A Horrible History of Haircuts
About 18 years ago, I was worried that my wife might have been having an affair. In truth, she just needed a haircut. Not just any haircut, but a sculpting and coloring from her loyal stylist based a two-hour drive from the beachside Cape Cod home we were renting for our summer vacation. I’ll explain later.
Right now, I have concerns regarding my own hair, which is already edging towards being beyond a reasonable length. Blame Covid-19. No, really. This time, the promise of long locks, albeit greyer than they were when I once left my hair to grow for four years without the threat of a single snip, is beyond my control. The salon is closed. They all are, around these parts.
While we’ve all been consumed with ensuring we have sufficient medication, sustenance, the disease’s hot item of toilet rolls, and in my case a case or two of a fine red wine, we’ve neglected to consider some essential forms of personal grooming that we take for granted. Well, at least I have. Put simply, I need a haircut.
I wear mine longer than the average bloke out there anyway, which means that since I haven’t been booked in for a trim since January, I’m long overdue. But now Maria, who my wife did indeed visit back when we were enjoying the splendor of Hyannis and Provincetown, isn’t available. Neither are the dime a dozen barbers here in Providence, Rhode Island, or any of the stylists who populate the salons dotted around the region. Health concerns for all concerned mean they’re closed, unable to work and I can’t find anyone to trim back my locks.
I’m not really concerned, however. I’ve inflicted more bizarre haircuts on myself since first deciding the skinhead look was the one for me as a 12-year-old aspiring bovver boy back in 1979. I thought I’d share a few of those ill-advised choices, while punctuating my excuse for each one with photographic evidence of my string of fashion faux pas.
By the way, to explain my opening comment, I was flabbergasted, back in 2002, when my wife Jen proclaimed that three days after we had battled through the notorious seasonal traffic jam that slows the flow of holidaymakers to the Cape, she was making a lengthy trip back to our part of Massachusetts. She had a haircut appointment with Maria, whose diary was crammed with clients for months on end and one simply did not cancel an hour allotted to Maria’s genius. I thought she was out of her mind and became suspicious until my wife returned that day frustrated by the bumper-to-bumper crawl, but nonetheless sporting an impressive new quaff. Maria had been cutting her hair since she was first qualified to do so, when Jen was 12 years old. Nobody else has clipped or colored her locks since. To be fair, I’ve been in that loop myself now for the best part of a decade. I’d be cheating on Maria if I was ever groomed anywhere else.
So, back to the 12-year old me, and my drastic departure from shaggy haircuts previously inspired by bands like Slade and Sweet from the UK glam rock days. I grew up in Birmingham, England, where musical tastes went hand in hand with my choice of hairstyles.
I owned a pair of Dr Martens boots and a fake leather jacket and listened to punk rock and the new wave sounds that followed. My hairstyle of the day was at odds with my cultural mood, so I visited Tony, the barber who had been content to inflict nothing more than a trim since as long as I could remember. My Dad first took me to the pokey shop beside my junior school to see Tony, who had the misfortune to resemble the Yorkshire Ripper around the time Peter Sutcliffe was caught and brought to justice for his crimes. My brother and I were warned not to rummage through the magazines laid out in the waiting area, so like any curious youngsters worth our salt, we did just that when Dad was distracted during his cut to discover odd glossy publications featuring women in various states of undress. Later, as a teenage boy, I appreciated just why Tony enjoyed such brisk business with adolescents. Tony routinely asked my Dad if he needed ‘anything for the weekend’ which I didn’t understand at the time either. When I sat in his elevated chair, having visited on my own that fateful summer’s day in 1979, I proclaimed I wanted a ‘number one’ referencing the harshest of clippers, which within minutes were buzzing through my long strands. A shake of the head later, I was sheared and as a bonus, Tony applied a tramline across one side of my head, shaving a bald stripe that made me resemble a tennis ball. All the cool skinheads sported those. Once home, I rang the front doorbell and for a few moments, my Mom failed to recognize me before a look of horror emerged across her face. Her sweet little boy was no more from that point on.
I looked absolutely ridiculous as a skinhead, so my teenage years featured less harsh cuts and when blonde highlights and numerous fashions of different dyes became the rage, I played along. I dated a couple of aspiring hairdressers (at different times) and for only one UK pound, could have my cuts and colors created by them as they experimented on student training nights at Raymonds, an apparently prestigious hairdressing school.
I failed to learn my lesson though. I’d long hankered over having black hair and one dubious evening, set about creating my own masterpiece. I wiped out my fashionable blonde highlights with a jet-black glop of DIY dye that I allowed to take effect for an hour rather than the twenty minutes recommended on the packet. The results on wet hair didn’t look too bad, but once blow dried, I resembled a Lego figure, whose solid plastic mop was rigid and unmanageable. Just like mine. My mates had a field day at the pub when I turned up not only with an abysmal haircut, but also fingerprint stains of dye on my pale skinned forehead where I had rubbed and scrubbed for too long. My girlfriend (not a hairdresser) dumped me. Thankfully, I haven’t been able to find any photo evidence of that haircut. However…
By 1984 I had abandoned education and had aspirations of being rock star, so being in a band, the 17-year-old me needed a haircut to match. Enter the mullet and a thick clump of spiky hair on top, which stood rigidly to attention thanks to a generous application of gel, mousse and hairspray. My Dad commented that had he fathered a daughter, she would likely have spent less time hairstyling in the bedroom and bathroom than I did. The time he walked in on me hanging upside down off the end of the bed and blow-drying my hair to maximize the likelihood of it remaining erect, he just shook his head and didn’t ask for an explanation. Note on mullets: they honestly were cool once, just like flares, man buns and ripped jeans.
Once the mullet cool factor had worn off, I had a head start (pun intended) on all the wannabees who craved long hair. Mine already brushed my shoulders, but I was a hairstyle extremist by this point and wanted more. So much more. As a result, I self-imposed a hairdresser banishment (I’d dated enough by this point to look to alternative industries for love) and did not so much as set foot near a pair of scissors for four years. I could almost sit on my locks eventually. Occasionally — in the days before political correctness — a delivery driver would letch out of his window with a suggestive comment or toot his horn before looking aghast when the realization hit home that I wasn’t some long-haired lovely, but a bass player from a struggling band with a beard. I grew a goatee as a result of those incidents.
Real life came calling in the mid-nineties and with it more of a conformist mane, though still longer than average. Thankfully, my Dad’s promise that my hair would fall out in my twenties, as his had done, did not materialize and even when I hit the big five-o, I was still having to have my thick mop thinned by special scissors at Maria’s styling station. Allegedly, you follow your mother’s father when it comes to experiencing baldness or not, but I’ll never know because that particular grandparent ran off when he was demobbed after the War and never returned.
So here I am now, still a couple inches short of needing a rubber band to return to my ponytail days, but if sheltering at home and social distancing become the norm for an extended period of time, who knows what I might do. One of my sons took classes to become a barber and is poised to shelter with us until these troubling times have passed. I know he owns a pair of clippers, but I only have to look at the cue ball I impersonated back in 1979 to know to stay well away from the temptation of another number one buzz cut.
