‘Your hair is looking good,” said Michele. I sighed. “Well, at least that’s something,” I muttered.
It was true. Though I had just got up, the hair, mostly still dark, mostly still there, fully a short back and sides, was looking pretty good.
I had cut it myself a few days before. It was an emergency job. After weeks of it looking unruly, like a head of hair that had refused to get out of bed, I had spent an hour in the bathroom with my electric clippers, a hand mirror and a furrowed brow encouraging the wayward, lazy thing into getting up and getting a life. I didn’t quite succeed. I had to have another go the following day.
I bought my clippers for next to nothing at the height of the pandemic when the thought of going to a barber’s shop and sitting in a chair for half an hour while someone breathed bad jokes and Covid all over me seemed like a recipe for suicide.
The pandemic has abated, mostly. My paranoia less so. But that’s not the reason I’m still cutting my own hair. It is because, from stem to stern, I’m cheap. It saves me $40 every time.
In any case, my barber seems suddenly to have disappeared. I walked by his shop a few weeks back and found it empty with a “For Lease” sign hanging inside. I peered through the window. No chairs. No mirrors. No framed photo of Tony Soprano on the wall. No giant boombox playing godawful music.
“What has happened to Jordy?” I thought. “Surely the parlous state of the country hasn’t driven him out of business, too? How can this be?”
The old saw has it that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. This is nonsense. I can think of at least a half dozen other certainties in life, and the certainty of every bloke needing a haircut every so often is most certainly one of them. Hair is recession proof. So I had assumed there would always be punters in Jordy’s chop shop waiting for “fades” no matter what the GDP was up to.
Still, a moment of panic, or at least a sort of vague sense of guilt: I hoped it wasn’t me who was responsible for the “For Lease” sign. Had cutting my own hair for the past three years contributed to the death of a barber’s shop? Or had the widespread need for fades suddenly, mysteriously, faded? I walked on confused and perhaps a little chastened.
It was only after barbering my own hair once again this week that the mystery popped into my head again: what had happened to Jordy?
The headline in the local paper said, “Barber shapes new business focus”. The story below it proved that news is whatever a journalist decides it is, and this news, across 15 paragraphs no less, was that Jordy has moved his business to the presumably hairier town of Carterton.
I am no barbershop murderer after all.
Forget the hair. It’s the rest of me I fear for. I have a tumour – allegedly benign – the size of a large grape in one calf. But 18 months after booking a yearly follow-up MRI scan, and despite repeated phone calls, it appears Wellington Hospital does not want to give me one.
There is also my heart – the pacemaker takes care of that – and a bit of high blood pressure. And now I have what I’ve self-diagnosed as tennis elbow in my left arm, which is more than a little irritating because I can’t abide tennis.
I will have to wait until my appointment in mid-July – in mid-July! – for my new doctor to tell me whether I’m right, and what I might do to relieve the intermittent pain.
If I were a building, the possibility of a heritage listing is fading while early demolition appears to be approaching fast.
Yet, as I approach another birthday next week, with winter turning the screws and my aches growing by the day, I can say this: at least my hair is looking good.
