Time Cut Short (a little off the ears)

I have been thinking about alternative measures of time recently, something more than minutes, hours, days, months, and years. This is due no doubt to the fact that I am in desperate need of a haircut. It goes from being perfectly kempt one day to undeniably unkempt the next. It is usually the hair on the back of my neck that tells me to get moving and get it cut.

I don’t like going to the dentist, doctor, or barber. I don’t like filling the tank of my automobile either. I wait until the light is on and then I begin to calculate how far I can go before being forced to buy gasoline. I get a haircut before a major court event or holiday. This works out to about every six weeks, or between eight and ten times a year. Base eight is a really difficult way to tell time. I had a trial in October, I am due.

The measure beyond the regular cut is a longer interval, more like a decade than a year. Perhaps it is more like an era. It is measured in barbers. You can frequent a certain barber and then one day you don’t. Did you move? Did they retire? Did you get an unforgivable haircut? (In 1986 the Ben Vaughn Combo released the song “Wrong Haircut”. You can’t find it on the internet. You will have to satisfied with “Growin’ A Beard.” Every cultured person should be familiar with the Ben Vaughn oeuvre. He is the “Potentate of the Garden State.”)

My first haircut was in Kansas City. There is a Polaroid of it somewhere. I am sure that I was very cute, as all small blond children can be. My mother wishes that I was still blond. It has been more fifty years since my hair settled on a non-descript dull brown. It is only notionally brown now, highlighted with gray.

The first barbers that I remember were Carl and Phillip. I remember older barbershops and stacks of Mad Magazine, just not the barbers. Phillip was the more popular one, so there was always a wait for him. We are not “waiting on specific barber” types in my family. My father always got his hair cut at the Marine base near his shop. It was cheap and fast. I usually saw Carl.

Carl had been a college football player before a serious knee injury. He must have been six and half feet tall and three hundred pounds. His forearms were the thickness of a man’s calf and my ten-year-old thigh. He didn’t ask you to “turn your head.” He turned your head. You had no say in the matter. You would have severed a muscle to resist. He didn’t talk much. At some point he and Phillip had a disagreement and he set up his own shop across town. My mother still drove me there if the wait for Phillip was too long. Carl’s daughter eventually set up a chair too. One day when I was in high school the shop quietly closed. I never saw Carl again.

I continued to go to Phillip, even when I was home from college. Phillip was the best coiffed barber that I have ever had. No hair was ever out of place. The beard was always closely and expertly trimmed. He wore his shirt open and displayed a medallion on his hirsute chest. He may have only been in his forties, but he had Kenny Rogers gray hair. He looked like a disco Zod. By that I mean he bore an uncanny resemblance to Terence Stamp.

All the mothers waiting for their pre-teen sons loved Phillip. They would blush and chat him up. He loved the attention. When I was older, he would tell me his exploits. He spent most nights dancing with and seducing divorcees at local dance clubs. He was a player. I deeply respected Phillip. He changed my perception on the proper uses of cologne. He eventually told me about Carl too. Apparently, Carl was moving a lot of cocaine through the shop. Phillip kicked him out. Carl eventually did Federal time.

I went away to college and tried the barbers on campus. They were used to shearing the ROTC kids. Accuracy was not their strength. After a couple of bad haircuts, I moved to the off-campus barber. The closest was Al, “the Singing Barber”. His schtick was that he would sing along to Pavarotti or Jerry Vail while he cut your hair. The singing got old. He is the only barber that I have ever seen do an entirely dry haircut, no spraying, no clippers. He only used scissors and a straight razor. It was awful. I started going to the beauty college because the girls were cute.

Once I was on my own, I started to go to Luke. You know how Seiko misaligns its bezels? Luke would misalign my entire head. It wasn’t just a little off. My sideburns were usually off by an inch. A little touch up work at home made it worthwhile to not be paying salon prices. Luke’s shop was in the original New Orleans Police stables. There were clues in the architecture. I loved talking about the history and architecture of that city with him. He retired.

I moved neighborhoods and found Paul. Paul kept his Christmas decorations up all year long. There was a light-up Santa from the Eisenhauer Administration. My son loved it. Mr. Abdul, the owner of the shoe repair shop next door, would sit and tell Paul everything that was wrong with this country. Kids today have no respect, that sort of thing. They had both probably been Nixon voters. I always had Abdul repair my shoes. I miss shoe repair nearly as much as I miss watch repair.

One day we were there for Saturday morning father and son haircuts. When my son was in the chair (he was little) I saw that Paul’s hand was shaking a bit. He looked exhausted. He was in his seventies. I told him not to worry about me and that I would see him next week. I stopped by the next two weekends, but the shop was closed. On the third attempt two new barbers were setting up their shop. They told me that Paul had died on the last day that I had seen him.

Then there was Billy, who escaped to the North Shore to avoid de-segregation (New Orleans had many of these). He kept the shop open in his old neighborhood (before “they” moved in) to give his adult disabled daughter a place to go to get out of the house. There was Don who would putt when it got slow. He had to put a barber out for dealing cocaine. His wife suffered from dementia. He rebounded when she passed. Somewhere twenty miles from me is Burt, the best flat-top barber in the region. He always had a line. He never used scissors. He was an artist.

I have probably had ten barbers since. I have had more die. I have had one explain the “deep state” to me. I had one correctly identify the barber who gave me my last haircut by explaining the terrible things that she had done to the part in back that I could not see. I can measure my time on the planet in barbers. I need Patek to work on the Perpetual Haircut complication. Maybe Casio can work on an alarm that goes off when your neck gets scruffy. Well, off to get my head sharpened.