Why It's Much Harder To Find A Barber Than You Might Think
I have a talent that occasionally rises to the level of genius for finding drunk barbers.
This is not a gift that I'm particularly happy about - I'd much rather have the ability to find
a Swedish masseuse or a competent transmission mechanic rather than someone who
leaves my hair looking like an ill-advised science experiment gone horribly awry - but there
you go; you take your abilities where you find them.
I first discovered this ability several years ago, about the time I started actually using a
barber. Up until that time, I'd always gone to various salons - generally the one's with the
most attractive stylists. Eventually however, I was forced to face the fact that there is
nothing particularly special about my hair. Some men have hair that justifies a $25 haircut;
others don't. I don't.
It was shortly after I came to grips with this realization that I discovered Fred's Barbershop.
The head barber there - Fred himself - had been cutting hair for a thousand years or so and
was a real no-nonsense kind of guy. You came into his shop, sat for a while reading very
old magazines, then got into the chair and got your haircut, which was usually excellent.
Fred was grumpy and terse - any conversation was generally limited to "Whatdayawant?"
or an occasional rant about property taxes or the Red Sox. That was OK - that was part of
the whole experience.
One of the puzzling things about Fred's business however, was that his shop was always
packed in the mid-morning, but otherwise empty. If you went in for a haircut between 9
and 11 in the morning, you'd have to wait in line for half an hour or more, but before or
after that period, the place was like Siberia. This was always a bit of a mystery to me until
one afternoon when, by sheer chance, I went in for a cut in the mid-afternoon.
It turns out that Fred was a pretty heavy drinker. His long-time, regular customers had
apparently learned through long and bitter experience that if they went in for their haircuts
too early in the morning, Fred still had the shakes. If they went in in the afternoon, he was
half in the bag and they would be in trouble. If they timed their visit just right however,
they'd get a great haircut.
On the day I learned this, Fred was watching a gameshow on the tv in the corner of his
shop. As I got into the chair and Fred tucked the barber's bib around my neck, the
contestant on the show was solving a crossword puzzle. The clue was an 8-letter word
beginning with C - "Surfers Don't Stand On This".
"Surfboard!" Fred shouted, his bourbon fumes adding to my fear of the shears that were
clipping away, more-or-less at random around my left ear.
"Er.. No, actually," I pointed out. "It begins with C and surfer's don't stand on it."
"Surfboard!" Fred shouted again. Since he had unaccountably decided to shave the back
of my neck with a straight-razor halfway through the haircut, I decided not to argue the
point.
The resulting haircut was about as disastrous as you'd expect. From the way I was gaping
in horror and disbelief at my image in the mirror, Fred could tell that I didn't like the
haircut I'd just gotten. His face fell and he looked so sad that I ended up tipping him to
show that everything was all right - though it patently wasn't. Instead of throwing him to
the ground and kicking him to death on the spot for making me look like an escapee from a
Pakistani mental institution, I ended up paying him extra for the job.
This is typical of my relationship with some barbers. I have managed to find drunk or even
actively insane barbers in every town and city I've ever lived in. Mind you, I've also gotten
some fantastic haircuts - Fred gave me one of the best cuts of my life on a day when he
was on the top of his game. But understandably, it was with some trepidation that I went
looking for a new barber recently. I have just moved to a small town in the Lebanon-
Hanover area and wanted to find a new barber.
This is extremely tricky. Barbers are not as common as they used to be. Every small town
or city neighborhood used to have at least one barbershop that you could walk into off the
street and get a decent haircut. It would usually take several visits before you'd be accepted
as a regular, but once you'd passed inspection, you could establish a relationship with your
new barber. That's not the case anymore - small barbershops have been quietly
disappearing for the past 20 years and are now something of a rarity. A full afternoon of
searching through five towns on either side of the Connecticut River turned up exactly two
barbershops - both of which were closed. According to the licensing authorities of New
Hampshire and Vermont, there are four barbershops in Lebanon and Hanover and there
are 195 licensed barbers in the state of Vermont - some of whom have to be in the Valley, so it seems as if I should have been able to
find somebody open on a Monday afternoon.
Good luck, says Lynda Eliott, an Administrative Supervisor with New Hampshire's Board
of Barbering, Cosmetology and Ethesthics. "There are definitely fewer `straight'
barbershops than there used to be," she says. "I think a lot of them have gone to full-
service salons. A lot of men have gone over to being styled."
This is sad - very sad.
There is some reason for slight optimism however, according to Nancy Morin, Eliot's
counter-part at Vermont's Office of Professional Regulation. "There are still people here
and there going into barbering," she says. "I've had two or three people lately tell me, `I'm
just opening a shop to do barbering - nothing else'." In addition, Morin points out that
although many barbers are evolving into stylists, the opposite is true as well - many stylists
are moving from more elaborate hair styling into clipper-based barbering. "A lot of
cosmetologists have turned to plain haircuts over the past few years," she says, "because of
`hand issues' like carpel-tunnel syndrome and damage from harsh chemicals."
So there is hope. In the meantime, my search goes on. Here is a list of my personal rules-
of-thumb for finding a good barber. They are largely broad generalities, but have been
served me well and been painfully learned over the course of years and dozens of bad
haircuts.
1) A good barbershop should be located in a downtown neighborhood where it is easily
accessible to food traffic. A good shop would languish in a strip-mall on the edge of town.
It should also have striped barber's pole. Call me a traditionalist, but I think it's a sign of a
barber that cares about details.
2) The better the barber, the worse his own personal haircut is. I don't know why this is,
but the very best barbers I've ever gotten a haircut from all looked like they were wearing
really bad toupees or had just finished a wilderness survival course.
3) Never - and this can't be emphasized enough - never trust
a barbershop that is associated in any way with a tanning salon.
4) I would be suspicious of any barber who shares a name with a character on Beverly Hills 90210. I suppose there is no logical reason why a
Jason, Dillon or a Brandon couldn't be a decent barber, but I personally wouldn't trust
them.
5) On the other hand, you can trust a barber who shares a
name with a muppet from Sesame Street. Bert, Ernie, Oscar,
Elmo, Tully - even Grover - these are the names of barbers!
