Friday, October 04, 2002
Where to Get a Haircut
Where to Get a Haircut
A barbershop is just a place where guys go for a haircut. The interaction is clinical, usually wordless. A decent barber hews order out of chaos and bestows a shred of evolution onto shaggy hominids. It has nothing to do with the things that are there, the music that is played or the magazines that are read by patrons waiting silently. But when everything is as it should be, these things harmonize and total up much more than the sum of their parts.
I got a real bad haircut once from Frank, a guy in West Philly who’d been around since B.C. (before cheesesteaks). His place had a lovely western exposure and a broad clean cheerful plate glass window, and the great old chairs I’ve always preferred. I asked his price, he said “five bucks.” Couldn’t beat it if I’d wanted. Wish I’d tried. He kept getting distracted by passersby and things on the street and shiny objects. Then again, he also simply gave a lousy haircut. I had to walk around in public acting as if I’d intended for my head to look like that, but it was like a lice treatment gone terribly wrong. Frank’s place had the elements, but lacked the key intangible: the tonsorial muse.
I thought I’d found a decent barber shortly after moving to this town, but he gave out on me. I got a few good haircuts, clean and tidy, nothing unexpected. Then I got a bad one. Nothing hideous, but falling below even my modest standards. The next time I gave him another try, since we’re all entitled to one bad day. But I was treated rudely and my hair was pointing strangely north when he was done. Two loser do’s in a row and I drop my barber. I’ve got to. I can’t stand the ignominy. I’m sensitive.
I bounced around from barber to barber. There are scores of little storefronts like Frank’s where I live, and I just went from one to the next, drifting, floating… my expectations were lower every time I tried someplace new, but there’s no way to tell who’s good and who’s not but by trial and miserable error. Then, in the bosom of the City’s biggest boulevard, I found my Philippino barbers. There are two locations to my knowledge, and three barbers whom I trust. My first discovery was International Dick’s, where I got a barbering unlike any I had ever had before. For one thing, my haircut was entirely acceptable. That’s all a guy ever wants. Nothing fancy, just a clean contour and a lower profile. This guy’s technique, however, was markedly superior to any I had theretofore experienced. He had taken barbering to the next level.
Later, I learned that Grand Opening was just as good and they performed the same routine. I think they’re actually called Rick’s, but the Grand Opening sign that’s been hanging on their awning for the past seven years is so much more prominent than anything else they’ve got going that it seems the best way to identify them. Grand Opening has two guys who work in a very small room where the only running water is in a little closet in the back. On the other hand, the chairs are lovely heavy old jobs, and the music they play is pop hits from the late 40s to early 60s.
At International Dick’s, which is its real name, you need to see Francisco. Dick himself does a really bad job and he takes forever. Honestly, he could screw up that badly plenty faster if he tried. A friend went there on my advice, got Dick and not Francisco, and came back with a strangely eccentric bald spot over his left ear and the look in his eyes of a cat that is being removed too slowly from a basin of water. Francisco, though, is a barber in the classic mold. In fact, for me, he epitomizes it. The shop has two old heavy chairs, well apart from each other in a long narrow room. You sit facing a mirrored wall that lets you see the people walking up the boulevard behind your right shoulder. The music is Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra and sentimental songs with lots of strings. Men quietly wait their turn reading USA Today and Playboy, but not the Journal or Hustler.
You sit in the chair and the black drape is thrown over you, settles over you, protecting you from your own hirsute extrusions, granting you a priestly anonymity and removing you from the workaday world. You are in the barber’s chair: you are to do nothing at all, whether you want to or not. The next step involves the wrapping of a small thin tape of cloth around your neck. Most barbers do it the same way, in a tight fold that’s both comforting and suffocating. But these guys make it comfortable, loose and somehow draped so as to minimize the clippings getting stuck against your skin. “How you want it today, my friend?,” they ask every time. The clippers come out without prologue, swooping in arcs round your head. Your hair falls in compact mats that bounce from your shoulders to the floor. As he paces back and forth behind you, the barber swings and swirls the clipper cord with graceful terpsichorean maneuvers. The scissors come out next for layering, firm fingers gripping locks of hair, swiftly comparing and correcting in a pattern crawling to your crown. Then the scissors start swirling, snipping nonstop, like a mosquito hawk or dragonfly that looks fearful but lacks teeth. The drone of the metal tines dragging back and forth against each other is hypnotic.
Ordinary haircuts end right here. At these shops, though, the barber detaches the cloth from your neck, lays it over your throat, takes off the drape and shakes it clean. You know you’re not supposed to get up yet because of the cloth, a gentle garrotte, a soothing restraint. So you relax and wait. The barber throws the drape back over you, reattaches the washcloth in a slightly different, lower, looser way. He gets warm shaving foam and smears it on your sideburns, the back of your neck, behind your ears, everywhere the spirit moves him. I’m sometimes surprised by the locations he picks, but I just let him do his job. He’s a professional; I am but the artist’s canvas. He uses a straightedge razor; Francisco once told me he goes through seven or eight of them a day. After you are closely shaved, he soaks a washcloth in warm water and cups it round your ears, holding it there until reality begins to slip away. He then wipes off remaining spots of lather that are clinging to your neck and eyebrows. Then there is the final touch-up with the tiny buzzing clipper.
And at the end, you get the special bonus, that which tells you that you’ve found the muse’s home: he straps an electric device to the back of his hand. It vibrates vigorously as he kneads your neck and shoulders to dispel all the remaining tension that had managed somehow to survive till now. He keeps at you until you are relaxed enough to stop paying attention. Finally, having done all he could to uplift you from a pitiable condition to one somewhat less pitiable, he carefully flicks all the stray hairs from your head and face with a broad, soft, talcum-scented brush, removes the drape a final time, and thanks you for your visit. You rise slowly from the chair, vibrations resonating in your corpuscles. You pay the man and go outside. The air flows smoothly round your head. You look good and feel better. We all do. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to us: find a decent barber and get a decent haircut. You’ll be glad you did.
