Haircut!

It’s a day for a haircut. It’s hot, it’s muggy and I’m feeling particularly bothered and sweaty. I’m waiting impatiently for my Combi window to be repaired, thanks to an inquisitive bargain hunter, and I need a break – a breath of fresh air. Often times I’ve considered a haircut to be an excuse for a relaxing break, a chance to take a breath and enjoy what is always for me a new fresh breath of life.

It’s a time to think, from a comfortable chair in which you’re expected to stay for the entire procedure – have your scalp massaged by soft skin and your hair ruffled by effeminate hands. No movement, no decisions, just a state between casual consciousness and drifting dreamland, and an excited anticipation as to what I might look like after this painless cosmetic surgery.

A change in looks often leads to a change in attitude – and I need one of those, so I go for a serious haircut.

I walk across from the window repairers to the Big Ben shopping centre. What used to be a clean and clinical little shopping centre with a bookstore and an expensive family restaurant and a marginalised black presence, as was so typical of the apartheid 80’s, has now become a colourful explosion of fruit sellers, some hand craft, cheap caravan take-aways, litter and jumble sales, with a constant stream of the Multi Billion Rand Business of busses and taxis ferrying people to this satellite station. Included in the bustling informal sector is a barber – but not just any ordinary barber. He is depicted by a shabbily handwritten sign saying “MR HAIRCUT” He has a portable shade cloth tent and a poorly laminated page of some possible hairstyles, and there is barely enough space on the sidewalk for pedestrians to avoid stepping onto Hendrick-Verwoerd Highway – a major Johannesburg arterial road.

His name is Teddy and he informs me that it will be R10 for a No.3. No frills. No comfortable chair, no massaged scalp, no beautiful women meticulously manicured. No air con, no music and certainly no privacy. But for one fifth of the usual price what can you expect?

Time is of no real importance, another difference between the old and the new way of life at Big Ben, and although Teddy assures me that he will be finished in “2 minutes – chop-chop” he takes considerably shorter than that. After only one glance in the cracked piece of mirror I realise that it is embarrassingly obvious that Teddy has never cut a white man’s hair before, nothing resembling a long, straight, thin piece of hair has ever passed through his electric clippers.

There are strands of thatch all over the place as if you’d thrown a chlorine bomb onto an old beach hut.

I take control. White South African males are good at that, and I proceed to empower Teddy to give my head a thorough shaving which he does with the care and concentration of someone brand new to an unfamiliar task.

As I sit on this upturned beer crate and survey the reactions of the passing traffic, I can only begin to laugh. People cocooned in the safety of their locked, alarmed and satelite tracked vehicles, white-knuckled anxiety and fearful anticipation of becoming yet another hijack statistic, are forced to take a second look at the scene on the side of the road. Smiles start to appear, positive hand signals are made, and occasionally an electric window winds down and something humorous is shouted across the dual carriageway.

Spontaneity. Even in Johannesburg, we are capable of this most precious form of freedom and expression. We have only an instant to jump on the opportunity, and if we miss it we miss all the magic that it causes, but if seized, the act produces some special outcomes, where, for a moment, barriers are crossed, where we can laugh with each other and at ourselves instead of with ourselves and at each other.

We so often rue the times we weren’t spontaneous, and retrospect and hindsight never bring those missed moments back.

To remove the mental barriers we have is not achieved by Governmental Policy, it occurs gradually as each individual removes one brick at a time. It requires us to alight from our armoured cars, settle on a beer crate and see life from the other side.

I walked away R10 and a heap of hair lighter but with a sense of freedom and an experience that no previous haircut, no matter how posh, has ever offered me.

Here’s to you, Teddy, and if you have another straight-haired client, shave up against the grain and tell them to watch the traffic!

Steve

PS If I could have a haircut right now, I’d teleport myself to visit Bash. Bash works and lives in Downtown Durban, and amongst many other pursuits, he owns and operates a hair salon next to the Denis Hurley Church in Victoria Junction, across the road from Warwick Triangle.

Bash was a professional footballer from Ghana whose career was cut short through injury, and he can talk with authority on most subjects from sport to religion.

He can talk about hardship, but he lives with hope.

One always gets so much more than a haircut from this quality Human Being.