I had to brake for a mink this morning. The sleek and
undulate marmot streaked out from the shoulder gorse, pivoted in a wee plie
when he saw the truck and vanished. But not before reminding me that it was
time for my semi-annual haircut.
Not
because the barber I had used for years doubled as the local taxidermist, but
because a mink on the roadside must mean Spring, which means Opening Day, which
means it’s time. I generally try to get the second cut around the World Series
and, as the only sport left with a reliable season, Baseball has worked pretty
well so far as a reminder.
When we were boys,
my father would take us around the corner on Saturday to Dominic’s on Second
Avenue, next to the deli we knew only as Old Smelly’s. Dominic was a trim, neat
barber with a thin mustache and lot’s of classic tattoos like broken hearts
with daggers and girls’ names like Gloria.
Of course, there was a barber pole out front – that’s how you knew it
was a barber shop – and the storefront was full of beakers and bottles with
clear, blue and pink and chartreuse liquids in them that I never saw him use
but always hoped he’d use on me. The wall in front of the three chairs was all
glass and
mirrors so that everything in
the place, the calendar girl, the posters for hair tonics, brushes and razors,
the celebrity head-shots all flashed around in a riot of stuff that was
masculine, somewhat secret and elusive to me as a nine year old. Baseball
seemed always on the radio at Dominic’s; Mantle coming to bat, Yogi Berra
selling YooHoo, the Miracle Mets stumbling around . I hated waiting for the
open chair; sitting in the sunlight counting dust-motes or leafing through
Popular Mechanics or Outdoor Life. I loved it when Dominic lathered up my
temples and made a big production of stropping his razor and making two
precise, raspy tugs at imaginary sideburns. I learned about the very solemn,
adult act of tipping from my father at Dominic’s.
Years went by when
we didn’t cut our hair at all. During this period of social upheaval Barber
Shops began changing, then disappearing altogether. They were replaced by
Unisex Salons with names like “Golden Shears” or “His N’ Hers Clips”. The
barber poles vanished together with the beakers of odd unguents.
You’d have to go to Grand Central or Wall
Street to find a regular, old barber. In fact, the barbers themselves were
being replaced at an alarming clip by…..women barbers, which, of course, seemed
like an oxymoron.
Toward the end of
the 70’s, after a minor ceremony at which the painter, Davi Schoffman and I
removed the symbols of that age – my butt length pony tail and his massive,
Rabbinical beard – I began the search again for a barber. With a barber pole.
Entirely bereft of the words “Shears” or “Clips”. And a male, please. In Maine,
that had become even more difficult as every lobsterman’s wife had suddenly
gone into Hair, converting the daytime kitchen into a salon and hanging a
shingle off the mailbox that might say something like, “Hair Today”. In Maine
that meant the taxidermist, who still had a pole and where a few dusty, ratty
examples of his craft replaced the mirrors and glass. Still had the endless,
tiresome wait for the guy ahead of me to finish his gabbing, during which I’d
thumb through the Sports Illustrated or Field and Stream, trying to be patient.
He actually did a pretty good job for a few years before succumbing to coffee
brandy and irrelevance and disappearing in the night.
I’ve since been
forced into something of a compromise. My current barber is, in fact, a woman.
She cut hair at the Brunswick Naval Air Station until they shut down, which
means her skills are somewhat limited to what she can do with the electric
shaver thingy. My wife will ask her to
use scissors on occasion, just to bust her balls. There’s nothing particularly
masculine about her shop – a couple of photos of her pudgy grandkids, the TV on
relentlessly, RedBook instead of Field and Stream. But she does have a pole,
which attracted me, despite calling her place “A Li’l Off The Top”. There’s
never any waiting and she gets the very reasonable rate of a dollar a minute,
starting out at a ten minute haircut for ten bucks and moving up to twelve
minutes for twelve bucks. I give her fifteen and say, “Keep the change…”
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