Switching to Men
posted in Doin' Our Thang |
I swear to god having a man’s fingers molest my head and assure me that I look good feels absolutely terrific. For years I’ve been dealing with these women who in addition to possessing damn near zero experience, have the confidence of a kid with a speech impediment giving an oral presentation. I can’t have that. I’ve got enough insecurities as it is and don’t have the patience to consistently assure some chick that I’m happy with her performance. Ladies, I’ve been soured and I think its time to open a new chapter in my life. I need the confidence, competence, and craftsmanship of a man.
My luscious rug of a head is too precious a commodity to be botched and boyified* time and time again. Granted, the vast majority of my cuts have been procured at your lower-brow establishments; Great Clips, the Hair Cuttery, Telma’s Unisex. Of course, you pay for what you get and what I get resembles a muskrat gnawing on a pineapple. However, at this grueling stage of the game, I live paycheck-to-paycheck, so designer haircuts must be sacrificed. Additionally, as a personal rule I don’t schedule appointments, which surely stems from my perpetual thirst for spontaneity. Consequently, I almost always wind up with the butt-end of the stylist team. Nine times out of ten this means that I’m at the mercy of some raw untested intern or if I’m lucky some sow with a haircut that makes Red from Fraggle Rock look like he graduated valedictorian from Gordon Philips Beauty School.
And the thing that really gets me are these superficial stabs at conversation. “Looks like rain, doesn’t it?” Bitch, I don’t care if a gang of mullet-clad red necks get their mobile homes swept into the Gulf of Mexico. Focus on my head god damn it. I bounce a deathly stare off the mirror, my personal medium of shame, informing her that our interaction is to be nothing more than a business transaction; small-talk will not be tolerated. My evil glares are rendered futile probably because she’s already metamorphosed me into a 6 year old with a beard. The laxity of her grip on the shears combined with an apathetic, aloof attitude towards my head has guaranteed me that for the next 2.3 weeks, my head will look like an isosceles triangle. Fucking phenomenal.
Anyways, call me a little bitch, but haircuts used to thrust a great deal of stress into my workweek. That is until I met Thomas. With the style and sensibility of a woman, but the reliability and resourcefulness of a man, Thomas knows how to do me. Seeing Thomas once a month has boosted my self-esteem exponentially and in five plus consultations, we’ve been able to determine that my hair is very porous; it reacts well to products but also absorbs the humidity within the air. His tender but firm grip on my chin as he beckons “Left, Right, Up, Down,” flushes a sensation of calm self-assured dignity tingling through my vertebrae. Thomas: He calls it serendipity the way we met.
It was last December at the Hair Cuttery. Again I was destined to become an expose in embarrassment. As my technician, Paula, lowered my seat to a position conducive to servicing a thorough lathering, the company phone rang. Itching for a reason to avoid engaging in actual work, or perhaps to reflect on how she might destroy my confidence, Paula stepped away from her station to entertain the call. Five minutes had passed. I rather enjoyed the hearty massage of high-pressure water pumping against my neck. For some reason, I heard fusses of irritation but lacked the perspective to distinguish where they were coming from. Then, from my peripheral field, a daintily manicured, but burly hand seized my drowning scalp and cradled it tenderly. The individual had actually put a great deal of exertion into this act of untold heroism. By the time he had collected himself, and muddled his hair back into a gorgeous mess, a glazed stupor had overtaken his face. Utterly befuddled, he spoke. “Your hair…Its magnificent.” And then, “God damn it Paula, 30 second rinse, shampoo lather, and 30 second wash. You’re over-saturating this client’s pores.” “She is?” I questioned. “Ssh…I’m getting you out of here,” the man uttered.
The mysterious man whisked me through a maze of rooms and hallways, and eventually hurled open a door with a stenciling of a male stylist engrossed in a woman’s hair, followed by the caption, “Shear Agony.” “I’m Thomas,” the man whispered into my ear as he coaxed me into a barber’s seat sheathed in alpaca wool. With the flick of a switch, the lights dimmed, my chair swung back, and an ethnic techno groove infiltrated the room. Thomas sportily bounced to the beat and launched a shockwave through his extremities as to emotionally cleanse himself before he entered the ring. He draped a silk smock over my body and pounced on my head like Somolian on a raison. Before long, any element of shock associated with these quickly unfolding events had melted into a gamut of unbridled euphoric emotion. Thomas danced around me with the grace of Dominic Moceanu in the ‘94 Summer Olympics and concentrated on my head like Bobby Fischer in the chess game of his life. I sat in powerless ecstasy. Within 15 minutes, Thomas had given me the haircut I had been dreamed of. It was like I was Bodhi in Point Break and after years of searching for and finding the perfect wave, I could finally die in peace, only I wasn’t about to die because my shit looked good.
*To cut a male’s hair, so that the amalgamation of hair and face render the subject infantile.
