By Michele Herman
This is an open letter to some local artisans I have known well, even loved, and then deserted with no explanation. It’s intended especially for Jose and Ruthie, my most recent and unhappy breakups, but in a way, it’s a letter to the whole haircutting profession.
Human hair may be some evolutionary relic, as lifeless as fingernails and less useful. But there it sits at eye level — defining us, reflecting us, sending out a million silent, subtle messages to our fellow humans. It seems important to bond with the people I entrust it to. I also find it’s unavoidable, particularly because I wear mine short and need to have it cut often. Many people tell me that with age, they’re growing less tolerant of small talk, but I seem to bond longer and deeper as time goes by. The problem is what to do when I still like the haircutter but not the cut.
I asked the advice of a worldly friend of mine with worldly hair to match. She said that if you run into a haircutter you’ve stopped using, you look that person in the eye and say thanks for everything, but it was time to try something new. If you’re really evolved, she said, you call them up and tell them. It comes with the profession, she said, and they don’t hold it against you. I mentioned this to another friend with great hair, and she just shook her head and said, “Ah haircutters, the second-most difficult relationship.”
I’ve always vacillated between high end and low, trying to get a good cheap cut or a good cut, cheap. For years I went for the model cuts at Bumble and bumble. This meant that I paid a little and waited a lot, and once Michael J. Fox sat next to me. Then I spent a couple of years following a sad-eyed Chinese-Brazilian woman named Chelsey from one branch of Jean Louis David to another. After that came a string of neighborhood boutiques, where the cuts never lasted long enough to justify the boutique price.
I found Jose through a fellow pixie-headed friend. The salon where he works is just a couple of steps up from a barber shop, with regular guys popping gum, light FM, snapshots of the owner’s grandson at the front desk. Jose was sweet and philosophical and when, at the end of a session, he handed me the big paisley-shaped mirror and swung the chair around, he always called me “beauty” in a way that wasn’t smarmy at all.
After things went wrong with Jose I settled in with Ruthie at a place in Chelsea where the aesthetic seemed spliced together from 1960s beauty parlor and 1960s tattoo parlor. I came to it through a blonde stranger I followed around Trader Joe’s one day. She had a fantastic cut, barbered up the back and long and stringy (good stringy) enough in the front to tuck casually behind her ears.
I liked Ruthie right away. Newly arrived from Michigan, she was young and bright and cheerful. Conversation flowed from dogs to kids to relationships, and felt effortless and satisfying. Unfortunately, as hard as I tried to describe my Trader Joe’s stranger and her hair, she was never sure who I was talking about.
It occurs to me now how few women’s haircuts even have names; the only ones that come to my mind for the entire 20th century are the bob, the pageboy, the pixie and the shag, and then the three celebrity cuts that defined their eras as well as the phrase “in your face”: the Farrah, the Dorothy, the Rachel. No wonder I’m frustrated. I see some beguiling-but-nameless cut on the street — most recently, long hair in the front swept casually toward the rear as if it were gathered into a hasty ponytail, but instead of a ponytail there’s just a neat bevel at the neckline. When I try to describe it — and I describe things for a living — something essential always gets lost or something unwanted gets gained in the translation, and I end up with a cut that seems to have had a layover in Dallas. Or maybe the shape of my head and the height of my forehead and the wave of my hair just aren’t meant for that style. I couldn’t tell you — I live too close to it to have much perspective.
If you change grocers or copy shops, no one is ever the wiser. You can even break up with your gynecologist, as I have, with relative impunity, because gynecologists don’t work out of storefronts with big windows (thank heaven!). But I walk my haircut betrayal down the street, which is why for about two years now I’ve made a big cowardly loop around a certain building on Seventh Avenue to avoid a man I once went out of my way to see.
Why did I leave Jose? I was crazy about him. He was gentle and philosophical, in a seen-way-too-much-in-the-’80s gay guy kind of way. He had recently gone back to college, and his face lit up when he talked about photography and poly sci. Why did I leave him? It sounds too stupid to mention. He kept nudging me toward Meryl Streep’s white do in “The Devil Wears Prada.” But the last thing I wanted was a big matronly “S” curve of bangs preceding me into every room.
And why, more recently, did I leave Ruthie? I still have conversations with her in my head. I’m dying to know how life with her boyfriend is faring, and what’s new with her mom and kid brother back home. But her cuts always required product and blow-drying, which I loathe. Worse, she would do whatever I wanted her to do, which stopped seeming like a good thing after a while. What I long for is someone to stare hard at my face and tell me what it needs.
I understand now what I am: a serial monogamist. I am not proud. I give myself over to each new relationship, willing it to be the ONE. Then one day my eye begins to rove to other shapely heads. I start to think how much better things could be, how much younger and more attractive someone new could make me feel.
This last time it happened on Varick Street. I was out for dinner with my family when I spotted her at the bar, another blonde, with a different but equally alluring, long-in-the-front, short-in-the-back shape. All through my tilapia taco, I kept an eye on her. Finally I marched up and asked the question. She pointed down the block, toward the high-end salon where she herself cuts hair. She surveyed my head with her fingers, using that magic haircutter touch.
I couldn’t afford her, but I made an appointment with a colleague who was the “stylist of the week.” I let the assistants (for this is the kind of place with assistants who whisk your coat away and take you to the upstairs waiting room and offer you beverages) talk me into buying product. I was reminded of a time back when I was still with sad-eyed Chelsey. She asked me if I wanted my bangs feathered, but because her English was a little broken, I misunderstood. Yes, I started to say, I am feeling a little fettered.
