About once a month I get my hair cut at the Good Look Nook, across the street from where I live. I can only go on Thursday or Friday (which is when Giselle, my "stylist," schedules men). The shop faces east and gets a healthy allotment of morning sun. I go in early, usually right after coffee and the paper, and while I wait for my turn, I sit in one of those chairs with a drying helmet attached to its back and read the latest People.
I like going to the Good Look Nook. I like Giselle. I like the way she puts my glasses on the counter next to the rack of heated curlers. I like the fresh, rough, white cotton towel she tucks into the collar of my shirt, the way the plastic bib floats down to cover the front of me, the way the chair tips gently to the sink so I can rest my neck on its fluted edge. I like how she tests the water to make sure it's just the right kind of warm, and the way the lather soaps against my scalp. I like how she tilts me upright again, roughly toweling my steadily scanting hair. I feel pampered and taken care of, and I understand why my mother used to go to beauty parlor every week.
Often I'm the only man there, and as Giselle pulls and snips my hair, I listen to the blue rinsed older women chip away at the morning sunlight with the brusque chisels of their French, their enormous pocketbooks matching in size and shape the Cadillacs or Buicks tethered at the curb outside. One is under the dryer, an incredibly long cigarette sending smoke semaphores into the air, and while she can't hear a word, she reads lips and nods vigorously. Another one is in the other seat, her hair being primped in tight curls, while a third, swathed in a large plastic smock, waits for the color dye in her hair to take. Occasionally I'll throw in a comment, when they lapse into English and the subject is something like the weather or the latest murder trial, and we sit there and chatter away like magpies.
I like large cities. I like their polychromatic bustle and the sometimes liberating anonymity they offer. But I also like that I can walk across the street to get my hair cut, go down the block to my mechanic, take my pants to the tailor around the corner, and pick up a gyro sandwich on the way back. For all of their cloistered behavior sometimes, close communities are the only places where we will be able to learn how to work together and trust other human beings, and take pleasure from ordinary everyday social commerce. On my block I can feel belonged and known and above all safe. I don't know how to reconstruct this kind of community in America, but I find where I live so precious that I can't imagine a definition of the good life that omits it. I can't wait until my hair gets longer.
(October 1995)