BARBERS ABROAD

I recently timed a female barber who cut my hair.  Five minutes, 10 seconds.  A record.   All through the years, reaching back over half a century, having my hair cut required at least 20 minutes and sometimes half an hour.  Then when unisex barber shops arrived, old fashion males-only barber shops began to disappear and 20- minute haircuts went with them.  Well, I guess some folks reckon a five- minute hair cut is progress.  But I don’t.

          Today’s five- minute haircuts in unisex shops make me nostalgic for the barber shops of my youth when the barber began with clippers and trimmed his work with scissors. Then he applied lather from a shaving mug and shaved your neck with a straight razor. The barber cocked the razor in one hand to begin shaving.  Then he wiped off his work with a hot towel.   

          Ahhh!  The warmth of the next step, a second hot towel, was most pleasant against my neck, a mildly sensual experience.  Often a gentle shoulder massage was included. Eyebrows and ear hairs were trimmed and a moustache or beard if you had one.  It was a relaxing and delightful experience, having someone fuss over my hair. In those days such shops were as much a territory of males only as was the local beauty sop the territory of women.  But women could enter if with their small sons. On those rare occasions when women were present, the sounds of the conversation would hush, and it was sometimes necessary to change the subject.  When I began to grow a beard, a shave with more lather and more hot towels was even more relaxing.   Then there were the ointments and the pungent lotions, which were probably not necessary or even healthy but nice none the less.  Yes, I miss all that. 

          Now I have just described an old-time American haircut.  But when I became a diplomat and began to travel around the world I found there were barbers and haircuts that were quite different from those in the US. Even so, haircuts abroad were mostly an occasion to look forward to, a too-brief 30 minutes of luxury and pleasure.

          At one extreme I have sat in the shade of a mango tree in open African markets for a barber working with the old-fashioned hand clips and a pair of scissors.   Not an altogether pleasant experience but it did have one plus.  Those haircuts cost me a British shilling, at the time worth about 14 US cents. 

          At the other extreme I have been coiffed by a lovely young woman in a unisex parlor near my office on the rue du Faubourg St. Honoree in the upscale 8^th arrondissement in Paris.  I was never able to find a proper barber shop in Paris, so I had ended up in a fancy French salon where “haircuts” lasted an hour and cost the equivalent of 60 US dollars.  The process began with a shampoo by a pretty assistant of the coiffeuse who pulled my head back into a large semi-circle stainless steel receptacle and gently messaged my scalp.  It ended as my hair was blown dry and somehow given body and a shape not its own.   I was quite handsome at the end of all that….for 24 hours.  

          One of the best haircuts I ever had was in an ultramodern, air-conditioned Portuguese shop in Beira, Mozambique.   I had arrived by freighter a couple of days before and settled into a pension called the Gato Noir (Black Cat). All the streets in the center of the city had been dug up and were open as workers replaced an ancient sewer system.  At that time Beira was surely the most foul-smelling city on the planet and it was in this very modern Portuguese barbershop that I sought temporary relief. The Portuguese barbers were highly skilled, but I suspect what has planted that haircut firmly in my mind is the rank smell of the city’s open sewers.

          The Chinese barbers in a shop I favored near our embassy in Singapore were skilled but unremarkable, perhaps because haircuts in Singapore were much like those in the US in the l940s and 50s, as also were those in Canberra, Australia. 

          If I were to choose my favorite barber I would select a shop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  That barber -- he was a one-man shop -- was from northern India. He used only hand tools, not an electric clipper, and worked slowly and carefully.  Once he was happy with what he had done and had my approval, he rubbed a delightful smelling unguent around my neck and over my face.  Then he messaged my shoulders and upper back.  Then…the first time he did this I could not believe what he was doing…he began firmly beating the center of my upper back with the edge of his hands and descended my back, disc by disc. Because I had been suffering from lower back pain for some months my first reaction was, Oh, No!  But I did not try to stop him. When he was done I realized that my back felt better than it had in many months and I continued to go to his shop for haircuts and the service of what I came to think of as a skilled chiropractor during the remainder of my four-year tour in Malaysia.