Cutters

© 2006 Jon Donlon

Men seem to be spending money on themselves reminiscent of the Gilded Age, with fat cigars, old liquors, fast horses, and young women. Glossy men’s mags are getting short on old fashioned visual porn and long on fashionable consumables. But I'm not looking for a high maintenance babe who can suck a golf ball through six meters of garden hose or expensive deluxe bijoux--overpriced sweat-shop produced clothing with some other guy’s initials on them or complicated toys. I just want to find a good cutter.

This was no problem for the decade or so during which I didn't cut my hair. Back then I just pulled it back and snapped a rubber band with coloured plastic balls around it. But, one day, in Spain, I thought it would be cool to visit the barber of Seville.

He would cut it, the young barber in a white lab coat said, but after lunch.

Jolly and I returned, paella laden, to find that a dozen or fifteen carefully oiled and coifed Spanish men had gathered to witness the event, and render the auto de Fe seal of approval. When the barber snipped off my thick ponytail, and finished the cut, they each solemnly rose and shook my hand. I was no longer a goofy hippie. Well, no longer a hippie.

Cut once, I found hair had to be cut again every now and then.

When we moved to Japan recently I became acquainted with its wonderfully arcane methods of organization. For my first hair cut here I wandered to the train station for a trim at the franchise. They spoke little English and I spoke less Japanese. But it was easy enough for the barber to gesture toward a machine into which I fed a 1000 yen note and from which a printed receipt curled. The barber took this, sat me in a padded chair with a pair of painted foot prints on the floor in front of it. Where else would I put my feet I had to wonder? He swung open the mirror I faced once seated. It revealed a shallow closet for coat, bag, and other personal belongings. All very efficient. Well organized.

The Japanese cutter held out a special, narrow case for my classes. Then he swathed me in paper neck tape and traditional bib. Of course without a common language it’s impossible to say “short,” “long,” or “fashionable.” But I could show the guy my Louisiana driver’s license. That thing carries a then current cut. I could and did make a fingers-close-together sign hoping to convey the idea that I wanted a short trim – and hope that I’d not conveyed the idea that I wanted him to shrink my noggin down to two inches like a Borneo head-hunter’s trophy. (That’s so outré this season.)

Although cheap at the price, the thousand yen cut was pretty good.

He did a preliminary cutting with the power machine and then a lot of clipping with shears. Done, a vacuum hose dropped from the ceiling, accoutred with a stiff upholstery brush on the end. It sucked up stray bits from his work exactly like I clean up after the cat. The haircut was quick if not dirty, although there was none of the detail work you get at a full service barber. In Japan, a colleague tells me over expensive imported Irish bitter, that means shaving the forehead, too. Errant eyebrow fibres and stray ear infill are things to be removed at the home sink if one scruples to use the economy barber.

It is curious how many ways this simple task, cutting your hair, can be handled.

For some time I was working just south of Chicago, "city of the broad shoulders, . . . meatpacker to the world" in the vast repository library at the University of Illinois. Back then I went to a Brazilian women who would gently wash my hair and chatter away in a wonderful syrupy accent about her father's horse farm in South America.

After the trim, she'd stand behind me, hold my head in her small hot hands, centered between her teacup breasts, and we'd both look straight ahead into the mirror. She would think about my haircut. All done, she'd pull away the white apron, bend forward, purse her carmine lips and blow stray trimmings out of my collar with her tropical breath.

But I finished my work in the heartland and had to leave library, Brazilian bust, warm exotic puffs and all.

My next cutter, an African-American in the Deep South, gave a wonderfully stylish haircut but was apparently homophobic and frightened of touching another man or at least another man's head: odd for a barber. He'd sort of fix my shaggy bean with a fingertip and go to town with power clippers and then a pint-sized red vacuum cleaner. I would be shorn and free of trimmings in a jiffy as a room full of black women relaxed their locks all around us.

On Gibraltar once doing a story on Rock Buster, the Victorian 100-ton gun at Rosaria cove, I stopped in for a cut by an Irish barber. He spun a tale while he snip, snip, snipped away with glittering rat-tail stainless-steel scissors. I was entertained but wound up with a high-on-one-side reprise of Michael Caine's hair from his first film, Zulu.

When Jolly, my travelling companion said, "What did you do!?" while snuffling like an asthmatic yet not totally amused goose, I knew I had to go back. Unsurprised, the fellow Donkey worked on me again, saying "aye, but it does look to be lacking in symmetry, don't you know."

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, an acquaintance recommended a Cuban émigré operating from a shop fitted out in a domestic garage. It was a sublime experience.

The barber was clearly deeply macho, confirmed in his manliness and willing to display. His slacks and shirt were ironed smooth as plate glass, a gold ring shown on his pinkie, gold watch on his wrist, and chain on his neck. Here was a real cutter.

An innovator, too, he'd plumbed the small barber shop with yellow plastic pneumatic line terminating in one of those bronze nozzles manufactured to be used in machine shops to clear away the iron filings during grinding and lathing. The Cuban cutter would hold my head, turn it, tilt it, twist it like a burned out light bulb and otherwise present my cranium for his careful work. From time to time he'd blast away the trimmed hair with a terrific chilled hiss from the industrial air-tap. This man knew his craft.

First, he picked up a shaker bottle and liberally sprinkled an astringent on my hirsute coconut, working the cool fluid into the scalp by massaging my noggin--his hands were like a pair of steroidal arachnids doing push-ups on a golf green. Next, he combed my anaemic mane straight back, then ran wildly buzzing electric clippers quickly and deftly here and there. Buzz, buzz, clip, clip, clip, blast, blast and the air was filled with scented hair.

For the final shaping, he used a series of different scissors to complete the work and to probe, pathologist like, into my ears to trim away those awful sprouts.

Then, cut complete I thought, he began to shape my moustache and use a tiny pair of scissors to deal with the hair forward of my ear. Still going on, he ran a small yet menacingly loud machine of indeterminate age and origin to generate a wad of hot foam, which he edged, with a sudden well-trained series of flicks, along my sideburns and the edge of my moustache.

Flipping open a straight razor with a thought provoking snap, he oh so carefully drew it along the now laser-straight frontier of those highly visible yet troublesome to trim zones.

Pulling a hot, wet white towel from a covered metal tray, this wonderful cutter wiped the remaining foam traces away and completed the job, finally, by firmly rubbing an antiquated, but cold and pleasant, floral cologne into my satisfied pate.

In all, it was a performance. Unfortunately, deep in the doldrums about circumstances in his earstwhile homeland he blew his capable brains out on a visit to Miami, his last earthly move being to place the cool, blunt muzzle of a small-frame .38 above his ear, nestled in his perfectly cut hairline.

I moved from that community, and that cutter, and landed in Botswana's sunny clime.

Then, if the larder was low and my skull was getting bushy, I'd pedal down the dusty road a bit to get a net sack of South African oranges and to catch a trim at "Booboos Rocket Styles." Booboo (not his real name) opened for business by wheel barrowing his sign, big piece of broken mirror, three home-market clippers, and small red Honda generator into work.

Although Booboo's sign offers fully a half-dozen styles from which to choose, I always opted for the basic buzz cut.

I’d slice open juicy oranges for all the bon vivants larking about the premises, sit back in the white plastic lawn chair and ask Booboo as he fires up the Honda, if we should discuss literature, politics, or soccer as we chatted beneath the prickly thorn bush branches, electric cutter a’ vibrating in the African afternoon.

The barber in the Sirkeci station in Istanbul usefully brackets my experience at the Japanese train station. Turkish barbers can only be described as wonderful. The cut itself may vary in quality depending on the skill of the cutter, but the experience is always top notch. It involves getting tea. It involves getting a shoulder message, a hand message, and a facial in a hot towel. You’re nuts if you don’t get shaved at the same time you get trimmed. Indeed, if you have not had a close, straight razor shave from an experience barber, you probably have not had a close shave.

Be ready. If you visit a Turkish barber with ear hair, here is the methodology. Twist up a ball of cotton at the end of a bit of wire. Dip the utensil in antiseptic. Set this aflame. Bounce said utensil carefully against the ear hair.

It works fine. However, if you are uninformed of the procedure and catch sight of a flaming cotton ball headed for your eardrum out of the corner of your eye, that can be disconcerting.

Many things make visiting Turkish barbers a joyful experience, and not less so the particular shop in the ornate Istanbul rail station. This cutter enjoyed the company of a charming pet bird which climbed about on his back as he worked. From time to time the companionable creature would creep up his sweater and perch on the barber’s shoulder, cooing and making comments in his ear. The barber would pause, smile, and make small talk with his feathered pet. Such moments make going to a barber better than just getting a good haircut.

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