that cut. Perhaps the size of a bowl? I am looking on the wall for a chart that may explain what a number 3 is so I don’t look like a hair salon rookie. Eventually I ask him and it turns out it is how close to the bone the razor will go. I guess a number 1 takes hair and skin too. We get that sorted out and he gets to work, sort of. He seems to be taking an inordinate amount of time to untangle the electrical cord on his razor of choice while I try to figure out how it got so tangled in the first place. I start to have vivid visuals of him spinning someone in the barber chair, so I put one foot on the floor just to be safe.
The buzzing and snipping seems to be removing hair, but without my glasses on I’ll be damned if I can see what he is doing. Then he drops his comb on the floor, says “shit” in a mumble, and casually picks it up and keeps going. I thought there was a barber law that after the comb hits the floor you have to drop it into that cylinder full of windshield washer fluid, or whatever that blue liquid is, or you are charged with “barbicide”, but not this maestro.
And whatever happened to that nice white powdered brush to take some hair away from my collar? Instead I feel him blowing on my neck! Then he blew on my face to remove some clinging clippings! When will this Sweeny Todd*** nightmare end?
“Do you want product in your hair?” he asks. What the hell kind of product did you have in mind my inside voice says. My outside voice says “No thanks” just before he slops a bunch of gel in my hair and starts kneading my noggin’ like a soon to be loaf of bread. “and now for a wash” he says, and I tell him I can wash it at home and I have to go. “No problem man.” He hands me my glasses which he cleans with a cloth that looks like it has been used to wipe the oil off a dipstick. As I put on my smeared specs he says to me “See, beautiful”.
I look in the mirror and immediately I understand the phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Perhaps the term beauty would apply if the beholder was a rooster with a fetish for half plucked chickens dipped in “product”, but this chop job is no beauty.
As I make a far too late but nonetheless as hasty as possible exit, before more “product” gets applied, they charge me $45 bucks which I see as an ass backwards victim restitution fee.
I am thinking of sending my barber a postcard on his holidays “Wish you were here”.
*Editor’s Comment: Warren Beatty played the lead character in the 1975 movie Shampoo, as a lothario Hollywood hair stylist, juggling multiple girlfriends and lovers while wrestling with unfulfilled career aspirations. Lee Grant won the best supporting actress nod at the Oscars for her role in the movie.
**Editor’s Comment: Anyone who was a kid in the 50’s or 60’s will remember Bugs Bunny’s 1950 cartoon “The Rabbit of Seville” with Bugs as the barber and Elmer Fudd in the chair, all played to Rossini’s overture to the opera “The Barber of Seville”.
***Editor’s Comment: “Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is a 1970 play and 1979 Broadway musical based on a character originated in Victorian popular fiction in the mid 1800s. Sweeny Todd uses his position as a barber to take gruesome revenge on those who did him wrong in a past life.
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