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.

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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.