I’m sitting shirtless on a tall kitchen stool, a blue towel, fixed in place by a black and silver binder clip, draped across my shoulders, Maria’s fingers brushing gently through my hair.  Her soft fingertips glide across my scalp, dissolving the stress that somehow makes a home in the concealed confusion of skull, wiry muscle, skin and hair.  

My eyelids flicker under the pleasure of intimacy.

“Who knew,” my voice, that can’t tolerate silences of longer than ten seconds, says, “that it would take a plague for us to discover that haircuts can be the ultimate in relaxation?” 

“I don’t think women needed a pandemic to make that discovery,” Maria says with an assured chuckle.

“And by the way,” she continues, “why is one sideburn half an inch higher than the other.”

“Oh, that’s to ward off the devil, apparently he loves left sideburns, so says Saint Martin de Porres, Patron Saint of Barbers,” I lie outrageously.  

“Or maybe it’s actually because when I’m shaving my right-hand deals more severely with the left side of my face than its own side?” I experiment with the truth. 

“Aahhh,” Maria says, nodding.  “Some consciously unconscious bias?”

I reclose my eyes, force a silence on the interminable voice in my brain, and try to simply enjoy the feeling of my overgrown hair being gently ruffled, my scalp massaged.

“What number do you usually ask for with the shears?” Maria asks.

“I can never remember, but the one that takes off the least amount of hair.” 

My tortured philosophie-de-coiffure is based upon the, entirely fallacious, theory that a haircut should result with the absolute least amount of hair being removed.  Using this theory, I seek to move safely through life under the powerful cloak of the anonymity-of-sameness.   

It all started fifty gone-by-in-the-blink-of-an-eye years ago, with me as a “wee lad” sitting anxiously in a wooden children’s chair set on top of our kitchen table.  Ma drapes a raggedy blue towel over my shoulders, fixing it in place with a wooden, grayed by a million Mayo showers, clothes pin.  

Next to me, now at eye level, Ruairi, our budgerigar, flutters his yellow wings, the underside flashing sickly-white, his black eyes, flat in his head, staring at me anxiously: A five-year-old that near to his cage usually meant some sort of poking devilment.  

Da scrapes the chair, with me in it, across the gray-white Formica tabletop, dragging my overgrown head of hair closer to his right hand, in which he holds a terrifyingly sharp-pointy scissors.  He warms the scissors up, snip-snip-snipping the air.

“Now don’t be shifting yer head around,” he snaps, cranky with his monthly task of cutting a lot of little children’s hair.

He leans in; the sharp point of the scissors’ blade, seemingly, going directly for my left eyeball.

My five-year-old instincts kick in: Involuntarily my head recoils.

“STOP IT!” he yells, full on angry now.  “I told ya not ta move!”

Thereafter it was, seemingly, hours of ears reddened by painful scissors-nicks; clipped hair drifting easefully beneath the clothes-pinned-towel, to transform my nylon, collared shirt – there were no other kind of little boys’ shirts available in the west of Ireland, 1969 – into the most afflicting hairshirt available since the Spanish Inquisition.  

But the scariest of the scary tools in Da’s tortu…, I mean barbering kit was the hand operated shears.  

From our vantage point in 2021, a mere hundred years after the electric shears was first patented, we take it for granted that when hair needs to be effortlessly mown, an electric motor driven shears can be found buried at the back of a bathroom drawer.  But in 1969, as I was hoisted up into that chair on top of the kitchen table, such engineering advances had not yet made their way into Da’s red, black and yellow barber’s toolkit.  

These hand shears, operated by untrained digits that fatigued easily, quickly transformed themselves into torture devices.  A dilletante barber’s hand, failing to maintain the RPM required to sever individual hair filaments, would instead snag a hefty scraw of hair in the shears, jamming it from any possible further movement.  Thereafter, the disjunction of shears, hair and scalp resulted in such pain that even today, retelling this experience, I still sense the memory in my gut and cannot suppress the grimace.  

Yet somehow the pain and humiliation – every other child, seemingly, going to a barber shop like regular humans – of kitchen barbering all paled in comparison to the outcome of this homesteading endeavor: The actual haircut.

Da did three types of haircut: Fierce bad, ferocious, and worsest ever.

Humans have many delusions that distinguish them, unfavorably, from the other mammals that root around on this planet, but perhaps humanity’s obsession with self-image is the least favorable of these distinctions.  Thus, for my five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven-year-old self, dragging myself out of the kitchen barbering chair and walking out onto the mean streets Castlebar – which had, seemingly, been devoid of all sense of style right up until I reappeared after being yell-summoned in for a scalping –remains with me as a memory of both enormous courage and humiliation.

The courage came from the resigned acceptance that there was no other option but to present yourself to the judging world of human society as it played on those streets.  

The humiliation was entirely created by my mind, deluded by that same human society into thinking that self-image actually mattered.

It wasn’t until I was just barely twelve-years-old that I summoned up the real courage to break with the tyranny of Da’s monthly administered, embarrassingly bad, and always way-too-short haircut.  

One weekday, in the middle of a school shutdown caused by a six-inch fall of snow a few days previously, I sloshed through the now melting snow up toward barbers.  In my pocket were three pound notes liberated from Ma’s purse, still in the kitchen drawer where she had left it eleven months ago the day a stroke took her first to the kitchen floor, then the hospital, and finally to a grave, forty miles away, in Leitrim.  

Da used the purse as a piggybank where he deposited milk and bread money.  On this day, I made the unauthorized executive decision that the family could go low on carbohydrates, animal fats and protein so that I could get a haircut that was presentable in the major aspect that it left my hair long, … or at least longish.

As I sloshed along the entirely un-shoveled, un-plowed (the nearest snowplow was a thousand miles away in Germany) streets in my black Addidas sneakers – self-image trumping dry feet – I realized I had to make a decision: To which of the three barbers in town would I entrust the oxymoronic task of cutting my hair long?

            There was Kelly’s Barbershop, but he was old school and would surely cut my hair short, regardless of what I asked for.  Mick Quinn’s on Main Street was of the same ilk, and Da talked to him, probably went there himself.  It was only then that it occurred to me that this was an important fact I didn’t know: Where did Da go to get his hair cut torturously short?  Oddly enough I knew that Ma used to disappear every few months into what was, seemingly, really just Maureen Hernan’s living room, and come out a few hours later with her hair looking like brown papier-mâché: A look that remained in place for several weeks.  The danger in my choice of barber was that I might get caught telling the haircutter, who was being paid with our food money, that he was to cut my hair long – wastefulness on the scale of shoveling snow that would melt itself in a few days.

            Having ruled out two barbers, the only remaining option was the one nearest me at that very moment as I sloshed through Market Square. 

            I open the door of Gerard’s Barber Shop – it too was really just his living room converted into a hair cutting place – and stick in my wooly head of hair, peering around nervously.  Had Da, my heretofore barber, been somehow sitting inside, I would have stepped back out, and immediately shipped off to Van Diemen’s Land, never again to see my friends, family or favorite books.   But the gods of coiffure are smiling on me, and it’s all scowling, beer-jowled, shaggy-maned strangers sitting in the five waiting chairs.

            The barber waves me in from the cold-wet outdoors with a flick of his scissors.  

I squeeze in, standing awkwardly behind the closed door, immediately realizing that I am now preventing Mayo’s manhood from getting the hairy part of their self-image rehabilitated.  I try to move myself, but no such movement is possible.  I can’t move towards the waiting customers without looming over their staring eyes; a step in the other direction and I’d be too close for comfort to the barber’s always moving scissors.

For five snip-snip-snipping minutes I stand there, sweating in my hand-me-down anorak; my back pinned against the white door; feeling as if the entire population of the planet is judging me a complete and utter gobeshite; who goes places he shouldn’t; takes food from his family’s mouths for the sake of getting his hair cut long; and generally gets in the way, taking up space that other, more important, people actually need.

My panic is lessened only inasmuch as I get to observe a miraculous invention: An electric shears.  It glides effortlessly over the hair-cuttee’s head, hair disappearing beneath its teeth – which literally move faster than the human eye can behold.

The heat of my anorak is killing me, but I don’t want to draw more crushing attention to myself by taking it off.  Slowly, trying to avoid detection, I unzipper it, one stubborn pair of zip-teeth at a time.

“Gud man now, gud man yoursell,” the fella in the barber’s chair says too loudly, with all eyes flicking to him, enabling a flurry of secret anorak unzippering.

With a loud sigh, he pushes himself up out of the chair.  He’s an ould fella with a farmer’s weathered-red face, whiteish hair, and the slight stoop of a man well used to hard physical labor.  

Once standing, he turns and stares at himself in the large mirror that dominates the barber shop.  His right hand starts to rise to his hair, but he stops, his eyes flicking to the reflection in the mirror of ten staring eyes. 

To my, vastly untrained eye, the ould farmer’s crop of whiteish hair appears to have been very precisely moved a half an inch above his ears, revealing a border of fish-belly-white scalp against the weathered-red skin of his face.

I risk another inch of anorak unzippering.

“How much now?” the ould fella asks the barber, who murmurs a response.

“Ohhh, cheap at thrice a price, cheap at thrice the price,” he nod-nod-nods, fishing deeply into his trousers’ pocket for a well-worn, flat black leather wallet and, licking the tips of his fingers, he extracts from it two greenish-yellowish pound notes.

The barber turns, slides open a wooden drawer, and drops the notes in silently.

“Sure, the last time I came ta town for a haircut, two month ago,” the ould fella turns to face his audience in the waiting chairs.  “Didn’t I run inta Tomma McGinty below in Mick Quinn’s.”

He raises his hand at them, brings it down fast in a ya-wouldn’t-believe-this wave.

“Right over ta Padda Hoban’s he took me.  Just for a half-wan, … don’t ya see.”

He closes his eyes and nods slowly.  

“Sure, we ended up on the beer for three days.  Cost me a bleddy fortune, … a bleddy fortune.  On t’secunt day, I sold me bike to a barman for twenta quid.  An’ poor ould Mammy without at home, fadin’ an’ milkin’ t’cow.  Out in the dark her goin’, an’ her on a cane with an oil lamp hangin’ from t’other hand.  Good God above us, but drink is an awful curse. Me poor ould bike gone.  I’m on t’ould fella’s rattly ould wan since.”

He shakes his head slowly, his watery eyes turning down to the floor.  

“But the yellin’ Mammy done when I got home,” he kinda-sorta laughs, and looks up at his audience with a deviously unrepentant smile.  

“‘Twoulda woke the dead!”

To my twelve-year-old sweating panic, he turns to leave, and I’m faced with the choice of leaving the barbershop ahead of him and then returning – looking like an even bigger gobeshite – or shuffling up next to the barber’s platform in a way that might angrily confuse the other customers that I’m jumping the queue.

Once again, the gods of coiffure smile on me, as the next customer lurches out of his chair, shoulders back, up onto the barber’s platform.  Sighing, each in their turn, the other customers stand halfway up and with shoulders hunching, knees banging off the magazine piled coffee table, move one seat closer to their haircut. 

Initially relieved to get out of my the-very-opposite-of-anonymity stance by the door, I flop into the last seat in the queue, still warm from its previous occupant, but upon sitting, the heat of the chair, my anorak and this last bout of panic has me ready to puke.

I take a bunch of deep breaths, eyes darting around the barbershop, pull at the collar of my jumper to let some heat out and air in.  Eventually, I cool down enough, my mind stops racing enough, and my stomach settles enough, that I can watch and learn from every little thing that happens in a barbershop. 

The barber moves in a slow, easeful way – completely the opposite of Da’s anxious, sudden, ear-cutting lurches – with the scissors seemingly an extension of his hand.  He stands back a half step, crouches a little, angling his head to review his work. 

It’s as if he actually cares what the haircut looks like!

But as I relax into studying the workings of a barbershop, the interminable voice in my mind starts to intrude with new, previously unthought of, scary thoughts: 

How much does a haircut cost?  

Was two pound just the ould fella’s price, or is that the price for everyone? 

What if it’s really four pound or three pound fifty?  

I only have three – what happens then?  

Do I end up washing dishes in the barber’s kitchen?

Can you actually tell the barber how you want your hair cut?

What if he refuses to cut my hair long? 

With the worry-circuits in my brain glowing red hot, I force myself to resort to my worry reliever of first and last resort – escape through reading.  

I lean forward over the knee-banger-coffee table, scan the pile of magazines and grab a tattered copy of Shoot.  I flick through the pages quickly, not getting enough distracting stimulation from photos of Emilyn Hughes, Steve Heighway and Mick Mills kicking a ball, pointing a finger, all looking serious and anxious, like they’re at work.  

I lean forward again and carefully place the Shoot back on the pile.  Now I notice that no one else is reading, but their eyes are all staring at me.  

Does my impatience with Shoot look bad?  

Should I have liked it more?

I mean Steve Heighway is Irish, even though he’s called after an American road.  I probly shoulda looked at his picture for longer.

With the worry circuits glowing again, I impulsively grab a coverless glossy magazine with two-inch-tall, screaming headlines.   Inside those glossy pages, my mind sponges up useless facts to chase away the worry: The French claim this new European Economic Community thing will bring all the countries into a United States of Europe.  Fat chance!  Sure, half the time we can’t even understand what the hell the frogs are spouting off about.  And anyways, Da says we only want the German’s money to fix the roads and build factories, then the EEC can feck off.  Earth’s population to double to eight billion by 2020.  Sure, you couldn’t fit that many people on this planet, and anyway, that’s so far away, who gives a damn?  A new ice age is coming: American weathermen are predicting we’re headed for another ice age.  Their little weathermen brains’ idea to stop the ice age by covering over the north pole with black soot, so it’ll melt.  Sure, wouldn’t it be easier to drop a nuclear bomb on it instead?  

But I do get useful information too, like how eating too many onions can create a dangerous electrical charge in your body.  And there’s a story about the vicar from Chesterfield who ran away with his sixteen-year-old babysitter, and now they’re running a Bed and Breakfast in Blackpool.  She’s holding twins in the photograph, but the babies are black, and she and the vicar are white – as a matter of fact, they’re pasty white.  And I never knew that David Bowie has a brother who’s “troubled with mental health issues.”

My soaking up of the News of the World Magazine is interrupted every ten or fifteen minutes by having to move over to the next warm chair, as each victim’s shaggy mane of hair is summoned up to the barber’s platform to get slaughtered. 

Debilitated by my eternal cluelessness and stupidity, I’m forced to flip these liabilities into assets.  My plan, formulated in the sheen of those glossy pages, and employed surprisingly well from that day forward, forever and ever amen, is to happily embrace my thorough ignorance of everything even approaching cool-trendy-fashionable.

My relief at getting off the hook of having to be cool is physically palpable.  I breath out an extra loud sigh, turning four sets of hair-cuttee-waiting eyes.  But deviously I disguise my true intent by flapping my anorak and pulling at the collar of my jumper in fake, but actually real, attempts to lower my temperature … but not to be cool!    

This decision is borne from that nerdy confidence that comes from having such vital information as to monitor your onion intake to avoid spontaneous self-lightning; avoid Blackpool, vicars and twins at all costs; and to examine Bowie’s lyrics closely for family influences – to see if regular people could actually write something meaningful.

Eventually, as happens in life, whether you desire it or not, it’s my turn.

The barber, a gaunt-faced, bearded man, with penetrating eyes, waves me up onto the platform as he silently sweeps male-Mayo’s fallen hair into a dustpan.

New problem: I now need to remove my anorak.  After a minor kerfuffle, I successfully, if inelegantly, remove my outer layer without knocking out anyone’s eye.  

The barber nods silently towards the coat rack.

My anxiety projects impatience into his nod.  

I stare hard at the coat rack, assured that if I recklessly hang my anorak in such an unprotected fashion, then, with my eyes closed, to avoid the blindness caused by hair particle intake, the door to the barber’s shop will fly open and in will burst a gang of international anorak thieves to steal my hand-me-down anorak, with the not-so-smallish split-seam under the right arm.  Thus, will be confirmed the wrongness of my wantonly spending money at a barber shop and not letting Da cut my hair for free at home. 

Like a man approaching the gallows, I step over to the coat rack, hang my anorak, and barely breathing, sit anxiously into the barber’s chair, where I’m immediately enshrouded in a blue nylon cape that billows down over my arms.

The barber’s penetrating eyes look into the mirror at me, his hand resting on the back of the chair.

He raises his eyebrows as he nods slightly towards my reflection.

I squirm.

He stares.

Finally, eyes down on the mottled bottom of the mirror, I mumble:

“Not too shor….” 

I attempt to wave my hand toward my head, but instead catch it in the blue nylon cape, tugging it free from my neck.

With no reaction, the barber tucks the cape back into my shirt collar, and he’s off to work: Snip-snip-snipping.  

Fifteen minutes later, my anorak miraculously not stolen, I swagger out of the barber shop, and slosh home with one pound note left in the back pocket of my Wrangler’s, my shoes and socks soaking wet, but the first shoot of independence sprouting green from my mind’s rocky soil of endless worry, a self-esteem vacuum and the deeply confirmed conviction of my eternal stupidity.

To my horror, Da is sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea, shake-reading the Irish Press.

I make a big show of the returning the pound to Ma’s purse.

“Turns out, I didn’t need this,” I say, kinda-sorta brushing my hair with my hand.

“Did ya get a sliced pan?” he looks at me curiously, no carbohydrates visible on my person.

“No, er …. I gotta haircut.”

“A hair…cut,” he lowers the Press.  “Well, he didn’t take much off for two quid, I’d a done ….”

Sweat gushes from every pore in my body.

But he lets his trail-off trail off, and just stares me in the eye, gritting his teeth.

“Yeah, he was fierce busy,” I lie outrageously, looking away, panting for breath.

“Well, ‘tis better than nathin’,” he gives the Press a shake that’d rattle Dev within in his grave, and hiding behind the newsprint says:

“Anyways, I was afraid ya were goin’ ta ask me ta cut it.  Sure, there’s no need of me doin’ that sort of stuff anymore.  Run on an’ take care of yer own stuff.”

The green floods from my shoot of independence, … but it survives.

Many barbers have cut my hair since that day, all of them getting the direction:

“Just a trim, but don’t worry if you take too much, it’ll grow back in a week.”

Turns out my hair is like a weed, that quickly reverts to overgrowth.

Three thousand miles from the Market Square in Castlebar, the barbers are Boston are mostly immigrants:

A Greek who loves politics, watches all the US Presidential debates on Greek television, agreeing wholeheartedly with the oldest democracy’s assessment of the most curious democracy.

A Brazilian who couldn’t contain his laughter at my choice of hair style – fringe, sideburns and neck all squared off – summoning over his fellow barbers to laughingly display what the long departed, but not forgotten, wag Pat Shea had labelled as my “helmet head haircut.”

An Algerian who spittingly curses France for four hundred years of colonization and, when he hears my accent, loudly demands I do likewise of England’s eight hundred years in Ireland!

A Ukrainian with whom, on my September 11, 2001 lunchbreak, I watched the footage of the Twin Towers collapsing in on themselves amidst billowing black smoke.  Each time the unbelievable-to-our-eyes footage rewound, he would say: “I fukeen tol’ thees country, don’t fuck with the A…raabs.  Them’s crazy peuples.  I fukeen tol’ ….” 

A Russian who was forced to train as a hairdresser in the Soviet Union because when he showed up at the university, into which he had been accepted, the registrar told him “go away, we already have too many Jews here.”  Upon emigration to the US, knowing only one word of English – “No!” – he defaulted to cutting men’s hair. 

Right now, in Massachusetts, cutting someone’s hair in a barbershop is a crime, punishable by …, well it’s a crime; punishment TBD; enforcement zero percent.  Though the State Police are following anyone with too neat a trim as a potential QAnon suspect and a confirmed idiot.

As with many things, this last year has changed life’s most basic actions.  Now, getting my hair cut is not the hassle of constantly checking the time as I flick from my phone to GQ to Sports Illustrated, ready to jump in should the next customer in line indicate, by a shake of their shaggy head, that they don’t want the next available barber.  

Who knew you could choose your own barber?

The ultimate in curious democracy.

In times of plague, a kitchen haircut is an opportunity to relax into a surprisingly meaningful intimacy.  

It’s only taken four and a half decades, but my lack of respect for the aesthetics of coiffure and my constant refrain of “don’t worry, it’ll grow back in week” has finally aged into a comfortable truth.