“Just a Little off the Top, Please”
Story & Illustration by Bernard Greenwald

Tom the Barber cut my hair today. I have been going to him for almost 30 years, once every five or six weeks—eight times a year or around 270 haircuts. When I started going to his shop in the 70s he was popular with people from Bard because, during the time of long hair, he could be trusted not to cut all of yours off if he got you in his chair. It was a time when young people rarely got their hair cut, and barbers struggled financially. Luckily many of his customers then were IBM employees, who always had to look trim.

Before him I had gone to Jim Petonito, College Plaza, New Haven for almost 10 years. I’ve had basically only two barbers in my adult life. But once traveling, before women cut mens’ hair in the USA, I had my hair cut by a beautiful blonde woman in Austria. I remember resting my head against her capacious bosom in its crisp white uniform as she snipped. Could it have happened that way?

Tom provides his customers with black smocks to keep the hair off their clothes. In the beginning my hair was as dark as the black fabric. I watched the color contrast increase over the years and now the evidence of their passing is in stark black and white. In the 70s Tom washed your hair, cut it wet with a straight razor and blow-dried it. Today he cut my unwashed hair entirely with an electric trimmer, 10 minutes start to finish. Used to be $9 and now it’s $15. He is always cheaper and better than other barbers.

I used to bring my sons to Tom when they were little. Pizza, a haircut, ice cream at Jane’s. Now Isaiah wears dreads and has probably not cut his hair in years, while Ben keeps his shorn in a military buzz. I don’t remember having been taken to the barber by my mostly absent father when I was a boy, but I do remember associating him with the barber I went to in Newark, where I grew up. Maybe it was because the barbershop was in the vicinity of the saloon on Peshine Avenue where I knew he hung out. No appointments in those days. You sat in bentwood chairs and waited and read magazines The men bantered but most of it went over my nine-year-old-head. They probably toned down the manly discourse in front of a kid.

The barber, an Italian-American with a moustache, was an entrepreneur. At one point the shop was full of boxes of white, men’s shoes. I thought they were white bucks, which were popular with my sister’s high school friends, but they were in fact surplus naval officers’ shoes. This was around 1950, when war surplus goods were all over the place.

My mother was highly critical of the quality of a haircut. My head would be twisted for inspection like a cantaloupe when I got home. A major criterion was that my hair be short enough so that I would not need another haircut for some weeks. A haircut was 50 cents, with no tip.

In that neighborhood there was a store which sold Italian ices in pleated, white, paper cups—lemon was everyone’s favorite, but they also had raspberry, cherry, pineapple, coconut and other flavors. A dip was two cents, two dips for a nickel, and for a dime you walked out with an impressive structure in your hand, a Tower of Pisa of multicolored ices. The top layers were good but most delicious was to eat down past the rim of the cup. There you had to squeeze the by-then melted ice liquor, a delicious melange of water, sugar, flavoring and papier maché, from the cup’s well tongued rim up from its bottom into your mouth. When finally discarded, the paper cup would be totally flat, the sweetness squeezed and sucked out of it.

My wife and I have a running joke about haircuts. When I arrive home from Tom’s and she fails to acknowledge my new cut (actually, to me, the sign of a good haircut) I go to the phone and feign making an anguished call to Tom. Now however when she gets her hair done (men have theirs cut, women have theirs done), she has adopted the same procedure, and the joke has become tedious.

In the old days a barbershop could be a rough place. When I was a graduate student and Jim Petonito cut my hair, he would banter to the other waiting customers that he was about to remove more hair from my head than was on all of theirs combined. Middle-aged men would flinch. Once, having electrodes attached to my head for a medical test, the technician complained that I had an entirely inappropriate density of hair on my cranium for a man my age.

My mother’s hair was identical to mine in texture and color. Now, in late middle age. when I look into the mirror, it is her hair that decorates my skull, salt and pepper but mostly white. I remember her pulling a comb or brush through it, a move requiring tenacity and strength, and seeing each hair pop back immediately into the same place it had been before, in a solid mass. My hair does this. Washing and drying good; combing useless.

When my boys were little I would joke with them that because my grandfather came from Hungary, we all had vampire blood. I told them a vampire could be recognized by his widow’s peak, and I would slide my hand meaningfully up my forehead to expose the one I have; and by the hair on the palms of my hands. They’d ask why I had no hair on my palms and I told them I shaved it. (In my own youth, hairy palms connoted a masturbator.)

I understand hair continues to grow after death. So I hope I have the foresight to get a really close trim as I approach my departure date so I look good when I finally arrive in the next world.