Waiting for Gouda

For about a year, I have managed to avoid all hair-cutting and otherwise hair-related establishments, accomplished via an exacting regimen of alternating periods of shaving myself bald and wearing a baseball cap every waking moment. However, last Friday I finally succumbed recently to the overwhelming need for a trim. It’s almost that time of year when I must think ahead to the holidays, and whether or not I want to look like an Alien 3 penal colony inhabitant in the requisite snapshots. In all honesty, it doesn’t matter much to me one way or the other, but I figure that I might as well look nice for the concerned mothers.

It’s been about six weeks or so since the last time I hunched over in the bathroom while my Lovely Wife™ took the clippers to my head. Therefore, all of my hair was exactly the same length, maybe half an inch long, sticking straight out of each and every follicle. For those of you not intimately familiar with my skull, I must tell you that it is somewhat large and kind of round, which, while not too bad when there’s no hair, tends to look quite a bit like a tennis ball when there’s that amount of growth. A giant, brown, hairy tennis ball. This is not precisely the look that I strive for. I sometimes fear that some nasally fellow named Todd with pale legs and a white sweater tied about his neck might run up behind me, premium athletic footwear squeaking on the asphalt, and try to whack the crap out of me with his racquet. A man can’t live in that kind of fear day in and day out. The Mid-City Tennis Club is right around the corner from my house, for crying out loud.

I needed professional help.

Or at least, semi-professional help, because I figured that all I wanted was to trim down the sides and back and leave the top alone. Just a couple of swipes of the old clippers, a little blending, what have you. Something that could almost be done in the comfort of my own home. I say “almost” because I suddenly remember when I was recently trying to trim my sideburns and an unfortunate muscle spasm resulted in a nice bald stripe up the side of my head.

And thus, setting aside my inherent dislike for all hair-related places of business, the reasons for which I shall detail forthwith, I turned to SuperCuts.

I realize, of course, that SuperCuts is not what you would call a high-quality salon. There are plenty of gentlemen in this fair city, each of them far more cosmopolitan than myself, who would scoff at the notion of trusting their precious coifs to such a low-class stable of clippers-for-hire. But, being a country boy at heart, or at least a sort of suburb/strip mall boy at heart, I refuse to pay over $20.00 for a haircut. I’m only looking for the standard “man” cut at this point, short on the sides, leave the top. It’s a five-, or possibly, if there is some sort of salon emergency necessitating the acquisition of a backup comb or something, six- minute job. Even at the low, low, downtown Chicago prices, it works out to something like $150 an hour.

I find it hard to believe that these SuperCuts ladies are the A-Rods of the beauty industry, despite the assurance offered by their framed little certificates from the Illinois Board of Scissors, or whatever. Let’s be realistic: if you’re dream is to style hair for a living, and you find yourself working at a SuperCuts, well, something went wrong somewhere along the line. You’re in the minor leagues, I’m afraid. And yet I’m still paying you ten times more, minute for minute, than I make sitting here typing out stupid essays about hair. That just isn’t right.

Anyway, as soon as I walk in the door, off beautiful Michigan Avenue, I can tell that my second problem with hair-cutters will be a big factor today. The woman behind the counter asks me my name, and so I tell her. The woman who will be spending the next 300 seconds or so with my head walks up and the woman behind the counter (I began to think of her as Floberta, just for fun)… Floberta turns to my assigned cutter ( Svetlana) and says,

“Dan.”

At which point Svetlana says, “Dan?” It becomes instantly clear that Svetlana, who seems to periodically indulge in a sort of full-body twitch, as if she had recently been the subject of some caffeine tolerance study, has a thick accent of some sort. That perhaps English is like a second language to her.

“Dan,” says Floberta.

“Dan,” says Svetlana.

“Yes,” Floberta repeats. “Dan.”

“Dan,” Svetlana repeats.

I’m standing there at the counter, watching my name bounce back and forth between them like a… well, like a tennis ball, actually, thinking to myself that my name is neither interesting, nor difficult, nor really at all important in this particular situation. Eventually they stop tossing it about, Floberta goes back to carefully scrutinizing the eraser on her pencil, and Svetlana turns to me and says:

“Dan?”

I mumble something like, “Yeah” and it occurs to me, as a former soldier in the Customer Service trenches, that this whole bit about my name is probably some new customer service initiative sent down from some Aqua-Net drenched corporate office where someone read a consumer study wherein it was postulated that customers like to be addressed by name.

Whether or not this is the case, allow me to definitively state that I am NOT one of these customers. I don’t like it when they do it at the grocery store, when I’ve used their I-Know-What-You-Bought-Last-Summer club cards to get twenty cents off a box of fish sticks. I don’t like it when Amazon.com is telling me there’s free shipping on garden tools. And I really see no reason to particularly like it at the barber shop. You’re not an old family friend. I haven’t been coming in there for years. I’m making up names for you people in my head, for crying out loud.

Which brings me to my other major problem with hair-cutteries:

They seem to feel that a crucial element in the entire process is a steady stream of small talk.

Svetlana led me over to her chair, asking as we walked, “Dan, how are you? Is everything okay?”

I wasn’t sure whether it was just a syntax problem, or whether I actually looked like something was wrong. “I’m fine,” I said, carefully stepping over the clumps of fur that littered the ground, and sat in the seat she indicated.

After I explained what I wanted done with my head, she got started with the clippers. A moment later…

“So, Dan. How are things? Are you all right?”

Svetlana was starting to freak me out a little bit. I glanced in the mirror. I didn’t appear to be ill or otherwise distressed, so far as I could tell. It was clear that she simply wanted to fulfill the Hair-Care Employee’s Prime Directive: Chat. Chat at all costs. And she wasn’t very good at it. I couldn’t just sit there and say nothing. I was being forced to talk to this woman, whom I did not know, and who kept insinuating that something was wrong with me. What could I say?

Now, the weather actually happens to be one of my favorite subjects. I can talk about the weather with rather unusual passion, if the mood strikes me. I’d be willing to bet that I could discuss weather better than any one of a thousand random people pulled out of a hat. Well, it would have to be a really big hat, obviously. With a proportionally large claw-like device for grabbing people, I suppose. But anyway, I like talking about the weather. But not just because I’m being forced to come up with something to talk about. That just cheapens the whole idea of talking about the weather, if you ask me. Besides, nobody who talks about the weather just to have something to talk about really wants to hear about the jet stream and prevailing winds and low pressure centers and warm fronts, anyway. All they want is to say, “Well, you know, we need the rain.” But I was on the spot. I had to say something, so I said something to the effect of it being a nice day outside, trying to smile while weeping on the inside.

Svetlana said that she was sad the summer was over. At least, I think that was what she said. I definitely heard the words “sad” and “summer”, but at that point, I was just hoping that whatever it was, her grief wouldn’t manifest itself on my head. Forging ahead, I said that I preferred cooler weather. Oh, not Svetlana. She said she liked it hot, hot, hot, as she was from Brazil. I do believe that she actually said, “Hot hot hot.” It was all very… I don’t know… Harry Belafonte.

It occurred to me that Svetlana might not be the best fake-name for someone from Brazil, but it was too late. I wasn’t about to go back and change it now. Once you’ve been assigned a pseudonym within the confines of my mind, there is nothing you can do about it. You’re a Svetlana, or a Horace, or an AssFace, and that’s it.

Svetlana worked in silence for a while, as our intriguing repartee about meteorology having petered out. I felt bad, since it was clear that my failure to provide a more interesting subject matter was directly resulting in a failure of the Prime Directive. I imagined that a couple of frosty-haired women in dark pantsuits and J.Lo sunglasses would burst through the back door, chewing-gum snapping menacingly, and haul poor Svetlana into the break room, where they would shine a bright light into her eyes and mercilessly tease her bangs until she promised to be more chatty.

Fortunately, approximately forty-three seconds later, she was done. We played the Why Don’t You Look At the Back of Your Head? Game, as she held the little mirror back there, even though I knew and she knew that unless she was grossly incompetent, there was but one way the back of my head could possibly look. Shaved pretty much clean. And suppose I didn’t like it, anyway? What could be done? “Yeah, could you please go ahead and put a little more back on…?”

Svetlana dusted me off, removing only a fraction of the millions of tiny shorn hairs that clung to my scalp and neck. And then, the smock came off, and the weird little white strip that, as far as I can tell, is placed around your throat merely to slightly constrict blood flow to your head. I was done. I had survived five minutes in the chair with a twitchy Brazilian armed with all manner of sharp implements.

I went back over to Floberta to pay the king’s ransom. Since I never carry that much cash unless it’s in a locked briefcase chained to my wrist, I had to use my trusty debit card. Floberta runs it through the machine, and then asks in a practiced innocent voice, “Would you like me to add your tip to this?”

A tip! A tip! Dammit, Floberta! From your point of view, given how deeply engrossing you found the pencil eraser, it must have seemed like I walked past your desk, turned around immediately and handed you my card. And now you want a tip. I’m sorry, but I’ve had farts that have lasted longer than the time I’ve been in here, Floberta. Oh, what the hell, what’s a couple more dollars at this point? I guess my cat can go without food for a couple weeks. And then I was gone, vanished out the door, with no evidence that I was ever there, save for a small dusting of tiny hairs in a ring around the third chair down on the right