HUMAN WRECKAGE
World Burns, Privileged White Guy Gets Haircut
Eventually, one is compelled to act. When Alberta began her coquettish emergence from lockdown in mid-May, essentially an economic reverse striptease, I took a long, hard look in the mirror. My hair was just the way I’d wanted it when I was 16. Trouble was, it was grey and I was 60. I resembled country singer Kenny Rodgers without the plastic surgery, tight little piggy eyes, and he’s dead.
I’d last sat and chatted with Paul my barber in late January when I was still 59. Around the time I was due to arrange my next appointment, the world had taken a weird and sudden wet market turn for something worse than the worst. Now, spring was in the air and so I telephoned Paul, desperate to see him. He said, “Geoff, I’ve decided to retire. I’m 76-years-old. And this covid thing…” I thanked him for his services and told him how much I’d enjoyed sitting in his chair because I realized during our conversation that I saw him more frequently than I did some close friends. After I hung up I thought, “Swell, got to find a new barber during a pandemic and then break the butcher in.”
While out and about on neighbourhood errands I ducked my head into Paul’s former shop. From the doorway I asked Amal the owner if she was prepared to look after Paul’s old customers. She said she was but I’d need to wear a mask. I said, “Swell,” and snatched one of her business cards from the reception desk.
I contemplated the new reality for three weeks - a simple haircut would now cause me the same stomach squirming agony as a trip to my dentist’s office. Two things happened in the meantime. First, waves of civil unrest rolled across the United States and splashed onto other western democracies. Prejudice, murder and disease are bad, bad things and best not combined. Somehow I became an Internet meme. I was the unmasked man at the demonstration waving the SHORT BACK AND SIDES placard, ready to blow a 50-amp fuse, agitating for a trim.
Second, a writer I know and with whom I attended university sent me a digitized picture he’d snapped of me during our early days together. His lens shutter had clicked in my Montreal apartment in 1983. A candid shot dating back to when I was confident and knew everything there was to know and my opinions were always right and the world seemed full of promise and a fine place to be except for the Cold War. I’d no idea what was to shake down after that moment and throughout the next 37 years, ooh la la, but my hair looked great, very rock ‘n’ roll.
(I wish I could somehow mail that boy a letter from the future.)
Thursday I sat in Amal’s chair for our first time, masked. She hovered behind me, masked, and examined my skull. “Does the hair over your forehead not grow?”
I muttered muffled, “It’s possible that I may’ve attempted some self-styling.”
Amal made one of those noncommittal yet critical noises. Bit of a poor start to a new relationship. She set about snipping the tufts of my hair scissored between her index and middle fingers. She told me a little about her family, her son and his wife, and her husband. Amal expressed her concern about the near future, flu season without a covid-19 vaccine.
My mask slipped off. I said, “Jesus!” And then I added, “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. Do you trim your eyebrows?”
I said, “Uh, erm, yeah, generally, sometimes.”
“Would you like me to trim your eyebrows?”
“Are you suggesting I look like an owl?”
Amal laughed. “It comes with your haircut.”
“Okay.”
Once I returned home I inspected her work closely. One sideburn was a quarter-inch lower than the other. Elastic ear strapping was one pandemic challenge I’d never even considered. Amal had cut my hair differently than Paul used to despite my same rote instructions. I sort of liked the result; I thought my new ‘do befitting of a trusted, fake news television network anchor: earnest, thoughtful, groomed and sophisticated.
The boy inside my head said to the man in the mirror, “Jesus, what happened to you? New look? I know it’s been a while since we’ve seen each other, but, man, you’ve gotten old.” When I talk to myself, little is left unspoken.
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