I picked my barbershop a long time ago because it’s cheap, and
also because it’s a no-nonsense, froo-froo-free guy’s barbershop,
which in Northern California is sometimes hard to find.
I could tell this was the case, because they had guy magazines
like Sports Illustrated and Field and Stream in
the rack by where you wait. But I was certain this was a
gentleman’s barber shop because the first time I sat in the barber
chair I was facing a black-and-white poster of Clint Eastwood,
squinting and brandishing two enormous Walker Colt revolvers — a
still from the movie The Outlaw Josey Wales. I had the
same poster on my door in college.
Hailing from a small town in Oklahoma, I’m used to barbershops
with deer heads, dark paneling, and straight razors, so this
well-lit spot was already a bit of a compromise. Certainly compared
to the two-dollar haircut I got in Sucre, Bolivia, where the barber
ostentatiously sterilized his tools in a jet of blazing alcohol, it
was not particularly studly. But I’m not that picky; the right vibe
was there.
My ideas about barbershop atmosphere, let me add, aren’t an
issue of what the left would call “homophobia.” I neither know nor
care about the personal life of my barbers. I just got used to
barbershops looking, sounding, and smelling a certain traditional
way, and I dislike the trend toward metrosexual Euro-fabulosity
that asserts itself in too many clip joints these days. Even more
worrying, many barbershops are simply abandoning their unique
character for a bland, generic sameness. Which is where I was going
with this story.
I hadn’t gotten by this particular barbershop for a while, and
when I sat down to wait my turn, I reached for an Esquire
or Bowhunting magazine to pass the time. All I found were
People and U.S. News & World Report from
three weeks ago. The guy magazines are gone.
Then I sat down in the chair, and the first thing I noticed is
that Clint Eastwood has vanished too. I mentioned this to the
barber and he told me that every time a little boy would come in to
get his hair cut, he’d see that picture and go, “Wow! A gun!” And
the mom would say, “No, no, that’s too violent!” So the poster came
down. And the same, said the barber, with the hunting magazines.
Little boys would see pictures of guns and get all hot and
bothered, and Mom would freak and demand the magazines disappear.
So, they disappeared.
The TV was also gone. Apparently the kids would whine until the
barber turned on cartoons. As soon as the kids left, the barber
pointed out, the other customers would tell him that they didn’t
really enjoy cartoons that much and he was constantly changing the
channel back to ESPN. So, he took out the TV.
As is his right, the barber made a business decision that he
would lose more business by keeping the posters and the TV and the
magazines than he would lose by taking them down. I wish him well,
and I’m sorry this piddling nanny-state politics intruded into his
business. But I’m not going to enjoy going to his shop like I used
to, after he decided to turn it into a Picture-of-Gun-Free
Zone.
Perhaps the biggest irony is that he had replaced the glowering
Eastwood with a picture of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter
Lawford, and Sammy Davis Jr. leaning on a pool table. Nothing wrong
with them, except that they’re not exactly role models,
you know? The title character in Josey Wales founds a new
outpost of civilization in a dangerous corner of the wild west. The
broken, hardened, but still chivalrous gunman played by Eastwood
risks his life to save some settlers from violation and slavery. He
may be a myth, but he is a salutary one. The Rat Pack’s attitudes
toward women were more modern, but certainly no more enlightened.
If I had a son I was taking to the barbershop, I know which example
I’d rather see on the wall.
Instead, the prevailing myth is that a glimpse of an antique
pistol at the barbershop will somehow pervert our children into
trying out for the Columbine All-Stars. Attention, paranoid moms:
if you believe this, rather than assaulting this last masculine
redoubt, go somewhere already soulless and generic like Supercuts,
or better yet go buy a dad-gum Flowbee and cut your own kid’s hair at home.
After all, you never know when, out in the big wide world, he might
wander away and be exposed to an illicit glimpse of Sports
Afield.
I went back last week, and after the haircut I asked the barber
when he was going to put Josey back up. He winked at me and pointed
high above his chair, where a small poster from A Fistful of
Dollars (the second one here) scowled down.
I’m glad I said something. I just couldn’t stand back and watch
a noble institution commit Barbicide.
