A Monthly Publication

Matters tonsorial in the Land of the Free

By Clive Jones

One of the more intimidating aspects of living in a new place is finding the right people to do all that necessary highly-personal body-maintenance stuff.

We found a good dentist easily enough, and a doctor after a bit of a hunt round.  It was the haircutting that gave me problems. Back home, some years ago, I had found someone who did my hair just as I liked it (at The Studio in KL, since you ask), and I’d stuck with them ‘til the eve of parting day.  

It hadn’t occurred to me before how men’s haircuts mirror a country’s culture.  America is a bellicose country, very pro-military and with God on its side, perhaps not dissimilar to Britain before 1 July 1916. Consequently the haircuts are military too.  My hair looking distinctly un-military, and being reluctant to just blindly walk into a barber’s shop, I sought the advice of men I had met.  Most, it seemed, had their hair cut by a wife or sister.  Someone whose hair looked OK, if a little old-fashioned, mentioned a barber’s a short distance away. I went in, encountered a man of mature years, told him how I like it (fairly short on top, not too close at the back and sides and watch out for the double crown). He set to and produced a cut known c.1955 as a flat-top. It looked a little strange to me, but over the next few days I discovered that it was not the only flat-top in town – and in a week or so it looked a little less ridiculous and after two weeks it looked not at all bad. Nice cut, wrong style.

Next time, I went back to the same place.  This time there was another barber who looked about eighty.  Not being ageist, I took a seat in his chair.  Told him how I’d like it.  Mentioned that the last cut had been at these premises, etc. He seemed responsive.

There are moments in life when you know you’ve made a bad choice and it’s too late to turn back. One of those moments happened to me as the electric clippers sailed up the back of my head way too high.  Can’t stop now – the hair was off.  Nothing for it but the white-knuckle ride to the end, watching a new me appear in the mirror like the unravelling of a hideous joke.

I thought he might be having a laugh as he brushed a part in one side, held down with what we used to call ‘scent’, having left the hair long on top.  I looked like myself as a boy, slicked up for church in my parent’s church-going years. ‘There,’ he exclaimed with evident satisfaction, ‘You look like a bank president!’  It seemed ungrateful to point out that in November 2008 looking like a bank president was liable to get you gunned down in the street. I expected him at any moment to give a short laugh, run a comb through and then start on shortening the top in accordance with our little agreement.  But no!  Off came the sheet, a quick brush of the shoulders and I was done.

Does one remain seated and ask for more off the top? Or should I cut my losses and leave vowing never to return?   More cutting by this old geezer might well result in further black humour at my expense.  I left.

Since that time there has been Liz, who did a nice enough job, and then my present favourite, an Italian-American who looks younger than his seventy years, listens to my requests and can do more than a flat-top or a bank president.  Once he understood that a military look was not my preferred option we got on famously.  At my last visit we talked, like most of America right now, about the proposed health plan that President Obama is committed to introducing, thereby bringing the US in line with every other ‘developed’ country.  In a recent speech to Congress, televised nationally, Obama emphasised that the new proposals would not affect anyone presently covered by health insurance – except to prevent the insurers jacking up the premiums if they had to make a claim.  The objective was to bring in the 45 million Americans who have no health insurance, and this is to be done without increasing taxes but by having a not-for-profit insurance pool. My barber told me that many of his friends were getting the bus to Washington to protest this scandal.  Had he heard Obama’s speech?  No.  But he’d been told by the right-wing media that if the new proposals went through, it would drive up his taxes.  Universal health coverage, claims the media, must be opposed because it was a socialistic plot symptomatic of ‘big government’.

This is a widely-held if erroneous opinion in this country of eighty-year-old barbers, shop assistants, food-service persons and others clinging desperately to their jobs because should they retire they would lose their health insurance coverage.