|
|
by
bud simpson |
March
8, 2006 |
The Barber
Rebellion
Days gone of the barber pundits, a place where
a man was a man
Back
in 1971, you would never have known that the barber shop
was a place I liked to go. |
When I was a kid way back in the 50s, I got my hair cut on Saturdays
at the neighborhood barber shop. At the corner of Ninth and
Spruce was a triangular island occupied by Fredman’s Drug
Store at the apex, the Shoe Repair shop, and on the Northwest
corner, facing Ninth, was Downey Brothers’ Barber Shop.
The Downey Brothers held court in a room with three white porcelain
and red leather Koken barber chairs with a gearshift handle
on one side and a razor strop on the other. The room-width mirror
behind the chairs reflected a few bowling trophies and the world
outside the corner windows. The air was thick with the smells
of hair tonic and clipper oil, to say nothing of the dense pall
of cigarette smoke. In the summer, the air conditioner kept
the little shop at bone-chilling, meat locker temperatures.
It was so cold your hair stood on end, making it easier, I suppose,
to lop it off.
Big Rex Downey always cut my hair. He had a no-nonsense demeanor
about him – a stocky man with strong hands and a wry smile.
He was the kind of man who drank beer from the bottle and could
hurl a string of expletives when needed for emphasis. He told
jokes to the regulars that I laughed at even though I really
didn’t understand the concepts involved until many years
had passed. If my mom had heard them, big ol’ Rex would
have gotten a bar of Dial soap shoved in his mouth for sure.
When
you went to Downey Brothers’ you were automatically assigned
an official nickname, each according to what Rex Downey thought
you looked like: Tommy Jackson was “Cowboy,” Steve
Fairhurst was “Shortstop,” and I was “The
Professor” – though it was pronounced “Perfessor.”
These tags were like federal judicial appointments, pronounced
from on high, non-negotiable, non-exchangeable and set in stone
for life. There were no girls here. Moms didn’t bring
their sons in for haircuts, dads did. Your mom could drop you
off, but no closer than the shoe repair store on Spruce. Sisters
need not apply. It was the last bastion of the XY chromosome
club, the pinnacle of male separatism in a time before anyone
was liberated from anything.
A barber shop was one of the few places that a kid growing up
in the 50s was treated like anything more than a virus. You
got to sit in the barber chair – although until you had
reached a certain stature, you had to sit on top of a booster
board that brought your shaggy head up to a workable height
– you got the full treatment, scissors, clippers and the
best part, a warm lather straight-razor shave around your ears
and the nape of your neck, followed by a hot towel and a quick
fan of talc. If you were inclined to shorter styles, you got
your leading edge treated to the Butch Wax Stand Up treatment.
If your hair was longer, Vitalis, Lucky Tiger or Red Rose was
worked into your hair and combed smooth. Next!
When Rex shoved you out of that chair, you looked better, smelled
better and somehow knew that even if all else in the world was
going into the sewer, your hair looked good. You could run faster,
jump higher, play harder. No, wait, that was Red Ball Jets shoes,
but the feeling was the same.
The real function of barber shops though, was as a focal point
for solving all the world’s knotty problems quickly and
surely. The radio waves back then weren’t rife with pundits
and bombastic know-it-alls, but barbers knew, somehow, how to
fix everything. If there was a knowledge gap behind the chairs,
the slack was taken up by the brain trust in waiting. Men gathered
there, freed of the editorial restrictions of Holy Matrimony,
to speak their minds, shoot the breeze and get caught up on
what others were thinking and doing. Parenthetically, the barber
shop was also a reading room where men could read things they
couldn’t read at home. Kids were kept away from the assortment
of “special” magazines in the corner – I found
out later that these magazines were special because they contained
images of women who lay in languid, suggestive poses and in
various stages of undress on the skins of exotic and quite dead
mammals.
My own hormones began to bubble and percolate about the same
time that the British Invasion landed on Ed Sullivan’s
New York stage. My conservative Princeton cut gave way to a
moppish cross between what I thought a surfer looked like and
the Mods of Carnaby Street. My dad was appalled, and was sure
I had become a Communist. By the late 60s, I was in full-blown
teen rebellion and had many more important things to think about
than the state of my hair. Like cars. And girls.
Fast forward to the early 70s – I had been long away from
the Downey Brothers. Political activism and a general attitude
of rebellion had made my hair long, unruly and hard to deal
with or even look at. My mom, ever the broker of new ideas,
suggested I get my hair “styled.” In the spirit
of appeasement and against my better judgment, I made an appointment
with a stylist at the Board of Trade Building, Corky Badami.
Corky was no mere barber, this guy was an artist, a Michelangelo
with clippers. His was no barber shop, it was a deluxe tonsorial
salon. When I walked in, beflowered and looking like a refugee
from Haight-Ashbury, Corky blanched. I again expressed my sincerity
about wanted to again look “human,” and Corky strapped
me in his leather lounge chair, anesthetized me and had at it.
In the Great Celestial Book of Alpha Primo Haircuts, Corky Badami
is listed as having undertaken a miracle transformation in Kansas
City, Mo. I had been shorn, shaved, layered and feathered; it
was the NuWay Double Dip Super Cheeseburger of all haircuts.
I had been reborn. Corky told me how to take care of my hair,
and fully expected me to follow up on my new way of life. My
aura was transcendent. I went immediately to Sears and bought
a new shirt. I considered the priesthood.
But something was missing from the experience. My hair looked
good – no, it looked GREAT. But no one had mentioned Nixon
or McGovern, VietNam, the post-Athletics absence of baseball
in Kansas City or the reason for the Great Unbridgeable Indecipherable
Chasm between women and men. There weren’t any girlie
magazines or bowling trophies. The air was clean, temperate
and smoke-free. It was just about hair. It was about style over
substance.
I learned you get different things from different people, even
though the service they perform is basically the same –
Corky showed me that presentation is everything. Rex made me
realize that sometimes, a barbershop is better than a thesis
and that you can’t make an appointment to belong to a
place in time. Every man my age has barber stories, barber memories
and the suspicion that we might have let something important
get away from us.
Thus sayeth The Professor.
Bud
Simpson is a member of the infamous Northeast High School Class
of 1968 and a professional photographer. Learn more at www.budzilla.com.
