The Contemplative Eye

Round and round she goes.

When I was a little boy, I went to Tony’s Barber Shop in Branford, Connecticut, and sat on a wooden board across the barber’s chair so I’d be tall enough for Tony to do the job. This was pretty much my introduction to American male culture (and its mysterious smells), plus a dab of Norman Rockwell.

Later, starting in college in 1971, I cut my own hair with a pair of barber shears for a long time. Then I got tired of this, in about 1982, and went back to a real barber shop in an Art Deco arcade under Grand Central Station. The three silent, craggy old signori who ran it shared their space reluctantly with a delightful, modern Puerto Rican woman whom they hid in a back corner. I liked her best and sought her out, much to their annoyance.

In Freeport, Maine, starting around 1991, I began using a barber called George. George had a freestanding one-room shop on a back street and was the only person I ever met who actually put up a sign that said “Gone Fishin’.” George moved as slow as a sloth and was a second nephew or something of my longtime acquaintance Eddie. When I made the mistake of extolling Eddie’s virtues one day, the air thickened and darkened like a summer thunderstorm, and I learned that Eddie had once embroiled himself, despite his considerable age, with a woman who was not exactly his wife and that he was still, apparently, drawing the family’s aggregated ire in relation to this matter. Yes. Well, sorry about that.

Anyway, after about 1995, I began patronizing a genuine hairdressers’ salon in downtown Brunswick, Maine, with the result that I had to spend and talk about three times as much for a haircut. One of my hairdressers was intensely beautiful but had a voice like a sheep, and the other was the other way around.

In about 2000, I began cutting my hair myself once more (or rather having Mary cut it) into a brisk military crew cut, using electric hair trimmers. This was fun, but the trimmers gave out pretty quick and I ran through three sets of them before deciding, earlier this week, to give a barber shop I’d spotted in Bath, Maine, a try.

Junior, the barber on duty that day, looks like Bert Lahr in a white coat and has been cutting hair in the same shop, unchanged—smells and all—for 50 years. I’d been growing my hair preparatory to the visit, to give him something to do. But he clearly had no idea what I meant when I said I didn’t want “smooth” hair but a rough, modern, informal cut. He nodded pleasantly and seemed to continue making the same automatic trimming-combing-and-conversation motions he’s been making since before the introduction of the Edsel, then tippy-tapped around my head with a comb, in a puzzled and birdlike way, when it came out smooth.

Still, Mary absolutely adored my new haircut, saying it was traditional yet fresh and not a spiky cliché. I told her I keep it rough and beautiful with “Moetry in Potion,” a new hair sauce I invented (which isn’t true, of course, but I enjoyed saying it). We agreed that, if only we were the kind of people to pull it off, creating a snazzy new line of pomades called “Hair Sauces” for forward-thinking barbers—like the ever-multiplying hot sauces in Mexican restaurants—could be a great new business idea. (Not that forward-thinkingness or new smells are the real draw of barber shops.)

But anyway: Thanks, Junior. And I’ve still got my latest trimmers, quite new, at home should it ever come to that. Again.

[Above: A picture of a haircut from the blog of an amusing Swedish photo-hobbyist named Rasmus, who seems to have borrowed it in the first place from a print ad for the Montreal hair salon Orbite. The ad was created by Bleublancrouge, an advertising agency, also in Montreal. O Canada.)