It’s not easy breaking up with someone, and I’m not a noble person, so I’ve decided to do this the easy way.
I’m just going to stop calling.
This isn’t about a girl. It’s about my barber. We’re through for good.
In case you hadn’t noticed, I am a follicle-challenged person with male-pattern baldness, possessor of the fourth-largest forehead in the contiguous 48 states.
As a fully-realized semi-bald man, there will be no more awkward trips to the barbershop, where other customers look at me like somebody who doesn’t own a car yet still wants the mechanic to tune up his chassis.
I have a chassis! It’s a small chassis, constructed in the classic horseshoe pattern, but a chassis nonetheless.
Stares from strangers are nothing, however, compared to the humiliation I suffer when I first sit down in the chair and try to strike up a conversation with the barber.
“So,” I ask, “how’s your favorite professional sports team?”
Snip snip.
“All finished. Next!”
After years of trying to convince my barber to charge by the hour, I’ve given up.
Last week, I bought a hair clipper. It cost $20, and after one haircut it has already paid for itself.
Why did I not do this any sooner? Habit, perhaps. Vanity, more likely. Delusion, most definitely.
Part of the reason was that barbers always seemed like such trained professionals, and trying to cut my own hair was akin to performing my own nose job, much like Michael Jackson has done. Repeatedly.
They lay out their instruments as though they’re surgeons, one next to the other, dipped in that strange blue liquid that can kill germs but is still somehow safe enough to run across my scalp.
Here’s a little secret: Those are not government-issued devices, and what’s more is they’re cheap!
Without doing any investigating, my fiancee, Jill, and I made a trip to our local Target and found a wide selection. We settled on the Vidal Sassoon Pro Series Clipper with Titanium Blades.
Let me tell you, it’s a beauty. It has four comb attachments (1/8″, 1/4″, 1/2″, 3/4″), blade oil, a cleaning brush and steel barber shears.
We passed on getting the advanced model with the full-length barber cape because, well, that just seemed weird.
Getting back home, we raced upstairs to the bathroom to start, but not before I laid out a few issues of Penthouse, some decades-old National Geographics and plugged in a TV that didn’t work.
Everything went well, at first. Jill started shearing the hair around the side of my head, and before long we had it short enough and even enough.
That’s when we noticed the neck hair and the ear hair. It took a little more work, and some shaving cream, but soon I had a completed haircut.
We considered it a success because there was no bleeding, and I considered it a success because the sound of the clippers scared the bejeezus out of the cat.
The cleanup was the hardest part. Hair gets everywhere, so we’ll have to work out a system to make it less messy. Any ideas, please let me know.
For those of you who still think of me as bald, I took my Dustbuster out and sucked up about four tons of hair off the floor.
For those of you who still want to go to the barber, I’ll leave you with this: There’s nothing quite so sexy as having a woman dustbust your back.
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jgreenfield@tribune.com.
