Not Too Much Off The Sides

November 26th, 2003 Posted in 2003

Whenever you move somewhere new, there’s a small but essential list of things you need to find before you can truly call the place home: 1) A decent take-out place that’ll deliver. 2.) A nearby gym you can purchase a membership to and then strenuously avoid for the rest of the year. 3.) Somebody to cut your hair. Having taken care of the first two, I went hunting for the third requirement when I first moved to Toronto some years ago.

Now, up until that point I’d frequented salon-type places, with thumping electronic dance beats and women who’d ask me with a straight face if I wanted botanical-enriched scented conditioners but wouldn’t think to offer me a shave with a straight razor. Clearly this was the sort of place without my needs in mind.

And yet I kept going to them because I went to university at the time. Among the strata of people I hung out with at the time, going to a plain old barber instead of a hair specialist was akin to… I don’t know, not having soft, uncalloused hands, or failing to own CDs by the Dave Matthews Band or something.

So when I arrived in Toronto, I was free to pick and choose according to my own tastes. Left to the guidance of my inner voice, I took stock of the haircare issues that were important to me and came to truths. First and foremost among those issues: I wanted to find a barber. Second: I wanted a barber who spoke no English at all. I wanted someone to cut my hair to whom the English language was entirely a mystery.

I’d like to pretend there’s some complex reason behind that, but in all honesty, it’s simply because I hate having to make small talk when I get my hair cut.

It’s not just that I always get lumped with some bimbo who traps me in one of those salon chairs and interrogates me like finding out where I work and where I travelled this year were state secrets. It’s simply that on some level I’m embarrassed to admit, I find it insulting that it’s somehow my duty to keep someone I’m paying to cut my hair entertained with small talk. You’d think that the $25 would be all I’d need to bring to keep up my end of the hair-cutting bargain; and yet on countless occasions I’ve found myself dutifully answering an endless list of banal questions.

Then, unfailingly, the worst happens: conversation flags and, almost imperceptibly, your hair stylist’s pace quickens. That’s right; now that you’ve run out of things to talk about, she’s apparently rushing you through so she can get someone with more captivating anecdotes in her chair.

The idea of this horrifies me. If the quality of the cuts I’m getting ultimately comes down to the banter I’m able to come up on the spot, I’m doomed to a lifetime of awkward hairstyles– the kind you know must be bad, because when you show up to work the next day nobody says “Oh, you got a haircut!”, since they know if they’ll be forced to follow it up with an “It’s nice!” they don’t mean.

I stumbled onto a Korean barbershop and a little light went off in my head: here was a place where I not only wouldn’t be required to make small talk—strict language barriers actually meant it would be futile to speak at all. I could finally fulfill my dream: sitting down and getting my hair cut in peace.

The downside of this approach is that it’s difficult to select a preferred barber if you don’t know any of their names, and it’s even harder to tell them what you actually want the top of your head to look like when you don’t know a word of Korean. Try standing in front of a mirror and expressing the concept “not too much off the sides” using only hand gestures and you’ll see what I mean.

Most likely the worst downside of all, though, is that it turns out barbers will attempt to make conversation anyway, even with a language barrier. It must be bred into them like reproductive traits into rabbits, or stupid into Baldwins. And it’s actually even worse than regular small talk, because first you have to decipher half-Korean/half-English to realize you’ve even been asked something about Mondays, local sports teams or the weather, and then you’ve still got the annoyance of having to repeat your non-answer three times.

“No, I don’t think I’ll travel this year.”

[confused stare; stops cutting hair entirely to devote all of his attention to comprehending you]

“No, don’t stop. I was just answering your question.”

[confused stare] “You want more off sides?”

“No, leave the sides. I was just—look, forget it.”

[confused stare] “You go travel year now?”

For some reason, though, I ended up sticking with the place anyway, and I’ve gone there for three years now. I’d like to think it had something to do with loyalty, but I think ultimately I’m just really fucking lazy.

Because I don’t understand them and am able to communicate ideas with greater accuracy to my parents’ dog, whenever I get a haircut it’s kind of a dice roll as to which barber and what kind of haircut I’ll be getting.

One barber, for instance, I’ve mentally dubbed Mr. Sides & Back. No matter how precise the directions you give him (”Take a lot off the top, thin it out, not too much off the sides, please, leave the sides,”), the man will grab clippers and attack the sides of your goddamn head with a ferocity that would alarm you if you weren’t prepared for it. If not poked or interrupted he’ll dwell trance-like at the sides of your head forever, taking off layer after layer until he hits bone. If you’re in the mood to argue, a fierce multilingual debate and frantic gesturing will eventually result in him grudgingly cutting some of the hairs on the top of your head. But even then he trims it bitterly, like the top of your head slept with his wife.

If this man had his way, I dont doubt that every one of us would look like those young skate punks with no hair on the sides and back of their head but a long and lustrous shock of hair up top. I would rather avoid this look as much as possible, and so try not to make eye contact if his chair’s free, eager to avoid the ineviatable clash of wills and pincer head attacks.

Today, luckily, he was occupied with another customer—happily destroying entire acres of hair from the sides of the poor man’s scalp, no doubt—as were all the barbers except one: the owner of the store.

I’ve had him cut my hair before without much problem. Today, though, it was unavoidably clear that this man ran the store first and cut hair second. About five minutes into my haircut the phone rang, and a Korean name was called from the back.

The owner put down his scissors and bowed meekly. “I take, I take,” he said, and scuttled off for ten minutes, leaving me to stare at myself in the mirror and come to terms with how stupid I look with half of my head missing hair.

When he returned he seemed to have a lot on his mind, and broke off with some of the other barbers with a calendar to discuss shifts. When he finally made it back to me, it was with a distracted, absent air. I was, naturally, horrified. He picked up his scissors, took a look at my head, trying to guesstimate where he’d left off, before diving back in haphazardly.

After a few minutes he seemed back in his personal barber groove, and so I relaxed. But then I heard, from the front door, “Pssst! PSSSSST!” I looked in the mirror to see an obviously drug-addicted young homeless kid motioning to the owner of the store. Would he come outside to talk? his gestures seemed to indicate.

This was starting to get a little ridiculous. While I had to give my barber points for having the courtesy to wait until after my haircut to stagger out into the street to conduct shady deals with homeless crack addicts, I was nonetheless beginning to worry that his concentration was lacking. My suspicions were confirmed five minutes later, when he once again stopped cutting my hair, leaving me looking butchered and half-cut, to berate Mr. Back and Sides. Once again my ignorance of Korean prevents me from accurately recording details of the fracas. I can only go with theories, and so present the idea that the owner noticed out of the corner of his eye that Mr. Back and Sides had entirely removed the sides of a customer’s head, and paused to chastise him.

Before he could finish the argument with Mr. Back and Sides, however, the phone rang again, and a voice from the back started calling his name again just as the drug addict appeared at the door to say “PSSSST!” again in a preposterous stage whisper. I half-expected him to start creeping across the barbershop on tip-toes, hands outstretched to steady himself.

If I was a weaker man, I would have broken into tears. As it was, I steeled myself with courage and put on a brave smile throughout what was to be an hour-long ordeal for a 20-minute haircut. I’ve illustrated that here:

There’s probably a lesson in all this, but I’m unwilling to poke through the mess of Korean words, drug addicts and Steve Harvey to find it, and I’ve gone on far too long anyway. So I leave the moral to you. All I can say is that it ended up being a great haircut.

Go figure.