from June 21, 2008
Ok. I know what you’re thinking- “Haircuts? Who cares about his haircuts? His hair is usually a wreck anyway.” I know, I know, haircuts. Just doesn’t seem to be an exciting topic for a blog. Or for anything for that matter. But that’s what I feel like writing about and you can feel free to surf over to youtube or J-Date or whatever it is you want to do. But if you stay here and read on you may find that I reveal such secrets as my favorite Jell-O flavor and what I really expect on a third date.
When I was young my Dad took me to get haircuts at the shop where he went. It was a little place on 20th Avenue between 84th and 85th Streets called, I think, The Better Look. The place isn’t there anymore. I’m going back twenty- no, thirty- no, let’s see, I was born in 1970 so- damn! I’m going back almost forty years! Holy shit! Forty years!
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(much later)
Sorry about that. I needed a little time off. (Forty years?) Anyway, my hair was cut by an old Italian man named Sal. Back then, barbers wore black pants and white lab coats, the kind that buttoned up the side and made them look like Lionel Atwill. They all looked like scientists. Even the barber shop was full of weird glass jars full of strange blue liquids they stuck combs in, and long straight razors and various jars of creams and lotions and strange sticky hair stuff. The barber chair was a strange, torturous looking device. It had straps on it. Why did a barber chair need straps? It had various long levers and metal hinges. The Apollo 13 astronauts didn’t have chairs like that. It was all vaguely uncomfortable.
The store itself hadn’t changed in at least twenty years. It had floors made of those old tiny red and white squares, metal and vinyl benches with ripped upholstery, and a long table filled with magazines and comic books. On the walls were old-fashioned drawings of men with hairstyles that seemed to be straight out of the Soviet-era 1950s. Every guy had short hair and a part down the left side. Remember, this was the 1970s, where men’s hair tended to be longer than the women’s. In fact, many guys had hair longer than a horse’s mane and nearly as neat. But this wasn’t that kind of barber. The people who went here had been coming here for twenty years, since the Eisenhower 1950’s, when any guy whose hair was longer than ¼ inch over his ears or even reached his collar was suspected of being a communist. This place gave haircuts that you could set your watch by. (Don’t like that joke? Don’t blame me. Abe Simpson said it about Johnny Unitas’ haircut on The Simpsons. It made me laugh so here it is.)
As a kid I didn’t care much one way or the other about my hair. I went to grade school a few blocks away and I’d get up in the morning and go. If my hair wasn’t combed, (and my Mom wasn’t awake) I didn’t care. In fact, when school pictures were taken and the photographer gave me a comb for my hair I handed it back. My teacher combed it for me. That’s why I look so strange in my old school pictures; no one ever saw me with neat hair when I was just a kid. If you go back and look at the blog with the pictures of me from junior high school you’ll get an idea.
But when I did get my hair cut it was by Sal. He was a very nice man with a high-pitched, sing song voice. He spoke pretty good English with a semi-thick Italian accent. From when I had my first haircut until I was maybe 16 he was the only one to cut my hair. He cut my grandfather’s hair, he cut my father’s hair, he cut my brother’s hair, and he cut my hair. Sal took haircuts very seriously. When he cut Dad’s hair, Dad went totally old school (which was the only school Sal attended) and got a barber shave. This started with a hot towel on his face. As a kid I had no idea what that was for. But I wanted one! So I’d get in the chair and Sal would put a hot towel on my face too. A few times it was way too hot. In fact it was always too hot. But I wanted to be a man like my Dad so I sat there and took it. When Sal took the towel off my face was red and my eyes were full of tears but I had so much pride- I was a big boy! Sal would then cut my hair. A Sal haircut took a lot of time. If my brother went with us, and all three of us got haircuts, this was an all-day event. I’d go through all of the comics on the table and play the pachinko machine in the corner.
Sal, I believe, cut every tiny hair individually. A haircut could take upwards of an hour and there was nothing complicated about those cuts. A few times, and I’m positive I remember, Sal took out a ruler and measured my sideburns just to make sure he got them even down to the millimeter.
So I’d be sitting in his barber chair with the straps and the levers and once in a while he’d tilt me forward, and sometimes he’d tilt me back, and I’d spend the rest of the time almost hypnotized by the mirror. There was a long mirror in front of me and a long mirror on the wall behind me. When you looked into the mirror you saw the reflection of the mirror behind you, and that reflection too, reflected again and again, an endless time-tunnel of heads, front, back, front, back, front, back, all the way into infinity. Or so it seemed. I’d spend my time looking to see the smallest reflection I could, farthest back, and I never could find the end. All the while, I heard the steady snip snip snip as he cut every hair to within an atom of each other’s length.
Well, there was some sort of internal power struggle going on at The Better Look. I have no idea what happened but Sal had some kind of barber dispute with his partners and he moved to a shop on Stillwell Avenue. This store was almost as old as the other store. Sal seemed to change with the times and instead of the white lab coat he started wearing a powder blue one. The new store was called A New Look (obviously, a new look must be better than the better look- take that Philadelphia!) and my family moved with him.
Sal still gave the exact same haircut and I was getting tired of it. I was getting older and I didn’t want the same little boy hairstyle. All the years growing up I had short hair parted on the left. (Back to the Simpsons. It was a Millhouse style cut, just not as cool.) Now I was a teenager and I wanted a good haircut. I was a little embarrassed. Fortunately, my parents were getting a divorce (this is the only time I have ever thought of that divorce as a good thing) and I was able to break away from Dad’s barber and go to my Mom’s hairstylist. (OK, it was only The Lemon Tree but it was a start.)
I will never forget the day, a few years later, when I passed Sal on the street and he said, in his accent and sing song voice, “Hey, why don’t you’a come back? I do all the new styles?” I said I would but I didn’t. Dad still went and that was fine as by that time he didn’t have that much hair left to cut.
The Lemon Tree was on 65th Street off of Bay Parkway. It is now a dog groomer’s. Make of that what you will. There I had my hair cut, for the first time, by women. It was my first time in an almost women-only place. No men went in there. And I never went in alone, always with my Mom. This was strange and awkward because some of the women were attractive, and a teenager getting his hair cut by an attractive woman who leans certain parts of her body on him tends to enjoy the haircut.
Getting my haircut in an all female environment was strange. There was relationship talk, pregnancy talk, sex talk, all from the opposite point of view. And my Mom was there. I never said a word, but I heard absolutely everything. This may explain why I’ve always had better and closer female friends than male friends. (Or maybe I’m threatened by the competition of male friends. Or maybe I’ll just shut up and move on now.)
Now it was the 1980s and I started to like having long hair. Problem was, and is, my hair isn’t straight, it is wavy. And that isn’t too bad but it just tends to do what it wants. So I’d go longer and longer between haircuts. If you go to my photos, near the end you’ll see a picture of me with long hair from the 1980s. Go ahead, look at it and laugh, I’ll still be here when you get back.
I’d even pull it back sometimes into the world’s smallest ponytail, about 3 inches long, just long enough to look silly.
Well, wavy hair is one thing, but in hot weather the waves would become curls and I’d look like a curly mess.
Around this time three of the stylists from The Lemon Tree started their own shop a few blocks down Bay Parkway called You Look Marvelous! and we moved with them. Geographically, every time a barber moved and I followed, I ended up getting closer and closer to home. It is still my dream to get my hair cut in the apartment below me so I don’t even have to leave the building. A few more changes of hair place and I just might make it.
Margaret, Danielle, and Vickie were the three to move and for a period of nearly twenty years, from the mid-80s until only about three years ago, they were the only ones to cut my hair. And while this may be my longest relationship with a female, I still only go there, listen, and leave.
Margaret sold the shop to a woman that no one liked. The employees stayed about a month, just long enough to hate the new owner. She had turned a comfortable little shop, with pictures of women’s hairdos in the wall, a coffee maker, and a stereo, into a sort of gypsy camp, with strange scarves hung in weird places. There were small tables with ugly tablecloths everywhere, and always just where you’d bump into them and bark a shin. There were strange colors on the walls, some of them pastel and some of them just ugly. Little knick knacks, like small statues of naked children, were heaped on every shelf or flat surface. The place was full of strange candles and I heard a fire started once when a spray can shot hairspray into a candle. Well, en masse, they quit. A lawsuit was filed but went nowhere. The new owner claimed a conspiracy to ruin her business but it was thrown out. Within a few weeks the shop was turned into a third hand clothing store.
Danielle and Vickie moved to a new store on Bay Parkway yet a few more blocks closer to home. This one went out of business too and they moved to a place on 20th Avenue, which is where I had my hair cut just today and got the idea for this blog.
Along the way, I went from long hair to short hair again, and once I tried to cut it myself, with very bad results.
I look back at my hair through the years. I think of the summers when the sun bleached it even lighter blonde. I remember the times when I wanted it cut short on top and long in the back, kind of like a mullet. I can’t forget the many, many times when I was young, and old ladies would tell me how much they loved the color of my hair, and would I sell it to them? (That joke got old fast, even at age five.)
So through the history of my haircuts, a relatively few people have actually cut my hair. There was one time I was in a hurry and stopped in a strange barber shop 20th Avenue and a guy who barely spoke English nearly wrecked my hair. Sometimes people insisted on putting gel in my hair. (I hate gel.) There were the one or four times I tried (and failed) to use mousse.
But most of all, when I think of my haircuts I think of….. well, haircuts.
And that’s it. If you struck through this rather odd trip down memory lane, here is the info I promised at the start: my favorite flavor of Jell-O is orange, and on a third date I expect that I will probably mess it up.
Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride 
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