I associate my earliest visits to the barber with lollipops, but also with a strange armchair that went up and down with a touch of the barber’s foot, flashing scissors, an alien striped cloth pinned too tightly around my neck, and a litter of multi-colored hair trimmings on the white tile floor.

These impressions may be the spurious product of a creative memory but I don’t think so. For certain my mother was my partner in these earliest of tonsorial adventures. I can remember her waiting for the deed to be done, watching anxiously as my shorn curls drifted to the floor.

I hated getting my hair cut then as much then as I do now, but at least I didn’t have to pay for it. Cursory research indicates that the typical fee for a boy’s haircut in Jersey City, circa 1943, was about fifty cents. It didn’t cost much to get your hair cut in 1943 and neither did anything else. A postage stamp was three cents. The average cost of a car was $1,100, a house $8,000. And fifty cents would buy three gallons of gasoline, if you had enough wartime rationing stamps.

I do remember exactly what it cost to get my unruly locks trimmed by John the Barber, my next stop along the hair-cutting highway. The price was one dollar, plus a quarter tip, appropriate baksheesh according to my father. John the Barber operated his one-man shop in the basement of the Fairmount Hotel, a mysterious establishment several blocks from the house where I grew up. Nothing ever seemed to happen at the Fairmount and about the only thing astir in it was John the Barber.

I was probably about eight when John the Barber and I began our long association. Although I continued to hate getting my hair cut, I loved going to John the Barber’s because I was allowed to go on my own and that let me pretend I was a grownup. Like all barbershops of that time, John’s was a man’s world, full of exotic fragrances and men’s talk, and, not least, men’s magazines. I was always happy when I had to wait my turn because that gave me some time with the magazines.

John the Barber was a tall, thin man who had been in the Italian Army during World War I and had been wounded in the legs by machine-gun fire. I knew this because every so often John would pull up his trouser legs and show me his scars. They were impressive.

John kept many combs standing on end in a glass of blue liquid, one of which he would select to use in clicking, snipping concert with his flying scissors. He took pains, and at the end he would circle the chair, studying my head as if it were a work of art, suddenly darting in for a snip here and a snip there. Satisfied at last, he would rub something called Pinaud’s Lilac Vegetal into my head with great vigor, and finish it all off with a soft whisk broom in a cloud of talcum powder. Now for the dollar plus tip (“Thanch you,” John would say), and I would take my leave, itching all the way down my back, but smelling like a springtime garden, an eight-year-old man about town.

In all the intervening years many different hands in many strange places have had a go at my hair with some very peculiar results. In the army a haircut took about five minutes and, at a cost of next to nothing, still looked like a bad deal. For a while in New York I got my hair trimmed by the same barber who cut Henry Fonda’s hair. Yet whenever I saw Henry’s picture somewhere I noticed that his hair looked better than mine. A lot better.

After barbers stopped being barbers and became ‘hair stylists’ things went downhill fast. Now it was all about hair glop, without which, said the barbers-turned-stylists, no man could be well groomed. This finally drove me to the Astor Barber Shop, near NYU, where in ten minutes for ten bucks you could get your hair cut by any of a hundred barbers, none of whom spoke English. No frills, no nonsense, no glop.

Now a woman cuts my hair, probably better than anyone ever has, better even than John the Barber. But it’s not the same. It costs a whole lot more than a dollar plus tip and there’s no Pinaud’s Lilac Vegetal. Most of the other customers are women and instead of men’s magazines they have cookies! Yes, John, cookies. What have we come to?

Posted by Paul Duffy at April 02, 2009 09:58 PM

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