Me and my cheating ways…

“You cheat on your girl before you cheat on your barber.”

-a wise man or a damn fool

I had a barber I trusted, this Russian dude at Astor Cutters. He was the first barber I had ever deliberately sought out for a cut. It was a big step in becoming a man I thought, a choice of barber that was all mine. I had had other steady barbers before but they were just the Korean barbers in K-town or Flushing that my pops had taken me too and I had continued going to out of habit. This guy at Astor was nice though; clean, smooth fades, he seemed to understand my Asian hair. But he disappeared for a few years and I stopped going to Astor and returned to my neighborhood spot on Bowne Street. Early last year I went back and started bouncing around different barbers at Astor; giving it up to anyone who had a free chair and clippers. I would walk in, request a “tapered fade” and the fat man at the counter would turn and yell for someone, anyone, to take care of me. So began a series of brief dysfunctional relationships and unrewarding one-haircut encounters. There was the white homeboy who looked like a mini-Kevin Federline/Mark Whalberg/Eminem/(fill-in-your favorite black-man-trapped-in-white-man’s-body…), the old Latin guy who took hours because he was always on the phone and the severe-looking Arab (?) dude in the corner who always looked at me as if he wanted to kill me (I swear while he was fading me he was having visions of choking me with the power cord. Hopefully all his customers got the same look of disdain from him and it wasn’t just my innate pussiness). It was rough times for my hair as my beard, sideburns and fade went through every possible style on the display poster.

But one day, he was back, I thought he looked familiar and while he was cutting my hair, in a pretty forward move for me, I struck up a conversation with him. “Yo, did you work upstairs a few years ago before they closed it down?” He was like yeah but he left to work at a shop out in Brooklyn and had recently moved back. I told him that I remembered his fades from a few years ago and we reconnected to the point where I consistently went back to him alone at Astor. No more motley crew of random barbers, I had a stable hair-cutting relationship. Things were great until…one day…

I was home desperate for a cut-poor planning left me with not enough time to get downtown to Astor and back uptown for a performance. I had let my hair get too long and a cosmetic trimming wasn’t going to cut it. I fretted and fretted and finally said fuck it I’m going to the neighborhood spot around the corner from me in Astoria. I popped into the shop around the corner from me and shamefully slunk into the chair. It was like they knew what I was doing, cheating on my barber, “you from around here?” the lead barber asked.

“yeah, around the corner.”

“Where do you usually get your hair cut?”

“Manhattan” I said barely above a whisper looking at my shoes.

His non-response said it all that bitch knew he was playing home-wrecker and he was loving it, calling me to the dark side.

The fade was tight, I couldn’t complain though he could have trimmed my beard a little bit less instead of leaving me looking I just had a dirty chin. My original dude’s haircuts and trims were better but realistically, not enough to justify their cost (local dude was 10 bucks to Astor’s 15) and inconvenience (going downtown every damn time I needed a haircut was a real pain in the ass). So I didn’t look back and made the local guy my new regular spot. The relationship wasn’t the same but price and convenience were enough to convince me that it was ok.

A few months later, I’m waiting for the N at 8th street and someone calls to me and I look over-its fucking old dude. And my cheating ways were spelled out on the edges of my shape-up and the slope of my fade. “Whassup man, what’s going on?” He gave me a vigorous pound but I couldn’t even look him in the eye. He knew. There was someone else. I tried to look down, look away, I craned my neck in every direction but his but you can’t just hide a fucking haircut. I wanted to tell him my new guy sucked and that he was just cheaper and around the corner and sometimes it was hard to get to Astor and one time I had even gone to Astor and that he hadn’t been working his chair and I had been assed out of a hair cut and that I had tried to make it work and he was always my first priority and that it wasn’t all cold blooded and that I missed his fades and in a perfect world...

But the words got caught in a lump in my throat.