The Man Cub and The Other Bad Barber

The Man Cub turns two next week, and this was only his fourth haircut. Through bitter experience, we’ve learned that of all Christmas Island’s barber shops, there’s only one that employs a barber who can cut toddlers’ hair. It must be like splitting the atom with a corkscrew or something. Very difficult.

Anyhow, The Man Cub needed a haircut today, even if The Good Barber wasn’t in, which he wasn’t. There was a trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s in the offing, and his shaggy early-Beatles coif just wasn’t going to get the job done.

So I drive him into town, discover The Good Barber isn’t working and move on to Plan B, which is go to the other barber shop in town and take our chances (since we know the other barber in The Good Barber’s shop is a hair-butcher). Well, the three idling barbers in the second shop scattered like dry leaves in a stiff wind when I asked which one of them specialized in cutting toddlers’ hair.

Thus did The Man Cub end up in the chair of The Barber Whose English Wasn’t So Good. Had it been better, he probably wouldn’t have been the last one to scatter.

So we put my little guy up in the big chair and he’s not feeling the love (see photo, top). But goddammit, he’s a Spartan and we have a code! I watch him as he toughs it out for a few minutes, then I turn to one of the other barbers and go, “Say, could one of you guys cut my hair real quick while he gets his done?”

The guy who volunteers then moves me around to the other side of the wall from my boy and sits me down in the one place in the tiny be-mirrored place of business where I don’t have a line-of-sight to my son (see diagram I created for The Missus after we got home, left). I can see the reflection of everybody else in the shop about 100 times each, but the only way I know he’s still there is because I have a clear line of sight to the door, and he hasn’t left.

So I’m sitting there, urging my barber to emphasize speed over accuracy because I’m nervous my son is going through this traumatizing experience alone on the other side of the wall and I don’t really give a shit what my haircut looks like anyhow. At one point, my barber asks, “Do you want the back tapered, flat or curved?” I looked at him in the mirror incredulously. “Do you know how often I see the back of my own head?? Do whatever you think looks best.” Jesus! What part of “speed over craft” did he not understand when I sat down in his chair?

The whole time, The Man Cub is completely silent. I’m awfully proud of my invisible little fellow. Figure things must be going pretty well on his side of the wall. I hear his barber giving him instructions in full sentences and just roll my eyes. Our less-than-2-year-old can point to a stuffed animal and say “bunny” and can identify “poo” when I indicate a soiled diaper, but complete sentences? This barber is a fucking idiot is the conclusion I swiftly come to.

Finally, my haircut is wrapping up and I see the other barber lift The Man Cub up out of his chair and set him on the floor. He walks around the corner and looks up at me, and the first thing I notice isn’t the concentration-camp survivor haircut (see photo, left) he’s going to be stuck with for a while. I think John McCain had the same cut when he was released from the Hanoi Hilton in 1973, and he’s done pretty well for himself until recently. No, the first thing I notice is the single tear running down one of his cheeks. I say, “Can he sit on my lap till you finish me up?” My barber grudgingly relents and another customer lifts my son up onto my lap. He melts into me and I hug him and praise him, assuring him he’s done an excellent job, which he has.

And how.

That’s when I notice the big red nick at the nape of my son’s neck. I call out, “Hey, what happened here on the back on his neck?” His barber snaps something testily about how the boy not following instructions precisely resulted in the divot in his neck. I look at my son and he looks at me, and I wipe his tear away with my finger. I hold him tighter and swear to myself that from now on, no matter what, we wait till The Good Barber is in, even if it means going to his grandparents’ looking like Paul McCartney, ca 1965.

Why write about this? Because I’m damned proud of the boy! Even in his fear, even when he couldn’t see me, even when other kids his age require an entire retinue of caregivers to even keep them in the barber’s chair and they still scream bloody murder, even when his Inquisitor was whacking wholesale chunks out of his tender young flesh, he didn’t utter a peep of complaint. He sucked it in, cowboyed-up and stuck it out with a stoicism that frankly didn’t come directly from either his mother or me.

Then we came home, bad haircuts and battle-scars in tow, and he created the disturbing pen-and-ink drawing below of his latest brush with Bad Barbery.

Lesson learned, little man. Lesson learned. (Sorry!)