Check Out My New $5 Haircut

Can I guy get a decent haircut in Chicago for $5? This question haunted me for weeks each time I passed by a place that advertised $5 haircuts on a collapsible board on Harlem Avenue on the western fringe of the city. Sylvia and Mike’s is located right across the street from a grocery store that I frequent, and despite all of the neon signs and low price, it took me a long time to summon up the courage to actually patronize the place.

I’ve gotten haircuts in many different countries around the world, and, on several occasions, I’ve paid far less than $5, and come away relatively unscathed. When I lived in Macedonia, I had a barber named Dime (pronounced DEE-MAY) who gave a pretty mean cut for the equivalent of $2. If I had been willing to part with $4, I could have gone to the kind of place where a pretty girl cuts your hair and washes it to boot. But why toss around that kind of money, when you can get a good cut for $2? I’ve also gotten cuts for less than $5 in Russia, Turkey and China. In each case, there was a language barrier, so even walking in the door was a bit of a leap of faith. When it comes to cheap barbers overseas, I am so trusting, that I once allowed an 11-year-old boy to give me a shave with a straight razor in Turkey. He actually did a damn good job.

But the United States is not the land of $5 haircuts. John Edwards recently received a well-publicized $400 haircut by a guy named Joe Villanueva. The incident was an embarrassment to his campaign, but Villanueva later told the Washington Post that the $400 cut was actually a discount price- he had previously charged Edwards $1250. Not too shabby for a guy who reminds everyone at least 15 times per day that he is the son of a mill worker from North Carolina. (Never mind the fact that he lives in this 28,000 square foot home, (that is when he isn’t at one of his vacation homes), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:JohnEdwardsHome.jpg)

The one common theme that I have noticed is that no matter what I spend on haircuts, I pretty much always look the same. If I paid Joe Villanueva $1250 for a haircut, I don’t think I would look much better than I do when I get a $15 cut. In truth, expensive haircuts are probably just a measure of one’s social status, and since I have no social status, what’s the point? So applying that same logic- I wondered- how bad could I possibly look if given a $5 cut? I resolved to find out.

When I walked into Sylvia and Mike’s Family Hair Care on Harlem Avenue one afternoon in late October, I had to resist the urge to confirm that the haircuts were truly $5. Only three of twelve chairs were occupied, and all the customers were middle aged Latinas speaking Spanish. A middle-aged woman doing a crossword puzzle sized me up with a quizzical glance.
“You want haircut?” she said, in a vaguely eastern european accent.
“Umm, I think so,” I said, trying hard not to chicken out as the rumble of salsa music echoed over my head.
“You want haircut, right?” she asked again to confirm.
“Yes, yes, I want a haircut,” I confirmed, eventually convincing both her and me.

The woman disappeared into the backroom and emerged with a skinny Hispanic man in his twenties who was carrying a styrofoam cup which he later used to spit tobacco into. Before I tell you about my haircut, first we need to resolve the issue of what to call the guy who cut my hair. It wasn’t a barbershop, so barber does not fit, and I would hesitate to give someone who gives $5 haircuts the term “stylist”, so why don’t we just call him by his name, David.

“What kind of haircut do you want?” David asked.
I told David what I have told every single person who has ever brandished a pair of scissors in my general vicinity in my lifetime, “just a normal haircut,” but I added the caveat I use only when I am in a particularly distrustful frame of mind, “not too short though.”

The first thing that impressed me about David was the fact that, after our initial exchange, he did not speak to me. There are few things I dislike more than a chatty barber who tries to force conversation on me, especially when they ask me, “so what do you do?” when I have no convenient answer to the question. But I was curious to know more about the man behind the $5 haircuts.

“Do you live around here?” I asked.
“I live in Lincoln Park,” he said.
Lincoln Park is a yuppie-oriented neighborhood located at least a half hour away from Syliva and Mike’s, it’s the kind of place where twenty-something’s jog to Starbucks in sweatshirts from big ten colleges or double park their VW Jetta’s right outside because there are no legal spaces.
I could not fathom why someone would actually commute through Chicago traffic to a place that gives $5 cuts, though I suspected it was because no place that charges more than $5 was willing to take David on. I hoped that he was merely an illegal immigrant who knew how to cut hair, rather than a legal one with no training or skills.

“Did you hear about John Edwards’ $400 haircut?” I ask.
“Somebody paid $400 for a haircut?” he asked, his brow furrowed in confusion.
“Even more, I guess he used to pay $1,250,” I replied.
“That’s fucked up,” he said, “yeah, I think David Beckham spent like $900 on a haircut too, now that I think of it!”
“What kind of person needs to pay that much for a haircut?” I asked, feeling like a righteously indignant member of the proletariat as I enjoyed my five-dollar scalping.
“Only a dumb ass would pay that much!” David said, laughing.
“Absolutely, you could come here and get a cut for $5,” I said.

Somewhere around the middle of my haircut, we came to a point where I thought that if he stopped right then, I would actually look halfway decent. This happens to me all the time. I think my hair looks best about a week or two after its been cut, but I can’t bring myself to: A) get it cut more frequently, or B) let it grow longer. So when he asked, “should I keep cutting?” I answered, “sure, why not?” like the scalped riverboat gambler that I am.

The cut seemed to go all right, save for three small problems. The first was that I told him to just trim the sideburns a bit, but instead he completely lopped them off, leaving me with two patches of skin on my face that I have not seen in years. The second glitch was when he took the straight razor to the back of my neck. It was a really dull blade. The kind of blade that I suppose one should expect at this kind of establishment, but still, a very dull blade nonetheless. As he painfully scraped away at my neck, I almost asked him to cut it out, but decided to just grin and bear it. The third problem, and I hesitate to even mention this one, was that I didn’t look good. But I wasn’t too thrown by this, because I frequently come to this conclusion after spending 15-20 minutes gazing at myself in a mirror, and often times, my haircuts don’t turn out to be as bad as I think they are.

After David was done with me, I paid the eastern european woman the $5 and gave David a $2 tip. He acted as though he was taken aback and it took me a few moments to realize that he was actually very pleased with his tip. David wrote his name, hours and telephone number on the back of a business card and handed it to me. The phone number he wrote on the back was different than the number listed on the front of the card. Was he so thrilled with the $2 tip that he was giving me his personal number? Or did he have some other motive? I resolved not to find out.

Just as it takes the military time to assess the fallout from an aerial carpet bomb campaign, it takes some time to assess the damage from a bad haircut. When I left Sylvia and Mike’s I was reasonably sure that I still looked reasonably presentable. My evidence of this was that I went to the supermarket afterwards, and no one seemed to be looking at me and then covering their children’s eye’s and running in horror in the opposite direction. I arrived home and my wife, Jen studied my head from all angles.
“It doesn’t look much different than when you spend $15,” she said, affirming my initial impression.
Jen never likes any of my haircuts, and if she had her way, I’d have Dog the Bounty Hunter locks resting comfortably on my shoulders.

But in the hours and days that followed, I came to realize that my hair was, for lack of a better phrase, all fucked up. It was kind of like the opposite of a bowl cut, it was a square head Herman Munster cut from hell, but I’ve been wearing hats recently and trying to keep a low profile, so the fallout from the $5 cut has been negligible. So can a guy get a decent haircut in Chicago for $5? Based upon my experience, no, I don’t think so, but now I feel as justified in spending $15 as John Edwards must when he drops $400.