About cutting the hair of the dog

I have friends who went from being robust men with nimble minds to bloated wrecks with broken brains within just a few weeks of lockdown. Their wives seemed fine.

I thought I had been keeping it together rather nicely. When you live alone, there is nobody around to disabuse you of any delusions. Friends don’t care. As long as you’re not dead and have cold beer, they don’t mind what condition you’re in.

Last week, I made the mistake of glancing at my reflection in the fridge door of a bottle store in Durban, where I am currently vacationing. I looked like Chewbacca with a drinking problem. Being under virtual house arrest for months had taken a terrible toll and it was clear something needed to be done before someone tossed me a R5 coin and asked me to watch their car.

Top of the list was an urgent deforestation operation. My head looked like a municipal plot – neglected and infested with alien undergrowth. Later that day, I broke two disposable razors on my face before reaching for the panga. Shaving with a machete isn’t for the faint-hearted. One nick and you’re on your hands and knees spraying arterial blood like a cloven-hoofed animal on Eid ul-Fitr.

My hair, hanging halfway down my back like a snarl of mortally wounded snakes, was next. I would have gone to a barber if I didn’t think there was a risk of being mistaken for Steve Hofmeyr afterwards. Also, the word “barber” is a corruption of “Berber”, a North African tribe that deals with long hair by removing the offender’s head. The choices were limited. Either I cut it myself and take the chance of looking like an escaped mental patient, or go to a hairdresser. Tough call.

I have always found hairdressers more frightening even than dentists. At least at the dentist there’s the possibility of being given drugs. With hairdressers you have to bring your own. It’s the only way to cope with the criminally inane chatter and interminable questions. “Where are you from? What do you do? How would you like your hair cut? Have you ever explored the inner ring of Dante’s seventh circle?” The Spanish Inquisition was more fun.

I chose a hairdresser in a small coastal town which shall remain nameless. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of these people. Badmouth them and they won’t hesitate to sever your jugular the next time you’re in the chair. Why, I don’t know, but I always decide to have a haircut just as I am careening off one of those crippling benders that men go on when they have nobody around who cares enough to stop them.

Fighting off the dry heaves while your ophthalmic veins burst one by one and your synapses splutter and fuse is not always the best time to be bent over backwards with your head in a sink while an inscrutable androgynous biped wearing leopardskin pants and tight silky top massages your scalp in time to an ambisexual girl band made up of teenage vixens with swollen breasts and shrunken morals.

The moment I walked through the door, the fear kicked in and my sphincter snapped shut. Everyone heard it. This is not like a trouser cough for which one can blame the dog, so I simply stood there. The receptionist gave me a quizzical look. “Can I help you?” she asked. That was unexpected. “Yes, I’m looking for a second-hand catalytic converter for a 1997 Subaru.”

There was a very long pause. I smiled, to indicate that I was joking. “No? Okay, I’ll have a haircut then.” To her credit, she didn’t ask to see my money first. I only say this because apart from the vipers nesting on my nut, I also have a smattering of premolars that have gone astray over the years. It’s homeless chic at its best. By this time next year, everyone won’t have them.

Hairdressing salons always remind me of brothels, or what I imagine brothels to look like – a gimlet-eyed harridan at the till, a roomful of pseudo-solicitous ladies with enthusiastic hips and a Zimbabwean woman waiting to wash your hair. “Is the pressure too much,” she asked, massaging my scalp. Was this her idea of irony? I’m lying down with my feet up while a black woman washes my hair. Of course the pressure was too much. I wanted to switch places and wash her hair and weep and beg forgiveness for the sins of my forefathers. “A bit harder would be nice,” I said.

Soon it was time to be wrapped in a luminous scarlet sheet and placed before an enormous mirror. With my tiny head and amorphous blob of a body seemingly engorged with blood, I looked like a giant tick. Or a massive goitre. Either way, not a pretty sight. I don’t enjoy looking at myself in a mirror at the best of times, which is unusual for a narcissist. Perhaps there is something wrong with me.

However, I prefer to think there is something wrong with the lighting in these places. It accentuates ones flaws – masculinity and a white skin being just two of them. A double chin the size of Perth being an obvious third. The cutter was an Indian woman. Paying off a debt of some sort, I imagine. At least she wasn’t in shackles.

She asked what I would like. I thought for a moment, then said: “I’d like to buy the world a gram and garnish it with thrills, grow dagga trees and jail keys, and snow white Mandrax pills.” She failed to appreciate my playful nod to the old Coke jingle. Hmm. A classic case of indentured servitude. “I want a haircut,” I said. Again, no response.

Was this not enough information? Should I have brought photographs? Was I expected to procure a pencil and paper and sketch a rudimentary diagram? In the end, she gave me a cut that, in medieval times, would have earned me the moniker Bob the Pageboy, the overgrown apprentice squire to Sir Snortalot, son of Prince Chopaline of the Kingdom of Ballito.

When I left, an elfish youth with dark eyes and harlarts in his hair took my money and said: “You look so hot.” Being a neophyte in the world of male-on-male compliments, I agreed on the relentless humidity and said it would be lovely if we had a little rain in the evening.

This appeared to be code for: “I’ll meet you in the parking lot in 20 minutes” because I found him leaning all louche-like against my car after I ventured to a nearby bar for a vital post-haircut recovery procedure.

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