The 4.99 Haircut

With no money in your pocket you have to be selective about your haircut. Most of Manhattan wanted $50 for a haircut. I went to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to some joint in an old warehouse, where everyone inside had that manicured messy look, and they wanted $65 so I could pretend I didn’t care how my hair looked. Walking through Chelsea, I spotted a sign for a $4.99 haircut. My kind of place.
You sign a list, go to a booth and pay your five bucks. You stand around and wait, but there were about five others waiting, so there was no space for me and my backpack and the bag of clothes I was carrying around. I had no home and was between couches.
A five-foot white guy with a buzzcut came in the door.
“What kind of haircut you want?” he asked me.
“A regular.”
“Okay, I’ll take you over here.”

He led me to a chair. He spoke slowly and reminded me of my childhood friend Reilly, who was slow because he was born without a thyroid. The barber’s name was Yuri. He was came here from Moscow when he was ten and a half. He spoke with a New York accent that was unchanged from my father’s day growing up in New York in the 30s.
“So you guys are students?” I asked. This was my first professional haircut in seven months. Usually I just found a friend to cut it. It was shaggy, disheveled. I looked more homeless than I wanted to let on.
Yuri nodded slowly. He replied to most of my questions with a nod or shake of his head and the same facial gesture you see in mob movies, a crinkled brow with puckered lips to the side.
“They pay you anything?”
Same face, shaking his head no.
“How much does it cost to go here?”
“Two thousand.”
“How long’s the class?”
“Two months.”
He didn’t look happy about anything.
“The fuck,” he said, dropping a comb.

“What do you think of the people you work with?” I asked.
There was a Latino with blond streaks in his wavy hair sneezing onto the head of a customer to our left. On our right was a black barber with a one-centimeter wide manicured beard strap spraying something onto the bald head of a customer, and I took a breath before the cloud engulfed me.
“Where do you want to work when you graduate?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want to cut.” He crinkled up his face to show disdain for cutting. “I want to have my own business, get other people to cut for me. You want it short, right?” This was the third time he had asked me that.
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
He kept surveying the implements arrayed before him, trying to decide what to use. There were three razors, a beat-up toothbrush, a comb and scissors. When he had finished razoring the sides and back of my head, he scrunched up his face and said, “I liked it better before.”
“You mean before the haircut?”
He nodded slowly. “It looked better when you came in.”
He hadn’t gotten to the top yet, so I was sitting there with a mop on top of my head and nothing on the sides. An 80s Cure cut.
“This stuff has to go,” he said, touching the top.
“Unless I want a mohawk,” I said.
He shook his head no.

He doused the mop on top and combed it back. “You want it like this? You look like a mobster.”
“I’ll get arrested walking out of here.”
He shook his head no again.
It occurred to me that cutting hair on the edge of Chelsea, New York’s gay capital, must have been the gayest job one could have. Maybe that’s why he talked like a mobster. Yet there was a tenderness in the way he touched my hair, and the faintest Mona Lisa smile, that made me wonder about him. He had already been cutting my hair for 45 minutes. Sometimes he would clutch a tiny cluster of about 20 hairs between his fingers and trim a millimeter off. He was awkward and unsure, but gentle. “Am I hurting you?” he asked once with the razor. He apologized another time for hitting my ear with it.
“Is your girlfriend or wife going to recognize you?” Yuri asked. “It’s so different.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s the hardest head you’ve ever done?”
“Long-haired guy. Pony tail. Probably homeless.”
“Where’d he get 5 bucks for a haircut?”
“Panhandling.

"...Yeah, I used to run an MRI machine. It’s what my mom wanted. I listened to her. I was getting headaches every week. Weekends I was fine, around Wednesday my head would start to hurt. I had to get out of there.”
He spent another hour trying to get the top of my head right. He started like all barbers with a pinch of hair between his first two fingers, but he didn’t know whether to go over or under the pinch point. Even I knew you’re supposed to go over. He would hesitate each time, then go under. I wondered what they had taught during the first few weeks of barber school.
The teacher was a Nigerian named David who paced through once to bark out commands. “Check the line in the mirror,” he said of the apparently crooked back of my head.
“I know, I know, I’m not done yet,” said Yuri.
There was a little cowlick on the front right of my head that he couldn’t figure out.
“I can’t cut it anymore,” he said. “It’ll give you problems.” He drowned the cowlick with so much water that it began dripping onto my nose.
Finally Yuri announced he was done. There wasn’t much hair left on my head, except for the cowlick.
“Whew, I feel like I cut five heads,” Yuri said. “Almost nobody gets a regular cut. Straight hair. You gotta practice with the scissors.”
I tipped him two dollar coins. A forty percent tip. “Hey, I appreciate it,” he said.

Out front I found David, the teacher, going through a pile of trash. He found an electric heater.
“Does that work?” I asked.
“I’m going to find out,” he said, wheeling it toward the barber shop. He said he got into the cutting business two years ago when he came here from Lagos. We discussed my travels in West Africa. I said I never went to Lagos after I heard the stories. One woman lost an earlobe to a machete because she wore a fancy earring. He said people say Lagos is dangerous but in 40 years he never got attacked. He loves to travel and in another year or two will hit the road again.