Trim it Up a Bit by B-Shop Lover

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Trim it up a Bit by B-Shop Lover
I had been going to the same barber shop for ages, ever since I was a little kid. The old barber could literally cut any style from a mullet to a crewcut and beyond. I’d seen him do ladies haircuts as well as men and kids. He had gone back to school a few years ago to learn how to style hair. It was the summer after I graduated from high school in the mid 1970’s. The weather was hot and sticky.

I was in need of a good trim. It had been a couple of months and my hair was a bit out of control. I went to the one-chair barber shop and I found a different barber. There was no one waiting, so he took me right to the chair.
I told him I just wanted my hair trimmed-up around the edges, and not much taken off anywhere else. The guy nodded. I asked him what happened to Evan, the other barber. He told me Evan had suffered a stroke and had sold him the shop.

He covered me with a white pin-striped linen cape and inserted a neck strip. The barber sprayed water on my hair and began combing it out. I was facing away from the mirror. The barber inserted his shears and began cutting the right side of my hair. I knew it was long, but it sure seemed there were some very large clumps tumbling down the cape. I reminded him "Not a lot off anywhere, just a good trim-up." He continued to comb and shear hair off over the ears and down the back towards the nape. Then he started on the left side doing the same. I already suspected I was headed for a short haircut judging from the clumps hitting the cape. He followed over the left ear and down the nape area.

He then put the comb and shears down and I heard him pick up the big old Oster 111 clippers, snap a blade on and turn them on. He tilted my head towards the left and ran them up the sideburn, and across the top of the right ear. This time huge chunks of hair fell. I resigned myself that this was going to be one really short cut. When finished with the right side, he tilted my head to the right and held it there while stripping the left side of hair.

He next pushed my head forward, holding it in place while he clipped the hair on the nape area.
Oh boy, now I am beginning to panic. He turns off the Oster, brushes off the blade and hangs it up, picking up a small pair of silver Andis Master clippers. I hear the Andis clippers turn on with a clack and he begins to literally shave the hair off the lower parts of the sides, making a wide arch over the ears, and then clipping the nape in the same manner leaving a short taper.

He trims my moustache with the Andis’ over a comb and does the same to the eyebrows. Then be turns off the Andis clippers, brushes the blades and hangs them back up.
He re-wets the hair on top of my head and begins combing it straight up and shearing off large chunks of it. He appears not quite satisfied, and switches to using thinning shears and severely thinning the hair, which results in him combing out wads of thinned hair. By now the cape is covered with cut hair. To say the least I am not amused.

I then hear the water running. He brushes the cut hair away from my neckline, and around the top of the cape, unsnaps the cape, removed the neck strip and folds the cape halfway down.
The barber fills his shaving mug with hot water, and after draining it, begins to make lather using his shaving brush. He lathers me on each side from where the sideburns used to be around the top of the ears, down the neckline and across the nape. I must admit it felt good.
He began stropping his straight razor on the leather strop hanging under the arm of the chair. He asked me if I had ever been shaved and I told him I had years ago. He told me to hold very still, and he began shaving around the sides, over the ears, and down the nape using his razor. When done, he wiped the razor, and toweled the leftover lather from my head.
He brushed the little cut hairs off of me using talc powder and splashed some after shave that smelled like the barber shop on the shaved areas. He removed the cape dumping the majority of the hair that was attached to my head onto the floor. He turned me around to face the mirror. I was shocked to see how short my hair had been cut.

I asked why he had cut my hair so short when I had just asked for a trim-up. The barber began to get defensive and told me I had too much hair on my head. "Oh, I see," I said. "You young kids run round with hair way too long" he said. I told him "This haircut looks like it walked off a page of a 1950 calendar." "Nice and proper the way a young man should look," he said.
"I don’t agree," I told him as I stood-up out of the chair.

Without saying another word, I grabbed the barber and sat him down in his chair. I picked-up the Andis Master finishing clippers and turned them on and proceeded to mow a bald strip right down the top of his head from his forehead to the nape. I was holding him in the chair with one hand and grooming him with the other. Then I shaved a pass from the right ear directly over the top to the other ear. Thinking that wasn’t quite enough, I shaved off one of his eyebrows.

He told me I still owed him him for the haircut. I took out my wallet and gave him a single $1 and told him that was pretty close to the price of a haircut in 1950.
I turned around and left the shop.

In the next few days, I noticed several other guys who had been the victim of his brutal shearing. One of my friends said "Oh I see you got the new barber’s treatment as well." When I told him about the haircut I gave to the barber he laughed and said he wondered why the guy had shaved his head and eyebrows. The next week the guy packed-up and left town.

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