The Barber Shop
GQ October 1988
Angelo gave me my first adult haircut. His barbershop was on Broadway between 86th and 87th Streets, right across from Tip Toe Inn. The place smelled of hot towels that came out of a huge spherical chromed-steel steamer, of Jervis talc and Kreml hair tonic, of witch hazel and bay rum and Pinaud after-shave. Angelo was the first-chair barber: He had the big upholstered seat closest to the shop's door, and he got the preferred customers, including my uncle the entrepreneur, who wore bespoke suits and silk shirts, tipped big and took a manicure. Like uncle, like nephew. When he brought me to Angelo that first time, I also wore a suit. Mine had short pants and a jacket with no lapels. I wore my best Eton-collared shirt and my school cap.
Angelo was big and round. He slapped a leather tuffet atop the seat and motioned me to climb up, undid my collar, loosened my tie, wrapped my neck with a single narrow band of tissue and whipped around me a white sheet with the name "Belnord Barber Shop on it. With practiced hands he turned my face first left, then right, swiveled the chair to face the mirrored wall and asked me, just like the 7-year-old man I was about to become, "How short you want it?"
I had been preparing for this rite of passage for weeks-peering in the windows of every barbershop I passed to see how other men acted. No more would l be taken across town to Pete the Kiddie Barber on Lexington Avenue and 73rd Street, where the seats were done up like carousel horses and mothers waited patiently while their little boys in polo shirts fidgeted under the shears.
I must have done well that first time because, as I climbed down from the chair, my uncle nodded approvingly, tipped Angelo handsomely and, shrugging into his cashmere coat, walked me back the block and a half to Barney Greengrass, the Sturgeon King, where we celebrated my incipient manhood over a couple of Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray tonics and Nova on bagels with cream cheese.
Angelo continued to cut my hair until I left for college. He scissored me before my first date, gave me a trim the day of my high-school freshman prom, cleaned around the edges before I went out for my first college interview (it was on the house - for good luck, he said in his thick Italian accent).
During college and graduate school I was an itinerant customer at perhaps a dozen shops until, back in the late Sixties, I stopped going to barbers altogether. Sure, we were wearing our longer hair back then. But there were other forces at work as well.
Barbers represented the System Lyndon Johnson went to the barber. J. Edgar Hoover went to the barber. Wall Street lawyers and stockbrokers went to the barber. We struggling writers and artists began to see those multi-jointed swivel chairs as yet another manifestation of a society we wanted to change, reform, revolutionize. Radicals didn't want the backs of our heads massaged. Didn't want to smell like bay rum or Kreml. A little dab didn't do us.
And so we let our locks grow longer and longer, until we found some friend of a friend of a friend who was "into hair," and we'd sit on ladder-back chairs in somebody's kitchen starring at the tie-dyed curtains while we were snipped in private.
From there is was only a short step to unisex. Upwardly mobile, moving from job to job, city to city, we'd learn from our friends at the pool about places with names like the Snippery, Scissors West and Visage, where, sipping white wine or espresso, we'd lounge in Italian-design chrome-and-molded-smoked-plastic chairs, our then wives in the next chairs, and scan Gourmet while lean bearded leonine men wearing silk tunics, or braless young women stylists wearing coke spoons on delicate gold chains, who'd learned their craft in London, worked us over with Redken products and tiny scissors.
We were meticulously groomed - just like the up-and-comers that we were - and we paid $20, $30, $40 for those power haircuts. And yet, no matter which vintage Meursault I sipped, or how authentic the espresso, I had the niggling feeling that every time I went to get clipped, I was getting clipped.
As I moved into my early forties, I again began peering in the windows of actual barbershops whenever I passed one On the street. They seemed so...familiar. The labels of the Jervis talc had been changed. But the old reliables were there: the chairs that could be double-clutched into "high re-cline" when you needed a quick shave, and Kreml hair tonic and Pinaud after-shave, and rumpled refolded newspapers and dog-eared easily read magazines (not a Gourmet or a New Republic in sight), and barbers in pastel-blue or yellow smocks, who - with no frills - cut men's hair, trimming around the neck with a straight razor. The customers in those chairs, white wraps thrown over them, weren't the System anymore - they were even younger than I, most of them. Indeed, I was the System: a Washington journalist who covers the White House and the Department of State and the network news bureaus.
I kept looking through those plate-glass windows. But, somehow, something kept me from pushing open the doors, from going back in time to Angelo's firm hands and quick scissors. Grudgingly, a slave to style and position, I made do with getting my power haircuts in shops where inscribed pictures of newscasters, senators and First Families adorned the walls.
And then, early this summer, about to enter my forty-fifth year, I walked from my office as if impelled by an unknown force, strode with quickening pace around the corner, pushed open the door of the barbershop in the office building next door and took a seat in the first chair, which was fortuitously vacant. The place smelled of witch hazel and my long-lost youth.
The barber's name was Vito. I undid my collar and loosened my tie. He wrapped a single narrow band of tissue around my neck and whipped a white sheet around me. With practiced hands he turned my face first left, then right, swiveled the chair to face the mirrored wall and asked me, just like the boy I once was, and was about to become again, "How short you want it?"
©1988 John Weisman