Where have all the old-school barbers gone?
My barber retired this year. He’d been cutting my hair for more than 25 years, and doggone it, what little hair I had left was badly in need of being cut. I hadn’t a clue where to turn.
I live in The Woodlands and settled on a place in one of our so-called village centers that billed itself, promisingly, as the “Village Barbers.” I walked tentatively toward the front desk of the six-chair shop and was met by a young lady sporting an impressive collection of tattoos and piercings. She asked, did I have an appointment?
I hadn’t even considered that one might be necessary.
With that airy, condescending tone that females of her generation routinely seem to address clueless males of mine, she told me that they did, in fact, accept walk-ins and assured me that a “stylist” would be with me shortly.
I looked around, absorbing the loud music that reverberated from speakers high on the walls. The stylists were all young women, most as tatted and pierced as the receptionist. Several had spiked hair in various neon shades. The place bore no resemblance to any barber shop that I had ever seen.
One of the stylists came over, announced that I was next, and asked whether I would like a shampoo. I was somewhat taken aback: The last person who’d asked me that was my mom, when I was a boy. I mumbled something that sounded like “yes” and followed her to a reclining chair in front of a large sink.
I began to relax, and even to enjoy the shampoo and scalp massage. My mind drifted back to the late 1950s and to a very different barber shop — the one that Mr. Joe and Mr. Leo owned in a working-class suburb just south of New Orleans. Practically every Saturday morning, my dad took me to get a haircut there. My opinion as to whether a haircut was needed was neither sought nor considered.
Across from the two barber chairs, customers waited in a row of metal chairs. The coffee table and magazine rack were always littered with a current edition of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, as well as not-so-current copies of Popular Mechanics, Sports Illustrated, Boy’s Life and Reader’s Digest. Another rack, a little higher up the wall, held copies of a magazine called Playboy. I wasn’t tall enough to reach or clearly see that rack, but was told that those magazines were for adults only, and that they contained well-written literary articles by popular writers of the time.
That shop’s sensations came flooding back to me. I remembered the smells of witch hazel, bay rum and the butch wax for the crew cuts that were so much in vogue then. I could practically feel the steamy towel laid on the back of my neck after it had been shaved by a leather-stropped straight razor, followed by the ritualistic application of talcum powder from a long-handled bristle brush. And then, at the haircut’s conclusion, there’d be the whoosh of the linen drape, removed with a courtly flourish.
At those weekly outings, I glimpsed the mysterious, neverto-be discussed ways that men bonded with other men. The barbers, my dad and their other customers discussed football, baseball and current events. They told jokes and tall tales and maybe even a couple of outright lies. Was anybody catching any shrimp? Were the speckled trout and redfish biting in the Chef Menteur Pass, down at Shell Beach, or out in Lake Borgne?
The stylist tapped my shoulder, and I snapped back to the present. She held a mirror to the back of my neck. I told her that she had done an excellent job and assured her that I would be back in six weeks or so. I even got her name so that I could make an appointment.
But as I took a last look around, I wondered: Did any of the folks in that shop know, or even care, where the fish were biting?