My coworker, Naresh, and I were talking about haircuts one day when he sits back and regards my coiffure. He then declares, "Your haircut looks easy." It really isn't. Between mom and dad, I inherited a full head of exceedingly thick, extremely straight hair. For some reason, this combination stymies a lot of barbers. One of the annoyances I've found when moving to a new area is finding a barber that doesn't do a butcher job on my hair.
Unfortunately, I've had my fair share of butcher jobs. One place outside the Charleston Navy Yard gouged out entire patches. It was so bad, when I got back to my regular barber, he just stared and let out a slow "Daaaammmmnnn." There was another place in Birmingham that touted itself as a bargain because all the barbers and stylists were students who cut your hair for tips only. It was not a bargain.
My most notorious haircut was given to me during my time in Auburn by none other than Andrea who was my girlfriend by this time. We were in her family's living room one evening when I offhandedly mentioned I needed a haircut before inspection the next day. She takes one look at my buzzcut and announces, "Why go to a barber? I can do that." This was after the equally notorious vaseline incident, so I honestly should have known better.
I actually did try to dissuade Andrea, but she wasn't hearing me. She turned to her dad who was sitting in his lounge chair going back and forth between watching a ball game and reading his paper. "Daddy, where are your clippers? I'm giving Wayne a haircut." Her dad mutes the TV, turns, and looks at Andrea. He inclined his head at an angle and his eyes widened quizzically. "You wanna do what, now?"
"It'll be fine. Wayne's hair will be easy to cut." Andrea's dad's brow furrowed. He peered over his glasses at me and gave me a very sympathetic look.
"Hmph. Is that right?" I didn't know what to say. I just had to eke out a simple, "Sir, no sir." and spare myself this ordeal, but Andrea must have sprinkled some of that crazy redhead voodoo on me. All I could manage was a grin and a shrug. My fate was sealed. Andrea's dad left the room and returned with a box of clippers and handed them to Andrea. He shot me a "This is your last chance to run" look, but I couldn't move.
Andrea gleefully cleared an area and set up a chair in their kitchen, and then called me in. My stomach sank. Each plodding step towards the chair was heavier and heavier until I resigned myself to my fate and plopped down. Andrea plugged in the clippers, turned them on and off, and started to approach me. "Wait!" I eyeballed the clippers getting closer and closer to my head. "Aren't you going to use a guard on that?"
"Guard?" She rummages through the kit and finds a plastic guard. "You mean this thing?" She clamps the guard onto the clippers and resumes her approach. I can feel my heart pounding in my chest and I'm thinking this was not going to end well.
She made her first pass and an insane amount of hair fell to the floor. I tried to hide my panic as she uttered a fateful, "Hmm. That was a lot of hair." She continued to make pass after pass seeming to gain more confidence with each stroke. I felt large clumps of hair fall away, and my scalp got cooler and cooler as it was shorn of its protective cover. By now I'd just squinched my eyes shut and waited for it all to be over.
From experience, I knew a normal session in a barber's chair could last 20 minutes. When Andrea declared "All done!" after 5 minutes, I braced myself for the worst. She handed me a mirror. "What do you think?" I shuddered when I saw my reflection. I didn't recognize the face staring back at me. The facial features were familiar, but where I used to have an orderly mop of black hair that I was able to comb and part to the side, there was just an uneven patchwork thatch of stubble. At that moment, I had less hair than a USMC Parris Island recruit. I managed to hide my shock.
"Huh. Well. Wow. That works. Thanks, babe."
"You really think so?" She brushed me off and pulled me towards the living room. I looked back on the kitchen floor and was astounded by the crap ton of hair I was leaving behind. In the living room, she presented me to her dad. The old Air Force staff sergeant looked at me, then at her, then back to me. He simply pursed his lips, nodded, and then disappeared back behind his newspaper. I just caught a glint in his eye that was basically an unspoken, "Wow, son. You must really like my daughter." Well. I guess I did.
If only I'd decided to join a rock and roll hairband instead of the Navy. I can't imagine the boys in Bon Jovi ever having this problem.
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