'To Be at Home in Other Places'

At his day job my current barber is a counselor working with street people who have alcohol and/or drug problems. Like most in that field, he values his clients and dislikes the bosses, who live by the dictates of bureaucracy. Barbers are like bartenders. The good ones usually know how to listen to patrons and interrupt sparingly. A variation on this works well for us because I’m not a big talker. I would rather listen than bloviate. I’m the one who interjects sparingly. In my experience, barbers become friends, perhaps because we are simpatico. You’re a captive audience for fifteen or twenty minutes. You might as well enjoy the company. Every four weeks for more than thirteen years David has cut my hair. 

Jude Russo has a good post about barbers, “The Particolored Pole,” on The Lamp blog. He has been going to the same barbers since he was seven years old. Throughout my childhood, my father, brother and I went to Tom’s Barbershop on Pearl Road in Parma Heights, Ohio. It was an all-male preserve, with stacks of comic books and National Geographics on the radiator. A whiff of witch hazel brings it all back. Russo worries about the loss of his longtime  barbers, and how rare such relationships are today:

 

“There is something unfamiliar about this sort of familiarity; the greater Washington area is a hive of well-off transients, coming from Ohio or New Jersey to work for Leviathan or its attendants and then returning home. Going to the same barbers who cut your hair in grade school must be a glimpse of what it’s like to be at home in other places.”

 

I’ve lived in five states though I’m not by nature rootless, so I value such connections. I try to make a friend or two wherever I go with any regularity – libraries and doctor’s offices. I don’t like the impersonality fostered by modern life. Part of me wishes I had been born in a small town and lived there all my life, which makes living in the fourth-largest city in the country unlikely. When I find a good barber I hold on to him. For three years in Seattle, a woman from Thailand cut my hair – the first time I ever had a female barber.

 

For nineteen years in Albany, N.Y., I had a barber with a slightly different profile. He was young, still in his twenties when I met him. He had two interests in life: golf and complaining about his wife, which could severely limit conversation. We stayed together because he had a saving grace: Chris was an encyclopedia of jokes, most of them filthy and many rooted in ethnic stereotypes. His shop was a refuge from the easily offended. He was also foolishly impressed by my being a newspaper reporter. In “Haircut” from his first book, Person, Place, and Thing (1942), Karl Shapiro celebrates the all-American barbershop:

 

“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 . . .”