He’s his own barber

Little confession here. I have not had a professional haircut in almost 10 years.

The paper doesn’t run my picture, but if it did, that confession would be unnecessary. My hair, where it exists, sprouts in various directions, as if I’d stuck my finger in a light socket on a day when there was already a fair amount of static electricity in the air.

I have hair in the back and some in the front, but there’s a growing chasm between them. In another year or so, I will have just a little isolated patch on my forehead. I will look like a Dr. Seuss character.

That’s exactly why I don’t pay for haircuts. Over the past 10 years, I’ve saved almost $2,300, and a professional barber isn’t going to make it any better. He will stand back, sigh and say, as a barber once told me, “Some people find it easier to just shave their heads like Mr. Clean.”

Years ago, I bought a pair of electric dog clippers, with multi-colored clip-on guards to cut hair at different lengths. We had three boys at home and a dirty shaggy dog named Harry, and none seemed all that concerned about how they looked. At some point, however, each boy discovered girls and realized walking around school with a home haircut was a sure way to never get within striking distance of a member of the opposite sex. And when Harry finally died, my wife replaced him with Sophie, who wears cute outfits and must be groomed professionally.

I also have a family tradition of home haircuts. My parents raised nine kids on a tight budget. Mom would place a metal bowl on our heads to achieve what we called the “Moe Howard special.” Sometimes, to get fancy, she’d tilt the bowl at an angle, as she thought it would look like we had combed our hair to the side. It didn’t.

So the precedent was there. After months of false starts and one or two unintentional crew cuts, I figured out a style I could reproduce month after month — 1-inch blade guards on top, ⅝ on the sides and sideburns with no blade guard. While I could cut most of my hair pretty easily, there was one spot I couldn’t do — the back of my neck. For the longest time, I was able to persaude my daughters to (reluctantly) help out. But they’re both away at college, and my wife, who just thinks I’m cheap, absolutely refuses to take on this important duty. I tried doing it myself, looking over my shoulder with a hand mirror, but the back of my head ended up looking as if I’d been visited by my mother’s ghost in my sleep.

Then I Googled how to cut your own hair and found the answer. You can buy a contraption on the internet that straps around the back of your neck. Anything below the “Barber’s Edge” trim guide gets cut off, and magically, you’ve got a straight, even neckline. Looking at the pictures, I had a brainstorm. I could save myself $19.99 (plus shipping) if I took a large yogurt container, cut off the bottom, sliced it in half, and wrapped it around the back of my head.

So that’s why, last weekend, as I was performing a home haircut, my wife opened the bathroom door and found me standing there with a yogurt container on the back of my head. She stared for a moment, sighed, turned and quietly closed the door behind her.

My boys were right. A home haircut is the fastest way on earth to put some serious distance between you and a member of the opposite sex.