Getting a haircut was more fun when girly pictures were involved

Brenda cut my hair for nearly 15 years and knew my head the way Bill Clinton knows interns, which is to say, intimately. After a decade-and-a-half she could have probably trimmed my hair in the dark. The place I go to now, it sometimes looks as if they have.

But that’s OK; I don’t stress over a bad haircut. It’s the process of getting my head-fur shortened that bothers me.

When I was a kid, my dad dragged me to a guy named Carl on Grand Rapids’ West Side who for fifty cents would buzz my hair down to a comfortable stubble that lasted a few months between cuts. The cut itself took about 45 seconds and there was no conversation. I was a kid and kid conversation not one of Carl’s priorities. Besides, he had girly centerfolds tacked up around his shop and memorizing those took up most of the mental power I would otherwise have needed to talk about my Little League team.

It wasn’t until years later that I found Brenda; she owned the shop a few blocks from my old house in Lakeview and—at the time—would cut my hair for ten bucks. A huge jump from Carl’s two bits, but still not bad by today’s standards.

As well as Brenda knew my head, she knew my life even better. When she was little more than a kid herself Brenda provided child care for my two progeny, a job known at the time as “baby-sitting.” It was only chance that we both wound up living years later in the same small, northern Michigan town.

Brenda not only knew my kids, she knew the (Former) Lovely Mrs. Taylor, who—it turns out—had been getting her hair cut at Brenda’s shop for some time by the time she first touched scissors to my head. In addition to family, Brenda also knew a lot of the same people I did, a fact of life in any American small town.

We not only had a history, but folks to gossip about. Getting a haircut from Brenda was a chance to catch up on the torrid, tawdry underbelly of my bucolic little hometown; who was doing what to (or with) whom. Brenda was the pre-Facebook Facebook. We rarely ran out of interesting dirt before the haircut was finished.

But Brenda’s an hour away now, which is too far for me to drive just to get my monthly trim. So I’ve been frequenting one of those salon chains with a shop in every neighborhood big enough to merit a McDonald’s. I’ve yet to have the same stylist twice.

The cuts are OK, but I hate trying to make conversation with a stranger; usually a female stranger in her mid-twenties. I have as much in common with these girls as an aardvark has with a Philippine merchant marine. I don’t want to know who Justin Bieber is dating and they couldn’t care less which character I like best on Golden Girls.

So I sit there in uncomfortable silence waiting for the cut to be finished so I can pay my 15 bucks and scram.

I wonder if Carl’s still cutting hair? He’d be about 108 now, but you never know. I wonder if he has any new centerfolds.

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