CULTURE | BARBERSHOP
The Haircut
A road story and a memory
One time, out on the road, I stopped at a barber shop in a small town. I stumbled into it by chance — it was hidden away on a back street in the old section. Time had sort of passed the place by, and the doors and windows hung off the building like an old suit.
The barber was a small man, he had glasses and thin grey hair. He had a kind face and a delicate manner about him. He told me he’d been there since 1957. Half a century in the same place, treadin’ water, cuttin’ hair. Seems hard to believe nowadays.
We talked about the times back then and about how music was when we were young, and about the music now, and how it all sorta seems to come out of computers nowadays. He said that, well, he’d never even used a computer. He talked about all the changes he’d seen over the years
He apologized to me for having to raise his prices.
“Well, that was a couple of years ago”, he said.
Turns out a couple of years ago was back in 1986
Now some folks sit down and write a song, because they think they’ve got something to prove.
And others, well, they try to right every wrong, ’cause to them, life’s just one big mountain to move.
You know, you can choose just one thing, to get along; You just put your head down, and you stay in the groove …
He asked me how I wanted it, and I said, “Ah, just shorten it all up a bit”.
“Number one or number two?” he asked, and I didn’t understand what he meant at first.
But that old shop, well, it suddenly brought back memories, from when I was a kid. I looked over at the “Approved Haircuts” poster on the wall. It was faded and shopworn, probably hung there back when the place was new. It had drawings of men’s haircuts, and each one was a shorter version of the one above it. It was as if more time and more work made you smaller and smaller.
Well, I chose the number two and I figured, what the hell, the only difference between a good haircut and a bad one is a couple of weeks.
He didn’t cut hair the way they do these days. He didn’t gather it in his fingers and take little snips with a comb and scissors. He used an electric blade, runnin’ it up from the bottom.
He asked if I wanted it tapered or blocked, and I didn’t know, so I said tapered. I was a little uneasy at first, but then I figured, the man’s been doing this since I was a boy. I reckon he knows his job.
Seven bucks later and a three dollar tip, I left that old shop with the best haircut that I’d had in a long time.
This was originally a short story of mine, I worked it up into a song. You can find it HERE on my Bandcamp page. Free downloads. — je
