I’d always thought the monthly pilgrimage to the barber would get easier as one got older, yet I’m forced to admit my relationship with the red and white pole remains a grudge and a social non-event, even as the hairline recedes.
After a few mindless generalities, you revert to silence. Head tilted, you’ll notice the framed pictures of George Michael clones with extravagant wavy kuifs, but you accept that you’ll soon emerge from the shop looking like the Frikkie of before.
Short back and sides, it seems, is the story of my life. I was introduced to its timeless elegance at age seven, when I found myself among the boys of the neighbourhood, on red plastic-covered chairs lining the walls of a mirrored room, reading Richie Rich and Archie comics and waiting for Harry the barber to flash the razor.
Harry’s wife manned the counter at the front of the shop, selling an arsenal of essential kit, like stink bombs, fart cushions and a powder that “exploded” when stepped on, especially by Afrikaners, our boyhood enemies. Most of this gear is no doubt illegal today, but that’s the price of a safer world.
Harry was the master of short back and sides, rejecting all pleas to the contrary. He called all the kids “Sputnik”, which was then very modern and edgy.
Smaller boys had to sit raised on a plank set between the two arm rests of his red leather chair, all the better to shear them to within a hair’s breadth of the emergency ward.
Word got round about another barber nearby: an Italian, and a musician. Shady type, but he did have a set of drums in his barber shop, so at least he was a real musician. After Harry, Dino the drummer was for us the exemplar of continental style.
For years afterwards, I wandered in the wilderness without a regular barber. One encounter I (hardly) remember was with a high-end hairdresser in the old JSE building, next door to that famous sociological media experiment in which dozens of reluctant journos were dragged from barstools in lowbrow Main Street to glassy luxury in Diagonal Street. This raising the bar, as it were, was a utopian attempt to impart to them a less cynical view of share buybacks and monopoly capitalism.
So, with me propped up in a luxury chair in the JSE building, the hairdresser asked whether I wanted beer or whisky, and I’m not sure which I chose but either choice was bad.
My luck was changing, though. Some months after being found unfit for purpose at the oversized cubic zirconium of slander and regret parading as a diamond, I took a grudge job with another news outfit, also in the CBD.
Loitering at lunchtime, somewhere in the area of the old Eloff Street Ext, I came across a hairdressing emporium that felt like a homecoming. Thoroughly Roman, too. Marble floor and an ornate portal with two brass pillars. A basilica of barbering. The patrician owner in his white jacket, his Sicilian stoop completing the satisfying stereotype. So, for many years, my hair was cut by either Nando or Vincenzo.
Some time later, shortly after I’d moved into a new flat, I was “celebrating” with friends quite late into the night when I heard an angry banging on the wall. Clearly my neighbour whom I hadn’t yet met. The next morning, as I somewhat sheepishly tried to leave, the neighbour opened his door and scowled. He looked familiar, and I realised who it was. Nando, my barber! The shame was immense, so too the regret at having lost my barber, and though I believe I was unlucky, I could hardly blame anyone but myself.
Adrift without a barber of my own, and saddled with a neighbour who wouldn’t greet me, I rued being a victim of my own excess. On the rebound then, I found myself with a succession of R50 Pakistanis.
They must have a barbering Seta in Pakistan, because among the young men who gather in their shop, any one of them cut hair as well as the next who’d brought this essential skill to our shores. Once, during the Cricket World Cup in 2003, I asked one whether he was interested in the cricket, and he said with a grin: “No, I like moneeee!”
Recently, after another move, I encountered a barber from Algeria. We clashed before I got in the chair, because I said I didn’t want it too short. On our third and final encounter he cut it short, Harry short, which is a barber’s way of saying … never mind.
My latest barber, as luck would have it, is Algerian too. Better still, I think he said he’s a Berber. I just nodded when he told me that, as if it wasn’t unusual at all. Call it fate, but he’ll be my Berber of choice from now on.
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