a fascist haircut
prescott, az
Yup, still catching up. This was November. I started teaching in January, and hoo boy teaching will eat your life right up. But it’s Spring Break now, so let me see if I can get us caught up a bit.
Hair is a highly gendered thing, and tied to race, by dint of history. But the quality of a haircut can transcend race and gender. Freddy, my barber in the Bronx, chooses to cross borders. A raucous gay black man in his 50s, who tends to wear a black leather apron over a white tank top, Freddy has trained both as a master barber and as a women’s hairdresser. He knows how to effectively style hair of all types, from thin and straight to kinky and vibrant, short and long for all genders, all races and hair types. He quickly gained my trust that he’d listen and do what I asked.
Freddy maintains a single chair salon, Bar Cuts, in what would be the living room of his one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, but he aims to make it An Experience. “Dear hair,” he says lovingly in an advertisement he filmed. “I have ignored you for too long.” He will serve you a drink when you come to his place. Eventually he wants to work out of an Airstream.
Freddy, outside his Bronx building. Freddy’s haircuts are pretty much by definition not the titular fascist ones.
It took a surprisingly long time to find someone who would cut a woman’s hair short in New York City. I’ve had a Queens hairstylist with a Fran Drescher perm who looked at me skeptically when I asked for a short haircut; I left looking like someone’s grandma. There was the salon I went into hoping to patronize a Dominican-owned business, who went out to buy Pert Plus when I came in, and whose dull scissors pulled on my hair. And don’t even get me started on the creepy guy who used to advertise short haircuts for women in the Village Voice. He also left me grandma-looking. I think it was out of spite because I had opinions.