Bad
Barber
By
Ned Vizzini
For
the last two months, I’ve been growing my hair long. I’ve tried this before and
it has always looked awful: my hair’s brown and straight and it grows out
instead of down, taking on its natural salad-bowl helmet shape. I always thought
that if I grew it enough, though—if I really committed to it—it would “come
down” into that long, flowing, rock star hair I always wanted. So I swore off
haircuts for eight weeks in a
That
was fine until I started eliciting cries of “Paul!” while walking past
Strawberry Fields in
“Hey
grandma, it’s Ned,” I said, phoning from work. “I need to get my hair
cut.”
My
grandmother, who for the record has terrific hair, had been raving for weeks
about her “stylist,” Pierre.
She told me that whenever I needed a “real” haircut, I should come to her and
she would set me up and pay for everything and make me
look like a million bucks.
“My
dear child!” she said. “I knew you’d call me eventually. What’s
wrong?”
“Well,
it’s not…wrong, exactly,” I lied. A couple days earlier a girl had asked if I
was going for That 70’s Show look.
“I’d just, you know, like a haircut, so I figured I’d take you up on your
offer.”
“Well,
“OK,
yeah, so, ah, where do I go?”
“Well,
he works at the John Barrett salon.”
Oh
man. I began to understand what I was getting into.
“John
Barrett is located on the ninth floor of the Bergdorf Goodman building; do you
know where that is?”
Now
I really knew what I was getting into. “Grandma, you’re sending me to like, a rich salon?”
“It’s,
well, yes—but there’s nothing wrong with a man going to a salon when he wants to
look his best, you see.
“Uh-huh.”
That got me thinking, actually. In a few weeks I was to fly out to
Yeah.
I
showed up at Bergdorf Goodman at
“Yeah,
I’m looking for the haircut place?” I asked.
“Well,
if you mean the John Barrett salon, that’s located across the street. In the women’s
area.”
“Uh
huh.”
I crossed the street and entered the Bergdorf Goodman women’s section. The
clientele were wearing fur coats, bent over display cases, with
boyfriends/husbands in tow, speaking German or French. Not only were these women
done—I mean,
you couldn’t improve on them if you tried—they were simply better than me.
Genetically, these were superior people and I didn’t belong in the same lobby as
them. I scuttled to the elevator with my cardboard box and my dry
cleaning.
“Nine?”
a woman asked as I got on. She was with her daughter; although she had her hair
colored red and her daughter’s was natural brown, you could tell. We were the
only people in the elevator.
“Yeah,
nine,” I said. “Nine’s the salon, right?”
“Right.”
She pressed the button, and as she moved to do it, I got a good look at the
daughter, who was standing in a corner staring at the ceiling. She was scary
beautiful, the kind of girl who really is “lily-white”, wearing a black skirt
with a slit in it. We had furtive eye contact as the elevator
ascended.
“Do
you want one, mom?” the girl asked at one point, opening her purse and offering
her mother a cookie.
“Honey,
you know I’m not capable of dealing with chocolate chips right
now.”
Ding.
Ninth floor. I walked off of the elevator into a Vidal
Sasoon ad.
The
John Barrett salon is in the penthouse of the Bergdorf Goodman building; giant
windows let in tons of light and all around, women walk purposefully, wrapped up
in towels and robes, with goo in their hair. I noticed pretty quickly that I was
the only guy in the place, except for male employees. The floors were beautiful
hardwood; the walls were perfect white. I approached a groomed Asian man near
the cash registers.
“Excuse
me, I have an appointment with
“Ooh,
yes, Ned, I’m sorry, I have to tell you,” he said, leaning in and bringing his
voice down. “
“OK,
fine.” What the
hell.
“Well,
then, wonderful, go check your things and put on your robe.” The Asian guy
directed me to coat check, where they reluctantly took all my crap and threw a
dark brown robe at me. I took it to a changing room and put it on over my
clothes. There was a sign in the room that bothered me:
“Color
clients: Please remove sweaters, blouses and the like before putting on your
robe. These garments are easily stained during the color service and the salon
can not be responsible for any damages.”
“Color
service”? Did that mean they were going to wash my clothes while they did my
hair? There was a sort of laundry bin in the changing room, with robes in it—was
I supposed to throw my clothes in there? Was I supposed to wear the robe without
clothes under it? I started laughing, which prompted a knock from one of John
Barrett’s many attendants—“Is everything OK in there?”
“Yeah,”
I chucked. Then I touched my penis just because I thought it was funny in a
salon.
I
went to get shampooed. That took place in a little out-of-the-way room, badly
lit, where the woman from the elevator and her daughter were being serviced by
My
attendant stopped washing my hair. “You are done,” she deadpanned, putting a
towel on my head. “My name is Maria.”
What
did that mean? Was I supposed to tip her? I walked out of the shampoo room and
met Arnold, my stylist. He was small and bald; he talked in
spurts.
“Wow,”
he chirped, looking at me. “Wow wow wow. Where do we begin? This really needs major work. I’m
going to shorten it up, but not too short, and then sculpt the back—it’s very
thick, you know. Is there a special occasion?”
“I’m
going to promote my book,” I said.
I
was not concentrated on it either, though; I was distracted by the legs of the
elevator woman’s daughter, who sat a few seats to my left. I kept looking over
at her and then looking in the other direction to compensate, as if I were just
some weirdo who liked looking around. Engaged in this activity, I didn’t notice
the paltry amount of hair
You
know how when you get a bad haircut, you think—up until the very end—that it
might turn out well? You hope that with a flick of the scissors, it’ll somehow
clear up; you’ll see what the barber was going for? And then you hear that bomb:
“You’re done.” Now there’s no way; it’s final; there’s nothing you can do;
you’ve got to go around looking like this for at least two
weeks.
My
hair was really awful. It wasn’t like there was some aesthetic to it I didn’t
understand: it was uneven, technically inept. It looked like I had done it
myself; there were patches of oddness and asymmetry all over the place.
“You’re
a handsome young man,” she said. “But you should really know better than to get
your hair cut by that stylist.” Then a whisper: “I think he’s a drug
addict.”
A
month later I saw