Rant #2,868: Bad Haircut

After my son’s work yesterday, he and I went to get a haircut.
 
Even a guy like me—with little hair on his head—needs to get a haircut about once every month, because if I don’t, my hair grows down my neck and doesn’t look good.
 
My son still has plenty of hair on his head, and at age 26, he needs to get a haircut to look good at work and doing whatever he is doing.

Me, I am beyond such needs.
 
We go to a local place that has several barbers working at once. It is simply cheaper and easier for us to go there, and I have been going to this barber for about the past 30 years or so, and my son has gone there nearly his entire life.
 
We always get a good haircut there, and we are generally in and out in about 10 minutes or so.
 
So we walk in the place, tell the woman at the front desk that we need haircuts and will take anyone, and we are directed to two open chairs, and proceed to get our haircuts.
 
Everything is going fine with me, and I assume that everything is going fine with my son, and then my barber does something that made me flash back to another time and place related to me getting my hair cut.
 
He took my head with his entire hand and wrenched it back, so I guess he could get a better cut of my hair.
 
It didn’t hurt at all, and I guess my head simply wasn’t in the right place for his scissors.
 
But in the mini-moment that it took to wrench my head back, my entire life haircutting experience literally flashed before my eyes …
 
When I was born—and this is so hard for me to believe but my mother still tells me it is true—I was born with a full head of hair—and not just a full head of hair, but enough hair for three people.
 
I had so much hair on my head that I must have looked like Tiny Tim did way back when when he sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.”
 
Evidently soon after I was born, I needed to get my hair cut, and probably from that moment on, I have hated to get my hair cut.
 
So in this mini-moment, I flashed back not on the first haircut I got, but on what I could remember—
 
I could remember that my mother had to take me to a special barber on Main Street in Flushing, Queens, because I could not sit still for a haircut.
 
The barbers put me in a variety of devices—like an airplane and a saddle of a horse—which went over the barber’s chair and which had a strap in it to keep me down while I probably jumped around trying to get out of this contraption.
 
I am sure that whatever haircut I got under those circumstances was good enough, and that the barbers were happy to see me go. They earned their keep that day, dealing with the lunatic that I must have been.
 
As I got older, I outgrew those types of gizmos, but I still hated to get a haircut--but at least I spared my mother the trouble, because I used to go to get a haircut myself.

So in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, I would go to the neighborhood barber, and somehow sit through a haircut.
 
I remember that my hairline was kind of weird, even from the age of seven to 14 years of age, and the barbers there would marvel at where my hair was growing on my head, even calling other barbers over to view it.
 
But I also remember one barber, by the name of Hyman, who had a huge hand and would wrench your head back and forth as to his need to cut your hair.
 
Hyman did not have a soft touch, and I cannot tell you how many times he palmed my head like a Harlem Globetrotter palms a basketball.
 
And yes, it did hurt a bit.

I found out that it wasn't just me that he was head-palming with--one of my friends told me that he got the same treatment from Hyman--which I guess made me feel better but still did not alleviate the pain, both mental and physical, that I received from this barber.
 
As I got older, I was able to take haircuts better, probably because my time of having substantial hair on my head was waning, so there was less to cut, so less to agonize over.
 
Yesterday, it all came out to me in that mini-second when this barber wrenched my head back, things I had not thought about in eons.
 
My son had no such problems, and we were out and about in around 10 minutes or so.
 
Funny, I have been getting haircuts about once a month or once every five weeks or so since I can remember.
 
Even during my longer-hair years of the early 1970s, I would go in for trims about once a month, so if you work it out, over my nearly 65 years of life, I have probably gotten one haircuts every four or five weeks, equaling out to about 750 to 800 haircuts over my lifetime, give or take a few.
 
I have always hated to get my hair cut, and I always will … It is just one of those things that I hate to do, like eating liver or something like that.
 
But I just hate the exercise, hate the chore that this has been for me during my entire life, but it is something that I just have to do, because I cannot do it myself.
 
If this is the worst torture I can ever know, I guess I am doing fine, but at times, I have to tell you, I just wish I was completely bald and didn’t have to go through this each and every month.
 
On the other hand, I also wish that I had a full head of hair that a barber could really work on the right way.
 
I guess you can’t have it both ways, so bald I will be, and I just have to live with the monthly torture. 

Hair today, gone tomorrow is my credo, and it has gotten me through the monthly haircutting experience pretty well, I guess.