Feeding the Mole People or 30 Minutes With The Old Barber

The old barber paused remembering the Korean War as parts of me fell around his polished black shoes. His aged skin, tight as Spanish leather and dotted with liver spots, was a roadmap of histories. These are the faded scars collected in an age the world no longer remembers but he cannot forget each time he’s in front of a mirror. He is a relic of a bygone age, an endangered species smelling of Old Spice and Barbicide, sharing the remnants of the life he recollects while his scissors blur around you.

Two years ago I fought a war of my own, a great rebellion against scissors, trimmers and razors. I had always wanted to grow my hair long and with a new city, job and life before me it was time for a change how I visually represented the top of my head. I have been cursed with terrible hair which is why, in highschool, I could usually been seen with a baseball cap firmly fixed to conceal my embarrassment. When left to it’s own devices it transforms into a mop that snows dandruff each time I choose to wear black and a mess that is always a chore to manage. I have used several brands of shampoo and a handful of conditioners, some that smelled of things I couldn’t pronounce and others that made my scalp feel as though I had just dowsed it with gasoline and lit a match, to try to rectify the danger zone atop my cranium but none of these gave me luster, volume or shine like the commercials said they would. Eventually I stopped caring, stopped combing and settled on whatever brand of shampoo smelled the best thinking the pleasing aromas emanating from my head would outweigh the monstrosity that was my hair style (or lack there of).

With the move to the capital and the freedom of being unknown, my bimonthly barber shop routine and I parted ways and -much to the chagrin of my dear old Grandmother- I allowed my hair to go uncut for nearly two years. Our relationship would eventually be rekindled when my mother requested to be reintroduced to her shorthaired son for her wedding day and, since then, my hair has remained something my Grandmother could accept without any drastic contortions of the face. Still, I look back on my carefree hippie days with admiration and though sweeping would reveal enough strands to create several small animals and patrons at work would often refer to me as Mrs., I believe my appearance benefited greatly from the longer locks. Now that I am entertaining a country that views physical appearance on a larger barometer then most, and with my working situation being slightly more professional then minding the counter at a video store, I have decided to keep things cropped. My plans to become the male Crystal Gale have momentarily been thwarted.

Going to the barbershop was always an odd experience to me. Here you are going to somebody brandishing sharp objects to ask them to remove portions of you and you pay them for the service. There is no other aspect of human life that functions like this so frequently and certainly not as willingly. Most humans, BDSM practitioners excluded, do not enjoy visiting the dentist for the occasional tooth excavation and nor do people, Hollywood excluded, eagerly adore the detaching of selected body parts. Where does all that hair go, anyway? I always wondered if barbers use your hair to create the wigs in their window displays. You know, the headless mannequins that always look exceptionally creepy under the glow of the street light as you pass by them at night. If this is the case shouldn’t the barber pay you for delivering him such well-maintained materials for him to work with? I am leery of the motives barbers have for collecting such copious amounts of something people wish to have removed from soup. My suspicions tell me that our human hair is used to feed an underground race of mole people whose only function is to control the rising and lowering of barber chairs. Or, even more alarming, the strands of our hair are collected for their genetic material and with the valuable DNA scientists, disguised as barbers, are cloning us to be used as drones, military and medical test subjects and pop singers. How else can we explain the consistent repetition of Top 40 radio? Maybe our hair is used to provide much needed fur for animals undergoing radiation treatments. I don’t know and for now, barber breeding mole people DNA thieves, I cannot prove a thing. Either way you slice this pie we, the hair growing public, are getting the short end of the stick.

When it has come time to feed the mole people, I have always sought out the smaller barbershops. In large cities these places are generally found in Little Italy or Chinatown, far away from the chain stores in the epicenter. Hairdressing entrepreneurs will usually set up shop in their place of residence but tend to be middle-aged women reeking of lavender and divorce. In these establishments a small white dog nips at your feet and a television is almost always playing soap operas. With such distractions you run the risk of ear amputation, the biggest fear of the haircutee. Small towns like Cornwall, however, still have a smattering of old barbers shops bearing the living fossils of old barbers and for those willing to avoid the Magicuts and salons you can always find a waiting chair, meticulous cutting techniques and enlightening conversation.

I discovered one such old barber on a frigid walk earlier this month. Since then I have passed his shop a few times and he is always sitting alone in a scene all to frequent to small town mom and pop shops when the large corporation move on in. There, adjacent to a large restaurant and in front of a Tim Horton’s, is the small white building, paint peeling, with the inactive barber poll. Somehow the none rotating barber poll was fitting, perfectly punctuating the ramshackle scene. The sign in the window made with black tape reads YOU R NEXT. Two silver chairs glimmer in the window and the sounds of Johnny Cash and Kitty Wells play from an old radio on a shelf in the corner. Sitting in one of the chairs behind the local paper, tapping his feet to the beat, sits the old barber. He resembles Mr. Dressup and is dressed all in white, a uniform more fitting to an ice cream man then a barber. He looks up at the clock ticking away and sighs to himself. The scene through the window is a museum preserving this place as a cultural artifact. It looks like something that should be found in a collection of black and white photographs gathering dust in a basement or attic. At seven bucks a cut, however, it not only appealed to my sense of nostalgia but also to my wallet and inside I walked.

The bell above rang and the old barber instantly jumped from his chair, newspaper falling to the floor, his eyes wide, almost psychotic. His motion was so quick and automatic you’d think a spring mechanism in the chair controlled by the opening of the door propelled him into swift motion. “You come to cut off the cold, have you?” he said motioning to the redness displayed on my numb face while stooping to pick up the paper. “And would you look at this here, huh, this guy. I tells ya, what is the world coming to, eh?” It is as though you have been to see this friendly man dozens of times before with the way he spoke to you. His manner was as warm and welcoming as his shop, his smile wide, gold teeth glistening. You will not find this kind of service in your large chain stores of modern design, my friends.

“Hello sir,” I said removing my hat so he could get a good look at the canvass. “I believe this may be a haircut of yours that will travel the greatest distance.”

“Oh,” he said, sweeping up the chair and lowering the volume on the radio. “Where abouts are ya’ going?”

I told him my destination and informed him that this was to be a business cut to which he replied: “Ah, so you want me to get rid of all of that shit there, do ya?” I nodded and the preliminaries were over.

Over the course of those thirty minutes spent with the old barber we spoke mainly of the changing times. He remembered the days when he could still swim in the river without fear of mutation and when the view from his shop window contained more trees. He told me that he could never picture himself in a mall store despite how much money the Tim Horton’s might offer him to move, his land being valuable to them as a parking lot. He spun my chair around so I could face the window. “Look out there!” He exclaimed. Here you see that guy walking in to get a coffee and that truck going to who knows where and what is that woman doing across the street? This is a window to the world and damned if I’m gonna’ trade this in for some mall store.” He grunts here assertively and continues. “I’ve seen many things disappear in my life but you hold onto what you can and call it your own. No sir, they can take their parking lot and shove it through a donut hole. I’m staying.”

There are certain people you meet in life that you instantly respect and this old barber was one of them. The scissors snipped in time with the music, pausing every now and then as the man became lost in his memories. I didn’t mind. His stories of the town I never knew, changed with the building of the Seaway, the erecting of the Wal-Mart and the closing of the mills was like finding an old historical volume of a frozen moment when my parents were children. Briefly our chat turned to his time in Korea but he didn’t dwell upon that very long. Like the scars knit into his skin, some things never truly fade.

A heater clicked on and the room seemed to vibrate. My haircut was complete. The old barber turned me towards the mirror and, what a surprise, he had actually given me a look I had never had before. Gone was the disarray I had called a hairstyle and in it’s place a slicked back look right out of the a gangster picture. The hair style of Cagney and Bogart rested on top of my head and, dare I say, it was the best haircut I had ever received. Still, I was slightly saddened that my time with the old barber had come to an end. I am sure weeks could be spent with him with many more stories to be told. He bid me a safe journey, smiled as I paid him, and returned to his chair, his radio and his newspaper. I turned as I crossed the street half expecting the place to have vanished, as though it was all just a vision of an age I wish I could have experienced. Thankfully, though, it remained and we have people like the old barber to remind us of what once was, still fighting the good fight in the world that left him and his shop behind.