#24: "barbershop"

For at least the last dozen years or so I have dreaded getting a haircut. For someone that can't really stand when their hair starts to grow over their ears, this presents quite the problem.

I don't remember when my hair started curling and waving. There are pictures of me with very straight, very blonde hair (which is exactly what my son has). I wish I remembered those days; when I didn't have to worry about sweating so my hair wouldn't go in strange directions, when I didn't have to do anything past run a comb through it (or just near it) for it to just lay down and behave. Which is why for so many years I had such a simple, short haircut - or was it because my father was in the military and he decided my haircuts? 

Whatever it really was, what I remember most was the barbershop that my parents took us to. Nothing more perfectly sums up the area where I grew up: this tiny barbershop was in a building with a lawyer's office, a driving school (for people with DUI's and the like), and a plumbing construction business. It was next to a karate school (Napoleon Dynamite anyone?) and across from a strip mall that had stores pass through as fast as a revolving door. Yet somehow this one barber shop stayed, and stayed cash only, for what had to be about 30 years. It was one of those places that always allowed smoking even though none of the old men smoked indoors anymore, always had westerns on the TV, and if you asked nicely you could have a soda from the fridge. It was a place where the barber knew how to cut your hair before you walked in the door, and no one ever changed their order. Everyone got their balls busted, everyone had a good laugh.

Then I moved to RVA and getting back to that shop got harder and harder. Work always got in the way, and eventually I decided I didn't want to just buzz all my hair off. It was so very difficult to find another place to get my haircut because I had no idea how to describe how I wanted it done. I'd spent years 5-25 just sitting in a chair and talking trash that I really couldn't say anything more than "a trim, please."

Over the years I've gotten slightly better, but my hair is at times unruly and often a source of irritation for me. I can at least describe most of what I want done, but every barber/stylist is different. I thought I'd finally solved my issues when I moved to New York, but after about four and a half years the person that was cutting my hair simply disappeared. Thankfully I know it wasn't me or my hair that caused it.

The past few cuts I've just gone to the closest barber shop to my office. It's super old school (a Woody Allen film was shot there), and thankfully I don't have to make a lot of small talk. Today they played Frank Sinatra and Sam Cooke on the stereo. It's a pretty solid haircut, just please don't ask me to describe it past "just a trim."