When we were kids, it was my father’s job to bring me and my brothers to the barbershop for haircuts.  We always went on Saturday mornings.  Sometimes we’d go to this place on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens. I forget the name of it, but it had lots of wood paneling and smelled like a combination of Old Spice and Clubman Talc. Below the large mirrors were shelves scattered with clippers and wires and numbered bladeguards and narrow glass jars filled with Barbercide and used combs and scissors. The walls had pictures of the barbers and some of their customers and their kids, and a few others of presumably famous people who got their haircut there and left commemorative autographs (I think Keith Hernandez of the Mets might have been one of them; in the 1980s, believe it or not, it was much better to be cheering for the Mets than the Yankees). There were sinks in the back, but you never got your hair washed here, or anywhere else we ever went; after your haircut, you just walked around the rest of the day with an itchy neck and a good deal of clippings on your collar. Around the holiday season, they’d put out bottles of hard liquor for men to drink while they waited for the next open chair; and unlike some other places I’d go to later in life, they were not simply for show, even for the Saturday morning crowd.

Eventually, we found a place that we’d more consistently go to in Malvern, closer to our house in Valley Stream. This one was much more bare-bones and far more suburban, located as it was in a shopping center with a King Kullen and a bunch of other random stores and a large parking lot that accommodated all of that. The walls were simply white and the ceilings were high, creating, well, lots of white. There wasn’t much hanging on those walls other than each barber’s New York State Haircutting License, and they all wore untucked light blue button-up shirts that made them look like members of a bowling team. They also didn’t do the drinks thing during the holidays.

My father would eventually make us wait for this one guy named Paul, after a few let’s just say uneven cuts. He was less aggressive with the clipper, if only by a small margin. Like nearly all of the barbers we went to, Paul was Italian and had little hair to speak of himself. He knew only a small amount of English, so our conversations were pretty limited. We’d sit in the chair and he’d look at us and say “Short?”, and we’d just shake our heads yes because what else were we supposed to do?

I thought about all of this when I took my son G for his First Haircut a few weeks ago. I wasn’t sure where to take him, so I used the sophisticated method of driving around to find a shop that didn’t look too crowded. We eventually found a shop off Route 30, at the end of small, dense shopping center with a RadioShack (which, I was sad to learn the other day, has filed for bankruptcy protection).

This place was more like the place in Malvern than the one in Queens. It was scarcely decorated, even a little stale in all of it greyness. It felt strangely like the customer service office of a cable company, or maybe the DMV. In the waiting area, in addition to the newspapers and the outdated magazines strewn along the short coffee table, there was a flat-screened TV for the customers to watch.  So, we watched a little CNN while we waited.

The barbers here used the same unwritten etiquette that’s developed in every barbershop (at least all the ones I’ve been too) to determine who’s next. The first barber to finish settles up with his customer, and then he looks around at everyone in the waiting area and asks, simply, who’s next? We all look at each other and give a head nod or a “you up?” regarding who got there first. Inevitably, somebody says they’re waiting for someone in particular, a request I’ve never seen not honored, even if it means you have a few barbers not doing anything while a long wait develops for the popular one. The whole thing sorts itself out almost invariably without issue or dispute, and rarely are more than two or three one-syllable words exchanged to sort the whole thing out.

When it was G’s turn, I stood next to him the whole time, but I didn’t have to. The barber, K, remarked that he was the best behaved 3-year old whose hair he ever cut. I watched as he tucked a white towel in the back of G’s shirt and draped on the long black covering, pretending it was a cape. He worked methodically through G’s hair, holding it in bunches with two fingers, sometimes with the comb, and trimmed away, making pleasant small talk with us the whole time. Then he cleaned up the sides and back, and gave the ticklish boy a good laugh when he put the powder on his neck. When it was all finished, and he looked all neat and clean and handsome, I asked G if he felt like a new man, the way all of us do after a good cut. He said yes, with a smile that always makes his big, deep eyes nearly close. I wonder if he really felt that way, or was just going along with it. He can, at times, be so endlessly agreeable.

We settled things up. I left a tip for Jim, and he left G with two Dum-Dums, one for him and one for J. We then went on our way, onto the rest of Saturday, just like my father and brothers and I used to do. Some things, I guess, never change.