Column: Submarine captain or sheep shearer? Only your barber knows for sure.

By Thomas Winterhoff

First published on December 13, 2000
Copyright © Thomas Winterhoff

Don’t look up. Try not to catch their eye. They can smell fear, you know.

Sitting in a worn vinyl chair that looked (and felt) like it dated from the early Pleistocene epoch, I buried my nose deep into an ancient copy of Maclean’s magazine and waited my turn at the barbershop with bated breath and beads of sweat slowly forming on my brow.

I’d been putting off this haircut for a couple of weeks, as I usually end up doing. I’m generally not too concerned about the routine maintenance of my hair, but like most people, I like to find a place where I at least feel comfortable. At the very least, you hope to leave the shop not looking like you placed 23rd out of 22 aspirants in a Peewee Herman look-alike contest.

When we relocated to our new neighbourhood a while back, the move necessitated that I also seek out a new barbershop. I’ve never had much luck with barbers for as long as I can remember, hence my trepidation once again on this occasion. 

It’s easier when you’re young, of course. Parents would get tired of mixing you up with the family dog at suppertime and declare that “it’s time” to get the deed done. Sabre enjoyed the occasional change of diet that this confusion wrought, but I personally found the Kibbles & Bits a little dry for my taste. 

Often the parent-induced trip to the barber resulted in a cut that was the hair world’s equivalent of sensible shoes, but at least you didn’t get beat up after school over it. 

During periods of financial strife later on, my family (in a misdirected but well-intentioned spate of economic restraint) somehow managed to procure a handheld razor/trimmer from the fine folks at Cheepo TV Products Incorporated. Its advantages in terms of frugality were somewhat diminished by the fact that it never actually made your hair appear perceptibly shorter, just thinner and home to several thousand new split ends.

The alternative to this was the infamous homestyle “bowl cut”. I was fortunate enough to avoid this particular form of teenage torture, as I threatened to run away and join the circus if it was ever actually implemented.

My mother had my duffel bag half-packed before she finally relented and gave me the cash to go to the barber myself.

In those heady days of the pre-disco mid-1970s, “unisex” was the “in” term, which meant that most of the neighbourhood barbers had suddenly turned into hairstylists overnight, with sideburns down to their knees and a blow dryer on each hip. One appointment with Eduardo and I ran screaming from the shop.

The next stop in my life-long quest for a decent haircut led me to an older part of town, where I found a cranky, white-haired, no-nonsense practitioner of the old school. He had a proper barber pole out front, a collection of Second World War artillery shells on display inside and a mean-looking straight razor at the ready. He did as good a job as one could expect from a guy who thought Attila the Hun had been given a bad rap and who spent his weekends blowing the stuffing out of small, furry animals.

His chief virtue (as far as a testosterone-loaded 16-year-old was concerned) was that in addition to Field and Stream and Guns and Ammo, the barber shop also subscribed to Playboy magazine. Looking back now, I think I must have got my hair cut every week or so over the course of that summer.

Our family moved again a few months later and I entered a rebellious phase, during which I grew my hair long and only got it cut when it began to interfere with basic, everyday tasks – like eating, drinking and seeing more than a couple of inches in front of my face. All photographs of me from this period are now kept safely under lock and key by a 24-hour armed guard.

I made do with whatever barber I could find for a number of years after that. With the onset of early male pattern baldness (“I just have a large forehead!”), some aspects of getting a haircut became simply academic. “Styling” was no longer an option and “short on top” became pretty much automatic. My chief concern was simply finding a barber competent enough that he wouldn’t lop off an ear or two in an unguarded moment.

The longest-running of these was Walter, a true gentleman of middle-European extraction who carried himself with an air of well-mannered refinement that would have served him equally well in the diplomatic corps.

His one shortcoming as a barber was his extraordinarily bad memory. We had formally introduced ourselves on first meeting each other, but even though I patronized his shop every two months for about six years and we discussed world affairs and other matters of great import, he never once managed to get my name straight after that. He would address me as Don, John or Ron or some other close approximation of my name. Because he took great pride in getting to know his regular customers, I tried to correct him gently at first – so as not to hurt his feelings. But it was all to no avail. 

Eventually he managed to mentally file away the name “John” for me, and so after that I left my true name at the door and adopted my new secret identity for his sake.

At this point in my life the top of my noggin began to bear more than a passing resemblance to the forest around Mount St. Helens shortly after her bout of geological hiccups – very few upright trees to be seen from horizon to horizon. 

As I had determinedly refused to adopt the galling comb-over strategies of others suffering the same fate, Walter (with the practised skill of a United Nations delegate) would peer closely at the dwindling treeline and gently suggest that we “um... perhaps... just even them out a little.” 

He always looked a little bit sad when I left, like an artist who had been yearning to create a masterpiece but who had only been given a very small piece of canvas to work with.

Another move across town took me to yet another barbershop in a smaller neighbourhood, where I could get caught up on all the latest gossip and argue about the merits of the mighty Canuckleheads, all accompanied by the quiet, steady clipping of scissors.

It was always like a game of Russian roulette, however, since one of the barbers there seemed to be conducting some sort of ongoing university psychology experiment. He would prattle on incessantly about all the mind-numbingly mundane doings of himself, his family, his dog, his neighbours and his neighbours’ dogs.

The goal of the experiment presumably was to see how long it took for the average person’s head to implode –at which point his victim would presumably leap up from the chair with plastic apron flying, grab the scissors and turn them on his tormentor.

I resisted the strain admirably. Frustrated, he would respond by turning the hand vibrator (which he used to dislodge the loose cuttings from my skull) all the way up to the setting marked: “Danger! Stand back!” 

By the time he was done, my eyeballs would be rattling around in their sockets so vigorously that it usually took several disorienting minutes to regain focus.

A three-year stint in the wonderful, ethnically diverse neighbourhood of Commercial Drive in Vancouver brought me to another old-fashioned barbershop, where a hand-lettered sign in the window admonished passersby with the following: “Have nice short haircut. You look better.” 

On my first visit, a silver-haired man sat at attention as an elderly barber trimmed his military mustache and sideburns with measured, practised strokes. Hair from previous customers lay unswept on the tired linoleum floor and ignored by the barber’s partner. He was sitting back in his own red leather chair, muttering to himself in Italian as he pored over the latest international soccer results. 

My time there was a relatively happy one, until I dared to question the unassailable superiority of the Italian national soccer team. Only lightning-fast reflexes saved me being hit by a broom as I made a hurried exit.

When we moved to Victoria shortly thereafter, my quest for a decent haircut began anew. I eventually ended up coming to the shop in James Bay where I now sat trembling with my stomach in knots, reading the same page of the Maclean’s magazine over and over again. The barber is nice enough, but I suspect he must have been a submarine commander in a former lifetime.

Usually when a barber wants to adjust the angle of your head to better reach a particular area, he’ll use his fingertips to gently move your bean into the correct position. Apparently, this is much too inefficient a system for our naval hero. Instead, he simply grabs one of my ears firmly in each hand and – like a captain at the periscope with a flotilla of enemy destroyers bearing down on him from all points of the compass – he spins my head back and forth until his work is done and I am left to wait for the waves of dizziness to subside.

He does give me a decent haircut for a reasonable price, however, so until other opportunities present themselves I’ll stock up on Gravol, steel my nerves and keep whispering, “Please... just a little off the top.”