I’m 50 (sorry…I started to cry)…so I’m guessing for at least the first 35 years I had my hair cut at an old school barber shop with one of those classic twirling red, white and blue barber poles out front. For most of that period it was at Darrell’s Barber Shop in West LA at 2450 Overland Blvd just south of Pico Blvd. It was adjacent to the old May Company (now the east end of the Westside Pavilion) and the old California Federal bank (now Citi I think). The Owner Darrell was an older Jewish fellow that had the chair closest to the door, and his wife, who had a classic white/blond beehive hairdo that must have extended a solid 8 or 9 inches above the top of her skull had a manicure table on the east end of the shop by the bathroom in the corner.
I don’t recall for
sure, but it seems to me there were about four barber chairs along the south
wall, all with mirrors behind them and cheap frame with a black and white
picture of the barber along with a license showing they’d had some level of
training to practice their craft. Most of the guys seemed ancient to me as a
kid, and it was almost like they’d actually died years ago…but their bodies
continued to give haircuts. When I was real young, it wasn’t uncommon to see
somebody getting shaved with some cream whipped up and applied by one of
those old-style brushes, and then shaved with a straight blade that at the time
looked like a small machete. It also wasn’t unusual to walk in
there on a Saturday and see the place full of men getting haircuts, drinking
coffee and talking about sports…and no man EVER had to have his hair washed
before it was cut. You just walked in, sat down, and got a your hair cut.
I suspect there may
have been a woman getting a manicure in there a time or two…but other than the
occasional brave mother that accompanied a weak young son into the joint, I
don’t even really recall seeing another female in the place. To be honest, I
don’t ever recall seeing a dude at the manicuring table either. I suspect it
may have happened a time or two, but I’m guessing it was at a slow time during
the week or later in the evening when there were fewer witnesses.
The north wall of
Darrell’s was lined with windows, and about five or six metal and leather
chairs where folks could sit and wait, or just kick back and chat with the
barbers or other customers. There was usually sections of the day’s LA Times or
Herald Examiner spread around the waiting chairs, and a magazine rack on the west
end by the door that even had a couple of Playboy magazines. As a young church
going boy solidly on the straight-and-narrow, I was repulsed by the filthy
periodicals and steadfastly refused to even step into that shop for a haircut
more than a couple of times a week. Darrell’s was a classic place…and there was
little doubt that it was a sanctuary for men.
In later the years
after Darrell and his wife retired, the shop was purchased and run by Rueben
(he still operates it today). Rueben was a cool cat, who actually boxed as a
welterweight (under the name Ray Rueben I believe) at the old Olympic
Auditorium on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. He had old black-and-white
8x10s on the wall of old fighters…including several of him wearing some belts
that looked like you would had to have won fights to own. Rueben was an
enigma…because he was also the quintessential 60’s hippy that drove a green and
white VW Bus and actually started shampooing hair before he cut it. The
signs of the looming de-evolution were not obvious to me at the time, but a
smarter young man would have recognized that this pre-cut hair washing was just
a slippery slope towards the general degeneration of manhood…and unchecked it
wouldn’t long before men were getting their hair blow dried or worse…making
appointments for a mani-pedi.
When I moved north
of Los Angeles to the High Desert, I started going to a Super Cuts and having a
girl cut my hair. I didn’t really know that women cut men’s hair, but
that seemed to be the trend and she seemed to do a pretty decent job. They’d
wash your hair at Super Cuts which was a tough adjustment, but things just
started to seem different. Plus…a lot of things were changing. People
were starting to carry around wireless pagers in case someone was trying to get
ahold of them, you could now put a document into a machine and have a copy go
through the wire and come out the other end, and there were a bunch of black
stealth jets that couldn’t be detected by radar flying all over the Antelope
Valley. It just seemed like the world was changing.
When we moved to
Washington, DC, I tried to upgrade yet again and after a few local Super
Cuts debacles, I started going to a Hair Cuttery (or is it cutlery) up in Kensington.
I thought the woman that cut my hair there was decent (think it was $14 bucks
with a shampoo), but I noticed my wife would always walk several paces behind
me in public. Actually, her pretending she’s not actually with me is not all
that strange…but this seemed worse than normal…especially after a recent
haircut. When I inquired why, she mentioned I needed to get away from the
standard bowl-cut and start going to a real salon. As I always do when she
talks, I listened and started going to a place in Downtown DC called Piaf. At
this joint, a man’s haircut costs about 30 bones (by the time you’re done
tipping everyone it’s closer to 50)…and sometimes they wash your hair twice.
The woman that cuts my hair there always tries to talk me into getting a manicure,
and when she does I can almost hear my German and Swedish ancestors literally
spinning in their graves. This past Wednesday she started in again…but this
time, she went over the line.
Have a great early
fall weekend and try to do something fun. If you can, spend some time with the
people that matter most.
You may want to start it with a little music too.
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