I do not consider myself to be a thrifty person. I regularly and eagerly pay significant premiums for better versions of things: coffee, poultry, bourbon, electronics, outerwear, soap. Despite frequent self-consciousness about the appearance of my hair, I do not extend this philosophy to haircuts, for which I cannot recall ever having paid more than $15 + tip.
In middle school, I established a longstanding Hair Person at a place within walking distance of my parents' house. His name was Eddie, an affable Hispanic gentleman adept at grooming others but himself sporting an unkempt bundle of straight black hair extending to the middle of his back, making him an extreme outlier on the scatter plot of professional skill vs. personal application of same, like if the P90X guy was 70 pounds overweight. He was the only "stylist" with no female clients in a shop otherwise overwhelmingly reminiscent of a ladies' salon, operating a one-chair barbershop amongst the elderly perm-seeking women of midweek and bridal parties on Saturday mornings. Our arrangement was the sort where I could be squeezed in between other appointments and the cutting began immediately as I sat down, with questions about how my parents were doing instead of how I would like my hair cut, always for an inflation-independent $15 that I rounded up to $20. I even returned sporadically on trips home during college, and then reestablished regular visits after moving back to Texas, despite then living twenty minutes away.
I eventually moved across the country and then further back across it the other way, and in turn moved on from Eddie. He has been replaced with a rotating cast of creepy strangers and inept amateurs, my selection of which is no doubt influenced by a continued adherence to the self-imposed fee cap. I have reasons for doing this. There is the straightforward cost analysis - my standard coiffure is short (although long enough to screw up) and requires length maintenance at four- to six-week intervals, such that the savings vs. a $40 cut comfortably covers, say, a Netflix subscription. There is my stubborn but possibly wrong belief that the degree of difficulty for the result that I am seeking does not necessitate the expertise of an advanced-level technician. There is my acknowledged track record as both willing part-time profligate and undisciplined consumer, such that my only real hope for not leaping into the luxury world of extravagant bi-quarterly grooming sessions is a commitment to convincing myself that such a world does not exist. And sadly, there is the growing evidence that I may in fact perversely enjoy suffering through substandard service just so that I can go home and complain about it.
I have tried several places over the last 4 1/2 years, all of which are effectively the same:
Check-In and Waiting
I forgo making reservations with a particular person, or even calling ahead, as the place either closes at 6:00 PM such that it is completely unforeseeable whether or not I will be able to make it there on a given day, or it suffers such staggering regular employee turnover that any potential new Hair Person from whom I may have received adequate previous service and with whom I might be attempting to schedule an appointment probably no longer works there.
Although the wait rarely exceeds ten minutes, something uncomfortable usually happens. Two unattended boys scurry to the cutting floor to pick up handfuls of strangers' hair clippings for use as ammunition in a totally gross hair fight, in which I am collaterally inconvenienced but in a way that could have been much worse. A regular patron loudly asks the owner why the Italian magazines with the pictures of naked women got moved from the lobby to his office; "Bah, some parent complained," he says, with at least one parent/child customer tandem in earshot. Or the place is arranged with a row of waiting chairs parallel to the row of barber chairs at a separation of maybe twelve feet, with everybody facing everybody else, and I end up accidentally making awkward eye contact with like six different people with wet hair. Clearly, my best option is to claim the most isolated empty seat and just stare intently at my phone until my name is called.
Sitting and Consultation
I am summoned to a chair by a cutter (I contend that "stylists" cannot be had for this price). "How are you today?" she has been told to ask; I am fine. If I am wearing a collared shirt, the collar is clumsily rolled and tucked down into and under itself for neck access, such that I appear to be wearing some variety of tunic. I am outfitted with the standard giant nylon bib.
"How would you like your hair cut?" the cutter asks, as if I am at all qualified to answer this question using the quantitative terms necessary to outline a legitimate game plan. I say something like "Oh, just a trim all the way around," which is so horribly vague yet must be what everybody says. I continue with a series of ambiguous hand gestures while mumbling keywords, typically preceded with "maybe" and ending with an implied question mark, until the cutter nods impatiently and reaches for an implement.
I silently lament that we have not yet achieved the technology to just scan my head immediately after a satisfactory cut and convert the data into instructions for future cuts by some kind of robot barber, although the shop where I currently go has taken a first step toward this in allowing cutters to append my electronic customer file with a description of the haircut they just finished. Unfortunately, it appears that this has only been done once in my file, and now every time I sit down, the cutter is holding a cookie-fortune-sized slip of paper that reads "CHRIS K. - 1/2 INCH OFF ALL AROUND", which definitely sounds like something I would say but seems overly dependent on initial conditions.
The cutter approaches. "Are you enjoying the weather?" she asks; I am not.
Cut
The experience of the trim itself is not noteworthy; there is snipping and buzzing and the cutter's frequent disconcerting confused expressions in the mirror. It lasts no more than fifteen minutes, punctuated with sporadic questions about where I work and how long I have lived here.
It turns out that the most entertaining recurring quirk of not maintaining a consistent Hair Person is not my inept explanations of what I want them to do or the uneasy conversation; it is the predictable inter-cutter disparagement that ensues when the current cutter gets started and sees what a poor job the last one did. "Can I ask you where you got your hair cut last time?" they always ask. "Here," I say (if I did), to which they uniformly reply, "Well, I hope it wasn't me - this is really uneven." This exact interaction has happened at least three times.
She finishes and positions a hand-held mirror directly behind my head and exactly parallel with the big mirror, awaiting feedback while plainly exhibiting the failings of her high school geometry teacher. But that's not important, because I am unable to assess the quality of the job even in general terms until I can look more closely at home - it is shorter, and you fixed whatever the hell it was that last chick did, so at the moment, it looks better. But it is probably still really uneven.
Post-Cut
I interpret the mirror ceremony as the formal conclusion of our time together and await only removal of the smock. This usually happens directly, but once every five or six haircuts, just when I get complacent, I am ambushed with one of the following unpleasant surprise endings:
- Surprise Assault with Undesired Styling Product: The least jarring and least intrusive. It catches me off-guard but I am about to go home and wash my hair anyway.
- Surprise Straight Razor Neck Shave: I suppose the shave itself is not a surprise since I know it's coming once I get past the shock of the zero-warning hot foam slathering to my cervical vertebrae. Truthfully, I found this to be pleasant upon return visits when it was no longer a sneak attack.
- Surprise Side Burn Truncation: The cutter grabs the trimmer one more time and slowly moves in to address what I assume is a stray hair near my ear before abruptly squaring off an edge and leaving an unfortunate gap between the end of my head hair and the beginning of my beard.
- Surprise Comprehensive Above-the-Armpits Massage: Not acceptable, especially from this Cambodian man in a denim shirt that smells so strongly of cigarettes. This only happened once and I didn't know what was going on until it would have been more awkward to say something, and then all of the sudden he's encircling my temples and then moving down behind my ears and onto the base of my neck and JUST EXACTLY WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE SIR. I just might have to file some sort of formal complaint, and I am definitely still only paying you fifteen dollars.
"You got a haircut," Kristen notices. "It looks...pretty good," she says, sometimes sincerely, sometimes just politely. She sighs. We both sigh. But in a week it will have filled in a bit and I will have figured out this month's way to arrange it into something acceptable, and Netflix is pretty sweet, so I will probably go back.
Summary
Pros:
- Upwards of 85% of individual hairs measurably shorter than before
- Good natural light and decent cell phone service in waiting area
- Zero head wounds sustained
- Fifteen dollars
- Constant unease
- Have to listen to story about cutter's car trouble, including route numbers, transfer locations, and schedule information for bus taken to work instead
- Excessive unintended asymmetry
Overall Score: 187
All reviews utilize their own unique scoring scale, each with no reference datum and extending infinitely in both directions.
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