'O Wonderful Nonsense of Lotions of Lucky Tiger'

I’m loyal to my barbers because they have always been loyal to me. I don’t have to remind them of what I want. Every fourth Saturday I visit, like a ritual. I sit in the chair, he pins the sheet around my neck – and we talk. No micromanaging. I can forget I’m getting a haircut and get on with the more interesting pastime of conversation. My current barber I’ve had since 2011. Before Christmas, he gave me a sack of tamales he had made as a gift. Earlier, in upstate New York, I went to the same barber for nineteen years. When I was hired as a reporter for the newspaper in Albany, I clandestinely evaluated the haircuts of my fellow male reporters, picked the one I liked and asked him who his barber was – a procedure as reliable as Consumer Reports. 

As kids, my brother and I went to the same barber shop as our father – Tom’s on Pearl Road, down the block from the police station. Even then I sensed a ritual was taking place. I sensed for the first time the camaraderie that can come from an all-male environment. When the first chair was available, my father took it. We perused the comic books, National Geographics and Highlights magazines piled on the radiator. There were no lengthy explanations. The menu was table d’hôte. Everyone got a variation on a buzzcut.

 

Karl Shapiro, like my father, was a World War II veteran. His early volumes were written while he served as an Army company clerk in the Pacific Theater. Shapiro was one of the first “grownup poets” I read and liked. His characteristically American choice of subject matter attracted me. He wrote about car wrecks, drugstores, honkytonks, Thomas Jefferson and a waitress, as well as war. His “Haircut” is more faithful to the barber shops of my pre-Beatles childhood than to contemporary “salons.” The poem begins:

 

“O wonderful nonsense of lotions of Lucky Tiger,

Of savory soaps and oils of bottle-bright green,

The gold of liqueurs, the unguents of Newark and Niger,

Powders and balms and waters washing me clean.”

 “In mirrors of marble and silver I see us forever

Increasing, decreasing the puzzles of luminous spaces,

As I turn, am revolved and am pumped in the air on a lever,

With the backs of my heads in chorus with all of my faces.

 

“Scissors and comb are mowing my hair into neatness,

Now pruning my ears, now smoothing my neck like a plain;

In the harvest of hair and the chaff of powdery sweetness

My snow-covered slopes grow dark with the wooly rain.”

Those lines evoke the scent of witch hazel and talcum powder in Tom’s Barber Shop more than sixty years ago, and the sense of the swiveling chair being "pumped." In another poem, “The Intellectual,” Shapiro derides the self-importance of the character named in the title:

 

“I’d rather be a barber and cut hair

Than walk with you in gilt museum halls,

You and the puma-lady, she so rare

Exhaling her silk soul upon the walls.”