“Every reasonable businessman is willing to sit and wait half an hour for a shave which he could give himself in 3 minutes, because he knows that if he goes downtown without understanding exactly why Chicago lost two games straight he will appear an ignoramus”.
Stephen Leacock “Men who have shaved me” in “Literary Lapses”.
My first memories of a hair removalist was Mrs D, a
friend of my mother’s, who cut hair cheaply in her back room overlooking the railway line. She came from a small country town known for growing wool. I’m pretty sure the hair clippers she used for my short back and sides cut came from her brother the shearer. They certainly had that painful blunt feel that implied 10 or 15 years of shaving the fleece off dirty Merinos or coarse haired Corriedales. The fact that she would dab the cuts she inflicted with tar was added evidence for the origin of her clippers and her training. As a haircutting style it was probably quite appropriate as there isn’t much difference between shearing an unwilling eight-year-old boy and an unwilling 3 year old ewe. To give Mrs D her due, perhaps a slip of the shears and consequent cuts were the result of the distraction of the trains roaring past the windows and rattling the furniture. And she did have a lot to say to my mother, about all her many relatives in her hometown and all their relative merits.
Not only were Mrs D’s haircuts cheap, they came with the occasional added bonus of a free dental consultation from her son John who was studying to be a dentist. When I mentioned I had just had four teeth extracted by Dr T, my aged dentist, John was eager to professionally critique his work. He started by poking around in my mouth with a dirty forefinger. Then he declared that if I were his patient he would have extracted only two teeth and tightly screwed up metal braces on the remainder to straighten out their wayward ways. However, like a frontal lobotomy, some things just can’t be undone. I wondered if he would have offered to do the procedure on the cheap in his mother’s back room as the trains rattled past the windows.
When I was a bit older I took myself off on the bus to have a haircut at the local department store. It was located at the back of the menswear department and so there was a nice synergy in cross-promotion.
“Yes sir, those trousers make you look very masculine” said the menswear salesman. The 13-year-old me puffed out his chest.
“We’re offering a complimentary haircut this week for customers who buy a pair of those trousers”. As I was amenable to compliments as the next guy I accepted his offer but I could never work out why the haircut was free.
As I grew up I found hairdressers were growing in ever increasing sophistication. I will never forget the shock when a hairdresser insisted on washing my hair before he cut it. Up until then I had washed my hair after my haircut to try to erase the mistakes, oil and perfumed hair products etc. As I saw it, a seismic shift in hairdressing had occurred.
When I moved to another city I found solace in a very old, very old fashioned barber who believed in soaking the customer’s face with hot steaming towels after the hair cutting exercise. It was a pleasant experience reminiscent of steaming a fillet of fish. However this particular hairdresser was more interested in the steaming process than the cutting process which consisted of a few perfunctory scissor snips which made no discernible difference to the length of my hair. To be fair, I did feel softer and cleaner and my hayfever had improved after his ministrations. Also my head was a nice shade of salmon pink rather like bad sunburn or terminal blood pressure.
In my new city, searching for a new hairdresser I came across Joe of Joe’s hairdressing just near the train station. Joe’s approach was to gain loyal customers by criticizing their previous hairdressers’ prowess. “Who cut your hair last?” Joe demanded. “Was it a tall person?” I confessed that my previous hairdresser had been above average height. “I knew it” said Joe “He cut your hair upside down. All tall people do that. Because they are so far above the customer’s head, they can’t see what they’re doing”.
I had no idea how my haircut had become inverted or what an upside down haircut looked like. Joe’s tallist comments would have caused a social media storm today but in those times no such sanctions were available. He was the expert after all, and so if my haircut had been upended prior to his clippered correction then that was that. Joe had spoken. How had I been able to walk down the street with my head held high with an upside down haircut?
Then there was Terry and Teddy, two partners in hair crime who made most of their money selling hair products to the gullible such as me. They had a range of products for itchy scalp, dandruff, fine hair, coarse hair and no hair. In my case I’m pretty sure my itchy scalp was caused by Terry and Teddy’s anti-itch shampoo which I discovered could also be used to clean toilets and remove oil stains from driveways. But they had a solution. Their No Itch Scalp Soother was only double the price of a haircut and the scalp massage that was required was quite relaxing. However Terry and Teddy lacked one quality essential to a good men’s hairdresser: a thorough understanding of sport. They were European so they followed soccer but knew nothing about the great Australian sports of Australian football, cricket and rugby.
My current hairdresser, Rocky, can not only cut and polish my hair as it’s slowly thins out, he also encourages me because his own hair has thinned out to the stage of what Mark Twain would call “premature balditude”.
Most importantly Rocky has an encyclopaedic knowledge of all sports. He follows soccer, car racing, Australian rules football and cricket. He understands Rugby League (invented by traffic engineers to simulate car crash tests) and Rugby Union, the sublime mixture of poetry and thuggery and the game they play in heaven. He knows it all. Not only does he know every player’s weaknesses and faults, he agrees with my opinions on which team will win the next game. He’s a true sportsman and a great creative scissor artist with a Dali-esque flair. I travel miles to visit Rocky, passing scores of other hairdressers on the way. Who wants just a haircut when you can also gain, in 30 minutes, enough sporting knowledge to rise from ignoramus to sporting oracle?
-Geoff Milton
© Geoff Milton 2018
