Five Buck Cut

I was looking for my first paid haircut in a long time. For years, I had gotten free haircuts, from everyone from girlfriends to a guy named Lars in the basement of a Copenhagen commune. Newly resettled in New York with no girlfriend, it was time.

I ducked into a warehouse-looking barbershop in Williamsburg. It was filled with young men with bedhead. Ah, the perfect place for a man who doesn’t care what his hair looks like.

“How much for a haircut?” I asked.

“Well,” said a hairdresser affronted by the boldness of my question. “They start at sixty dollars,” said a hairdresser.

“Sixty!” I blurted, spinning and walking out.

So where goes a man who really doesn’t care about his hair? Someone mentioned that there are these barber academies sprinkled around the city, where you can pay $5 for a haircut from student barbers. This I had to see to believe.

I found one on West 29th Street in Chelsea. You go to a booth, like at a car service, put down your five bucks to get your name on the list, come back in 20 minutes and you’re up.

My guy was Igor, a 25-year-old from Ukraine.

“Everyone thinks you’re a queer in this line of work,” he said. He had lost any trace of a Ukrainian accent and had adopted the local hit-man patois. “But I don’t care, you know what I’m sayin’?”

He had tried some college but dropped out, much to the consternation of his parents.
I learned all this because Igor delivered the longest haircut of my life.

After 45 minutes, he was still snipping, hair by hair. I got a haircut in India on a sidewalk behind a post office that included a head massage, and it didn’t take this long. In the mountains of Morocco I got a haircut that included a very careful shave with a straight razor and a ten-minute lathering process and it didn’t take this long. Ihor wanted to get it just right.

He said he was delighted to finally be cutting straight hair, if I knew what he meant. When it wasn’t dangerous, I looked around and saw mostly black customers. “This is the first straight head I’ve cut in four weeks,” he said.

In seventh grade I was terrified of haircuts. I had one that had them yelling “Dorothy Hamill” in the hallways. After another, bangs with my ears poking out, they yelled “Damien,” the devil child from The Omen. But I just didn’t care anymore.

When Igor had finally finished, he spent several minutes showing me his work from every angle, I just didn’t care. The fact that I had paid five bucks was what I cared about. I tipped Igor 40 percent—two dollars.

But something was bothering him. He pushed me back in the chair and kept snipping a hair here, a hair there. “I don’t know,” he said. “Honestly I think you looked a lot better when you walked in here.”