|
|
|
|
Until my parents moved out of California in 1990, trips to the barber for me were rare. My dad did all the hair cutting. Then, in my twenties, thrust into independent living, I had had to venture out, to find someone else to give me my cuts, and to pay. I had been to one barber that I could remember, way back when I was five, and our family was on vacation, and there was no way for my father to do his usual trim. Other than that, my only trips to hair cutters were to watch other friends get theirs--or more specifically, to watch my friend Tim get his, and his brother Josh. This hair-cutting trip was to Supercuts, and we must have taken it two or three times during the various summers we spent together--his mom a part-time working mom and my mom Tim and Josh's attendant "babysitter," my mom a nondriver and his mom a driver and thus our daytime chauffer on the days she wasn't working.
Supercuts, until I began to go there myself, had seemed a kind of glorious place. In television ads, they promised to cut your hair in the manner you preferred. And they told of having set styles from which one could choose. There, in the waiting room, watching the eight women (occasionally one young man among them) whack away at people's hair amid the white walls and tile, the bright lights and the mirror, it seemed glamorous. Haircutting magazines lay strewn about the room, full-page photographs of beautiful models and with beautifully quaffed hair. None of this was my world. Strangely, none of it seemed to be Tim's either, but he sure tried--dressing in whatever seemed hip and cool, buying things according to the latest fashion, the name brands stitched into each piece of clothing: Reebok, Nike, Levi.
By the time I started to go to Supercuts myself, I realized that no such glory existed for the place. It was mostly a place where customers were devoid of identity and so were the people who cut their hair. Take a seat, describe your preferred cut, and person X will try to match it in fifteen minutes so that a tip may be collected and another person be set down in your place. Such namelessness suited me. I had nothing to tell a barber--I was a nobody--and attempts at pleasant conversation did not seem to go far with me. (Once or twice a woman seemed particularly friendly, and I thought of what it meant. I concluded it meant nothing, and yet I was tempted to return in two weeks--much earlier than my usual six--at the exact same time, requesting her by name, in case her friendliness had meant something, but I was poor, and I would not have known how to get a barber to go out with me anyway. Another time, I was given various tips on how to rid myself of the dandruff that was a constant problem, such tips including a special shampoo and gel that the store sold and that I said I would think about, think about because I wanted to get rid of such trouble but again had no money for. Always, nice hair seemed out of my range.)
Meanwhile, the prices at Supercuts rose. This was natural, of course. A haircut started at seven dollars or something like that, and then eventually it was nine dollars, one dollar more than that with tip. Ten dollars seemed about the limit of what I could afford, and when the price rose above that mark, I opted to go to the barber even less frequently--every eight to twelve weeks instead of every six.
And then I moved, and to my relief, the prices dropped back down. I was in Mississippi now, where everything was cheaper than it had been in California. A six-dollar movie was four dollars; an five-hundred-dollar rent (if you were extremely lucky to find such) became a two-hundred-dollar rent; and an eleven-dollar haircut with tip became eight dollars with tip.
But there was another change also. Gone was Supercuts, and in its place was a barber, a real barber as I remembered from five years old and from television. The place was next door to a grocery store, an old grocery store that few ventured into (a big fancy new Kroger's being only a block away). It had three chairs, one of which was never used, wood paneling on the walls, a single long mirror on one side, and two white-haired men who were responsible for cutting hair and who had been for decades. This was not a place for the nameless, not if you didn't want it to be. Sitting, waiting for my cut, I would listen to the barbers carry on with their patrons about what X was doing or Y. When I sat down to take my cut, quiet and somber as I usually was, they did not attempt to talk with me, but if there was another man, sitting, waiting, a man of their same age, often the conversations were thrust in their direction. I learned nothing. I was just a student after all, someone who would live in the town for a year or two (almost three, as it turned out) and then disappear. I did not know X or Y, so the recountings of their real estate purchases meant nothing, and I didn't care about sports.
Still, sitting in this place that had been around for decades, this place where the men who were servicing my hair had been servicing hair for decades also, there was comfort, a comfort that Supercuts had never had. We were not all people drifting by until something better came along. We were not all looking to uproot ourselves. Some men could still choose a profession and stick with it. Some buildings could stay put, no modernizing redesign for each successive generation. I felt that I could return to this place two decades later, and the same men would be here, and the same wood paneling, and the price would still be seven dollars plus tip, and there would still be three chairs, one of them never used. And I would still be a kid. And these men would still be my father.
| Previous | Next |
| Back to Main Page | Back to Archives |
bravenet.com