The Razor's Edge

As I embark on my 42nd trip around this medium-sized, yellow star known affectionately as "Sol," I reflect upon the last 492 months of my life outside the womb. To begin with, without being excessively weak, and hopefully avoiding overly emotional sentimentality, I would like to acknowledge all those people who have had a lasting effect upon my hair. I will get to the rest of my organs some other time, but it seems good begin with the most profound symbol of aging.

Barbers
Over the decades, I have been fortunate to know thickness of hair, lustrous, brown, and even semi-flaxen in hue at times, after vainly rubbing freshly squeezed lemon juice into my scalp, steeping in sweat, enveloped in prickly Negev warmth. When I was small though, dad would pile the trio of Singer boys into his Belvedere wagon and drive the four blocks to Forest avenue for a snip snip at the hands of Joseph Brandman; a latvian Holocaust survivor. Curls of thick Tipparillo smoke lazily crept from his mouth and nose around the bare bulb and grommet chain that swayed above me. My flabby tush overflowed off the top of two old phone books, stacked onto a wooden bench.

Brandman, referred to by surname only, with the "a" pronounced as a schwa ə, was a smiley guy. He had a thin moustache over his lip, and a perfect row of no more than 43 long hairs combed over his shining bald skull. Come to think of it, he looked like Gregory Peck's rendition of Joseph Mengele in "The Boys From Brazil." Brandman's basement was the barber shop. An empty bag of Munchos potato chips lay somewhere on top of a pile of magazines. The bag was always there. My dad would never have bought Munchos - not if a gun were at his head.

Descending the staircase from Brandman's eternally summer kitchen, the smell was a combination of musty wood, cigar smoke, and brill creme. The basement was a sort of interrogation room; a naked, yellow incandescent bulb barely illuminated the work space. A squat table sat against the cinder-block wall, behind the "customer's" seat. That was where Brandman laid out his black box of torture implements: various scissors with the little finger hook for his pinky, different sized combs, and a pin-striped silken wrapping cloth kept everything neat. He swung the tall case up and onto the vinyl covered table, and deftly slid the buttons apart - the burnished brass hasps snapped up and vibrated, sprudududud, like flippers on a pinball machine. As if he was reciting from a script, he would ask "Ya vant a herrkut ?" Or he might quip, "You need a herrkut, you look like a Beatle." There was something comforting about his reference to the British mop tops - a compliment. Like the bag of Munchos - he was hip to a label.

I don't know if Brandman was formally schooled in cosmetology. If he was trained at all, I imagine that at some vague juncture he happened into a vocational landscaping course geared for immigrants, and settled, then and there that methods accorded to bushes and weeds were dually applicable for grooming the children of fellow camp survivors. With slender thinning-shears, he "layered" the sides of my scalp, moving up from my ear toward the top of my head with a predictable rhythm, tzik-tzikah,tzika-tzika-TZIK! tzik-zikah, tzika-tzika-TZIK! He certainly was consistent, but I think he didn't quite know what to do when my hair was particularly thick, because at some point he would grab clumps of hair and go at them, digging in with the scissor, kachika! kachika! kachika! Frankly, I don't think he really knew what he was doing at all because this action just plain hurt. It's not supposed to hurt at the barber.

When I was around fourteen or fifteen I started going to a place called Cutting Corner Hair Designers, at New Scotland and Quail in Albany, New York. They charged eight or nine bucks, but that included a shampoo. Then some buxom babe would cut my hair, her soft bosom occasionally grazed my shoulder. Gives me goose bumps still. Once she said, "ooh, you've got the hair." As if to say, "that's where my hair went," or maybe she just liked running her fingers through my hair. I don't know. My dad was pretty angry when I started going there. It was a statement. On my part, it meant getting my hair cut the way I wanted, by people who listened to what I wanted, without my dad muttering instructions in the barber's ear in Yiddish, nullifying my request to keep a little "over the ear." This was about independence. For my dad, it was "a vaste of money! Vut, Brandman izn't good enuf? You need sumvun to pat yer herr nicely?" Come to think of it, well, yes it was nice for once not to have my head chopped at with a pair of blunt hedge clippers.

What this all boils down to is, well, I don't worry about this anymore. Half the time these days I cut my own hair, because in fact, I don't have hair anymore. Life. Age.