The Price of the Haircut
by Brock Clarke
On Monday, an unarmed black teenage
boy was shot in the back and killed by a white city policeman. On
Tuesday, there was a race riot in our city, a good-sized one. On
Wednesday, the mayor formed a committee to discover why there had
been a race riot, and on Friday he held a news conference to announce
the committee’s findings. The mayor told us (we were watching
the news conference at David’s house, because David’s
house had the biggest TV and was furthest from where the riot had
been) that the committee had initially believed the race riot had
been caused by the black, unarmed teenage boy being shot in the
back and killed by the white city policeman—because there
had been other unarmed black teenage boys shot in the back and killed
by white city policemen, fifteen in the last five years to be exact,
and because, of course, the riots had happened the day after the
boy had been shot—but the mayor put the matter to us as he’d
put it to the committee: that this was too familiar, too obvious;
that riots had been caused by events like this too many times already;
and that would-be rioters would be desensitized, bored even, by
such a thing. The mayor had scolded the committee for their highly
unimaginative findings (and we were a bit ashamed of ourselves,
because we, too, had assumed that the riots had been caused by the
shooting).
In short,
the mayor told the committee that its initial findings were no good
and that they should go back and find something else. And so they
did, and this time, the mayor told us, the committee had found the
true cause of the riot: it had been caused by a barber named Gene
who charged eight dollars for a haircut and who had said something
racist while giving one of these eight-dollar haircuts and the customer
who had been getting the haircut had responded in kind and word
had gotten out and one thing had led to another and finally to the
riot. The mayor brought out charts and graphs that showed exactly
how one thing could lead to another, and he also brought out eyewitnesses
and experts who testified that, yes, indeed, this barber was to
blame for the race riot, and then they showed us an enlarged picture
of Gene, who had a good head of white hair and a thick white mustache
and large glasses with translucent plastic frames and who looked
much like all our grandfathers— which made sense, since each
of our grandfathers had also said not a few racist things in his
time—and all in all, the presentation was convincing in the
extreme. The mayor concluded by saying that he was certain this
revelation would help begin the difficult racial healing process
and restore confidence in our unjustly criticized police officers,
and then the news conference was over.
“Wow,”
we said, turning off the television set.“Eight-dollar haircuts.”
Because for
years we’d been paying fifteen, seventeen, sometimes twenty-plus dollars for a haircut, and the haircuts were never good, weren’t
ever good enough to justify the amount of money we’d spent
on them, and often, after we’d had our hair cut, we’d
sit around telling each other that the haircuts didn’t look that bad, that maybe if we parted our hair differently
the haircuts would look better, and that in any case the bad haircuts
would eventually grow in, and it was embarrassing for us,
grown men all, to have to sit around and lie like this, to ourselves
and each other, about our awful, expensive haircuts. It was emasculating,
if you thought about it, and we did, all the time: we thought, for
instance, how we could never imagine our fathers sitting around
telling lies about their haircuts, how this was another
way in which we’d failed to live up to their example, and
how if we were to continue to get such bad haircuts then our self
esteem would be totally and permanently in the crapper and if we
were to continue to pay so much money for those bad haircuts then
our sons wouldn’t be able to go to the best colleges, either,
and would end up like us, graduates of cheap state universities
who had unfulfilling jobs and sat around fretting about bad, overpriced
haircuts.
Because they
really were bad haircuts, and we really had paid way too much for
them. Trent had paid fifteen dollars to get a severe Roman-centurion
haircut that Marc Antony might have been jealous of; Michael had
paid seventeen dollars to have his sideburns butchered so badly
that one was gone entirely and the other had somehow gotten longer,
thicker, more muttonchopish; David had paid twenty-five dollars to get a haircut that was all business in the front, all party in
the back. Right after he got that haircut, David ran into his ex-wife
on the street (all of our wives had left us, and although they,
our now ex-wives, never said as much, we all knew they had left
us in large part because of our bad haircuts, and who could blame
them really? Who would want to be with a man with such an awful
haircut, and who could respect a man who paid so much, time and
time again, for such an awful haircut?) and she took one look at
him and said,“Hey, nice haircut.”
“Really?”
David said.
“No,”
she said.
“She
actually said that,” David told us. “And then she laughed.
It was a mean laugh.” David was wearing a baseball cap when
he told us this story—he was, like the rest of us, over forty
and too old to wear a baseball cap—but none of us called him
on it, because of his truly horrific haircut and what his wife had
said about it, and believe me, our empathy for him was huge, especially
mine: because I can’t even tell you how bad my haircut was,
and how much I had paid for it. Even now, it’s too difficult
to talk about.
But maybe
it wouldn’t hurt so much to have such bad haircuts—
we’d resigned ourselves to having bad haircuts, we’d
known no other kind—if we didn’t have to pay so much
for them. If we only had to pay eight dollars for our haircuts,
then it wouldn’t be nearly as awful, nearly as humiliating.
It would be like we were getting a deal on our bad haircuts.
That was our thinking.
“But
wait,”Trent said. “What about the riots? Are we really
going to give this racist barber our business?”
He had a point
and we spent a highly engaged few minutes discussing the matter.
Because the riots really were horrible and life-changing for so
many people—so many abandoned and not-quiteabandoned buildings
set on fire; so many white motorists pulled out of cars and beaten;
so many department stores ransacked and looted; so many black men
harassed, beaten, shot at with rubber bullets, maced and arrested
by police in riot gear. So many restaurateurs and nightclub owners
who had risked all by investing in the impoverished but architecturally
significant part of town where the riot had taken place; so many
of these brave pioneers who had gutted and refurbished these architecturally
significant buildings and who had turned them into brewpubs and
sushi bars tricked out with Italian marble and complicated track
lighting, who had made a successful go of it and had managed to
convince, with their many off-duty police officers as security,
white suburbanites that it was safe to come back into the city again,
at least for a few hours on a Friday or Saturday night—these
people were ruined, too, or at least their investments were, or
at least their investments were until the city came through with
the no-interest loans it was promising to these restaurant and nightclub
pioneers. Yes, the riot really had been horrible, and were we, as
right-minded, left-leaning, forward-thinking men of the world,were
we really going to patronize the hateful barbershop that had caused
all this misery and destruction in our city?
Because we
really were right-minded, left-leaning, forward-thinking men of
the world. For instance, the day after the riot we had all leapt
into action. David, who teaches history at one of the underperforming
city high schools, sent his ninth graders to the school resource
center to watch filmstrips of civil disturbances from throughout
our nation’s history. Trent, who works at the main branch
of the city library, scrambled to set up a display of books by Malcolm
X, Larry Neal, Maya Angelou, and other radical, black writers, even
though it wasn’t anywhere near African-American History Month.
Michael, who’s a waiter at a local steakhouse, began soliciting
and accepting donations from his customers on behalf of the dead
black teenager’s mother and father. Me, I work in a silk screening
shop, and we had all these T-shirts left over from the last riot—twelve
or so years ago now—that read No Justice, No Peace,
and I put them in boxes outside the shop, with a sign on the boxes
that said the T-shirts were free to any socially conscious citizen
who wanted them. But was all this enough? Wasn’t it also our
duty to do something pro-active and civic minded in the wake of
the riots, like not get our haircuts, no matter how cheap they were,
from the racist barber who had caused the riot, as the mayor had
so clearly demonstrated?
But as David
argued, that was easy for the mayor to say: because he
had an excellent haircut, and no doubt he had an excellent haircut
because he had the money to pay for it, and because it was easier
to get an excellent haircut after already having had previous excellent
haircuts, and you could only get those previous excellent haircuts
if you had the money to get them in the first place. And then there
were the four of us, who could not afford and had never been able
to afford the kind of haircut the mayor had, who were permanently
shut off from the world of excellent hair by virtue of our middling
salaries and our long history of bad haircuts, and yet we were also
doomed to pay too much for these bad haircuts, much like the black
people who rioted were doomed to pay too much, for instance, for
lousy foodstuffs at the understocked and overpriced neighborhood
grocery store, the only grocery store they could go to, because
it was the only one within walking distance and few of the residents
of the neighborhood could afford cars. Because when you thought
about it, David said, we were helpless, just like the rioters were
helpless; we were caught in a vicious cycle, just like the rioters
were in a vicious cycle; we were desperate, just like the rioters
were desperate, and desperate people do desperate things, things
they probably shouldn’t. Yes, desperation made the rioters
riot, and desperation would make us get eight-dollar haircuts from
the racist barber, too.
Well, it was
a spectacular piece of logic all right, and we sat there quietly
for a while, as if the logic were something beautiful in the room,
something so very beautiful that it was the exact antithesis of
our so very ugly haircuts. We sat there awhile, admiring the logic,
contemplating it, not wanting to disturb it until David, who owned
the logic and had the right to decide how long we would sit there
in silence, admiring it, finally broke that silence and said,“Come
on, let’s go.”
We went. Went
to get our haircuts from the eight-dollar racist barber who was
responsible for the riot that had torn apart our city. But we didn’t
go with a collectively light heart, don’t think that we did.
No, rest assured we were a very grave bunch as we piled into Trent’s
station wagon and drove over to Gene’s to get our haircuts.
We were somber, all right, full of the enormity of what we were
doing, the significance, the complexity, and, in some way,we felt
more human than we ever had before. Because if, as someone once
said, to be human is to be compromised, then we were feeling very
human indeed. Because there was the half of us that wanted our cheap
haircuts, that felt we deserved them,
were owed them by someone—society maybe; but the
other half of us knew that what we were doing was very wrong and
that we’d have to do something to make it a little less wrong,
a little more forgivable, something that might enable us to explain
away and justify our actions later on. Not that we had second thoughts
about getting our cheap haircuts (we didn’t, and would not
be deterred), but we all agreed that something had to be done to
make it known that we were not just garden-variety bigots getting
our hair cut for eight dollars at the racist barber’s. We
needed to assure people—ourselves, too—that we were
against what we were doing even as we were doing it. Trent, who
is the most politically active of our group and who has spearheaded
many a protest in our city and who owns his own bullhorn and who
even, at that very moment, had generically worded protest placards
in his car, suggested that, after we actually got our haircuts,
we picket the barbershop to express our outrage, etc. It was an
interesting idea all right, except that it might leave us a little
too exposed as hypocrites and we didn’t want that, any more
than we wanted to pay exorbitant prices for our bad haircuts. Michael,
who as mentioned waits tables and is very much concerned with gratuities,
suggested that we shouldn’t leave the barber a tip, but this
didn’t seem a big enough gesture, especially since we never
tipped any of our barbers and certainly had no intention of tipping
this one. Finally, we decided to do the very least we could do:
we would keep our ears open, our eyes peeled, so that we could explain
later on how very awful it was at the racist barber’s, how
we had no idea how severe the problem was and how horribly racist
the barber actually was and you could easily understand how he had
caused the riot, and now that we knew,we had no intention of ever,
ever letting him cut our hair again, even if the haircut was incredibly
cheap, only eight dollars, which was something of a miracle if you
considered it in the context of all the other, pricier, albeit not
racist barbers.
There was
a big crowd milling around outside the barbershop when we pulled
up. This was not unexpected. In fact, in the car we had discussed
what we would say to the big crowd milling around outside the barbershop.
We assumed that the crowd would be there to express their outrage
at their barber and how he was responsible for the riot that had
rocked our city, and we also assumed the crowd would largely be
black, and since they were largely black they wouldn’t be
able, right off, to understand the difference between us and the
regular patrons of the barbershop, might even mistake us for the
bigots who had caused the riot, etc. But that was far from the case,
as we would make clear. Because even though the barbershop’s
neighborhood was largely white,
none of us lived in that neighborhood; the white people who lived
in that neighborhood were called Appalachian. At least
Trent, whose ex-wife worked for the city census bureau, said that
was what they were called, officially, and this was what we called
them in public and around people we didn’t know very well.
When we were talking among ourselves, we called them poor white
trash, and we would explain to the black protestors that we were
as scared and distrustful of the people in the neighborhood as they
were, and, aside from the color of our skin, we were as different
from the regular patrons of the barbershop as they, the black protestors,
were. And if the black protestors then asked, as they no doubt would,
why then, if we were so different from the bigots who normally frequented
the barbershop,were we going to get our haircuts there? It was a
good question, and we would admit this to them, right before we
would hand over the figurative microphone to David, who would then
put forth his theory about the vicious cycle of our bad, overpriced
haircuts and how this made us much like the rioters and maybe the
protestors, too, who probably had their own variation on that vicious
cycle, that vicious cycle which made us close kin, brothers, really,
and as brothers couldn’t they cut us a little slack? This
would work. We were certain of it. Because of course the black protestors
would be able to see our haircuts, which were, as you know, incredibly
bad.
There were
two problems with this plan. One, the protestors weren’t black;
they were white. We found this troubling in the extreme. Where were
they, the black people of our city? Had they not watched and listened
to the mayor’s televised press conference? Had they not heard
the committee’s findings, had they not scrutinized the very
convincing charts and graphs? Had they not taken to heart the testimony
of the experts and eyewitnesses? Had they not seen the picture of
Gene? Did they not care that this racist barbershop was the cause
of the riot that had rocked our city? Were the black people of our
city this politically apathetic? Were they content to leave their
civic and political and social well-being in the hands of these
white protestors? Yes, it was a blow to all of us, because David’s
theory had been so convincing and we had all begun to feel a special
kinship with these black people, had begun to feel that their race
and our hair were like an enormous door, and on one side of the
door were the questions and on the other the answers, the answers
that had always been kept from us. But maybe, we thought, we could
open the door together. Except that the black protestors we’d
expected weren’t here. Did they not want to open the
door? It was mysterious all right, and we didn’t pretend to
understand it, just as we didn’t pretend to understand why
getting overcharged for awful haircuts made men like us so very
unhappy.
Speaking of
men like us, that was the second problem with the white protestors:
they weren’t protestors. We realized this after we’d
piled out of Trent’s station wagon and moved closer to the
throng. These people had no signs or placards, were holding no megaphones
nor chanting any chants. No, they weren’t even a throng. They
were merely waiting in line, quietly, to get into the barbershop.
They were customers, would-be customers, and more than that, they
weren’t the Appalachians from whom we were prepared to distinguish
ourselves. No, they were middle-class white men wearing moderately
expensive
running sneakers and white ankle socks and khaki shorts and polo
shirts, just like us, and, just like us, they all had very, very
bad haircuts.
Well, we
had no idea, no idea how epidemic this problem was, no idea that
there were so many men like us, and it stunned us to be in such
a large community of man. It made us mighty uncomfortable, to be
true, and for several minutes we stood off a bit from the line,
as if the line had nothing to do with us. Because we had for years
thought of ourselves as antagonistic to the larger community, whatever
that larger community might be. Our haircuts had made us outsiders,
rebels if you will, which was the only good thing we could ever
think to say about them. And so you can understand why we didn’t
get in line right away. But that seemed silly after a while, because
we so obviously belonged in the line, our haircuts told everyone
that we belonged in that line, and in this way our haircuts betrayed
us again. And so we gave in and did apparently what one
does when one finds oneself in a community of man: we got in line
with the rest of the community and waited to get our cheap haircuts.
It was a
very tense wait. At first no one spoke. At first,we all stared straight
ahead at the badly cut back of the man’s head in front of
us. Then, after a few minutes, David asked meekly if anyone knew
anything about Gene. Someone said that he’d heard he had been
a prison barber, that he was a white supremacist with Aryan tattoos.
This was dismissed right away as mere, obvious rumor. Someone said
that he, Gene, was continually aphoristic and sometimes the aphorisms
were racist and sometimes they weren’t. This fit in with our
earlier impression of Gene as grandfatherly, and we were quiet again
for a while as we thought about our grandfathers and our mixed feelings
about them, too, and then Michael said something vague and generic
about the riots, how he understood why the riots had happened and
how he didn’t blame the rioters one bit. It was difficult
to disagree with this, and we didn’t, and everyone murmured
their assent until Trent wondered out loud where all the black people
were, wondered why they weren’t protesting and picketing the
barber shop, chanting angry slogans, that kind of thing. All of
us in line agreed that we found this somewhat curious. And then
someone piped up and said he’d heard that there were large
crowds of black people at the police headquarters downtown, picketing
and protesting the white cops’ shooting of yet another black
teenage boy in the back. This got everyone in a bit of a lather.
Because hadn’t these protestors listened to the mayor’s
news conference and the committee’s findings? Were they, too,
guilty of not thinking outside the box? It
seemed like they were guilty of this, and now that we thought
about it, the riot itself hadn’t exactly been innovative,
either. Because what had earlier seemed impressive—momentous
and important and life changing—now seemed obvious and tired:
the same old looted grocery stores and white people pulled from
cars and beaten, etc. Now that we thought about it,we were ashamed
of the riot, too, as it was pretty much the same old same old. “That
riot was a disgrace,” I said. “What were those
black rioters thinking?”
I didn’t
stop there, either: no, I went on, and gave voice to what had always
disturbed us about the black people in our city, those black people
who had rioted and who were now down at the police headquarters
for absolutely no good reason; who never seemed to appreciate our
right-minded, left-leaning, forward-thinking, albeit sometimes theoretical
and moral as opposed to active support of their struggle against
oppression and who never responded to our friendly “yos”
and “what ups” when we greeted them on the street; who
never seemed to appreciate how uncomfortable these greetings made
us, who never seemed to understand how fraudulent we felt saying,“Yo”
and “What up,” but that we suffered it because we wanted
them, the black people of our city, to know that we were on their
side, rhetorically speaking, that we were willing to meet them on
their linguistic turf. But they never seemed to appreciate the gesture,
never responded in kind; or, if they responded at all, it was with
awful, withering glares that made us wonder if there was something wrong with these black people, if they really knew who
was on their side and who wasn’t and if they really wanted
our help, if they wanted help at all, and for that matter if they
even wanted to help themselves. And then there were their haircuts—the
hair extensions and the high fades and the cornrows and the old
school pick-in-the-hair afros—these haircuts that were so
very expensive and,we thought, so very ugly, and yet they got these
haircuts on purpose: unlike us, who had no choice, these
people made a conscious decision to pay too much for their ugly
haircuts, and not only that, they didn’t call them haircuts.
Oh no, one didn’t cut hair, one cut heads, which
we found more than a little barbaric and which made us wonder—again,
again—what was wrong with these black people, these
black people who were now, with their intentionally expensive and
hideous cut heads, protesting down at the police headquarters when
they knew full well that the riots had nothing to do with the police
and had everything to do with Gene, and so I spoke for all of us
when I asked, at the top of my lungs,“What is wrong with these black people?”
I immediately
suspected that I’d said something inappropriate, because everyone
started shuffling their feet nervously and even David, Michael,
and Trent wouldn’t meet my eyes. I thought about apologizing
for what I had said,was about to point out my haircut and how truly
horrific it was and how it often made me say and do things I shouldn’t.
It made me, for instance, often speak for the four of us, for the
collective we, instead of for myself alone. It somehow
seemed less lonely to speak for four men with bad, overpriced haircuts
than just one. At first we all liked it, me saying “we”
instead of “I,” but the more we thought about it, the
more pathetic a coping device it seemed, and we all agreed that
it was odd and awful that something designed to make you less lonely
ends up making you more so. And we also agreed that I should stop
referring to us as we and start referring to the four distinct
individuals we were. And I tried,we all knew I tried, but I often
failed, I often slipped up and still spoke for the group, and I
blamed that on my awful, overpriced haircut, too.
But it turns
out that I didn’t have to make excuses this time, because
a man with an extraordinarily wide side part said,“It kind
of makes you angry, the whole thing,” and then someone with
a greasy, uneven brush cut went one step further and said he knew
what it was to get angrier and angrier until there was nothing to
do with the anger but let it out. There was more vocal assent to
this, and a couple of men in line, men with the worst of the worst
haircuts, gave each other high fives. One man who had large, trapezoidal
bare patches in the back of his head wondered out loud why the line
wasn’t moving. Had anyone gone into the barbershop or come
out? he wanted to know. One person had gone in, it turned out, but
hadn’t come out yet. So, had anyone seen Gene’s work?
No one had, and this made things even more tense. What happens if
his haircuts are worse than the ones we already have? One man with
nasty-looking razor cuts on his neck asked. What happens if the
mayor got it wrong, if the haircuts are more than eight dollars?
Another man wanted to know. They had fucking better not be more than eight dollars. The man who said this smacked his meaty
right hand into his left palm, and it was like a call to arms, and
the whole line suddenly took up this call to arms, and saying we
could not take it anymore, we had been pushed too far, all of a
sudden we were on the verge of our own riot. Because you can’t
push people around for too long. You can’t treat them like
second-class citizens forever. You can’t expect them to just
sit by and take it. You can’t.
When the door
opened, everyone became profoundly quiet. Then a cheer went up.
Because we could see the guy who’d had his hair cut, and it
wasn’t bad, not bad at all! It wasn’t perfect—there
were stray hairs peeking out on the sides, and his receding hairline
had been slightly accentuated instead of obscured—but all
in all it wasn’t a terrible haircut at all, and it gave us
great hope: you could almost feel the crowd elevate a little, rise
up at the sight of his haircut and in anticipation of the next question—not,
“Did Gene say anything racist?” but “Did it only
cost you eight dollars?”
“It
did,” the man said. “It really did! I gave him a ten
and I left him a dollar tip and I still have a dollar left over!”
Here he waved the dollar bill at us, over his head, like a flag.
And would
you believe the world changed a little bit, right then? It became
a little brighter, a little more hopeful, and all of us in line
changed a little bit, too, became a little brighter, a little more
hopeful, and a little more generous, a little more empathetic. We
would be better, happier people from there on out, we were certain
of it. We even felt more generous toward the black protestors, no
matter how deeply buried they were in denial and self-deception
and self destruction. After all, who were we to judge? We were where
we needed to be, and maybe they needed to be down at the
police headquarters and maybe at that very moment they, too,were
massed in front of a door,waiting for their old bad helpless lives
to die and their new ones to be born. Maybe, like us, they were
watching that door swing open for the first time; maybe, like us,
they were waiting patiently in line to cross that threshold, so
happy to finally leave the question and enter the answer.
Brock Clarke has published a novel, The Ordinary White Boy (Harcourt, 2001), and a collection of stories, What We Won’t Do (Sarabande, 2002; winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction). His third book, Carrying the Torch, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Short Fiction and will be published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2005. He teaches English and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. (4/2005)