Haircut

By Vince Basehart

I imagine the Perfect Barbershop: the barber pole, the miniature bells that jingle when you open the door. The air is thick with pomade and shaving cream when you enter. Hudsons or Packards cruise the streets outside.

A guy called Manny, or Sal, runs the place. He greets you with a “Hiya!” and is a big man who wears a white barber's smock. His pinky sticks out delicately from his ham-sized fist as he shaves the face of a customer.

Over in a corner, Frank circles favorites in a race form. Al and Joe argue whether Louis was better than Dempsey.

This is of course a fantasy from a bygone era, probably the East Coast, and definitely lifted from a dozen detective novels. But it is my fantasy.

Luckily, I found where I can live it.

On the corner of 15th and Santa Monica sits a red-bricked building from the '20s with a fire escape on its side. One door down from Hank's Liquor's corner window you see it: a barber pole. It's only half-sized, mounted to the wall, and doesn't spin, but it's a real barber's pole. And the painted gold letters arrayed in an arch across the window spell Valentino's, and the sign in the window doesn't promise "salon," "beauty" or "treatment" of any kind, but something simple and sturdy: Barber Shop.

Open the door. No bells jingle, but you are hit in the nose with the sent of manly tonics. And the proprietor is a friendly gentlemen who greets you with a smile and a nod as he snips away at the hair of a man reading the Times.

Valentino is his first name, not his last. He is not a tall man, but he is slim and fit, which makes him look taller. His full head of pewter-colored hair makes him look younger, although he's into his seventies. No smock. Instead, Valentino opts for the Italian knit polo shirts that only he and a few other lucky souls look good in.

Valentino speaks quietly and intently. You hear a vague accent that's hard to place, and when he tells you he came to America from "near Rome," a long time ago in his youth, you get it instantly. He has been cutting hair in Santa Monica in various locations for thirty years, and at his current spot for about two.

Across from Valentino's station is his partner, Bob, around the same age, who is trimming the back of the neck of a customer old enough to remember getting his first haircut in a place just like this.

Racing forms and boxing debates have been replaced by a large television and CNN. It's all about the mortgage industry meltdown on this summer day.

"It's still a good stock," Bob's customer says about Countrywide Mortgage. "I'd buy it."

Bob shrugs in a "no problem" sort of way. "Sure. Good bet," Bob concurs.

Bob is from Brooklyn and his accent sounds like Leo Gorcey's. But, just like Valentino, he too is a gentleman of the old school. He is polite and attentive to the man in the seat and would not argue with him if the guy said Countrywide was a sucker's bet. Bob wears a gold medallion on his chest and sports a dark green tattoo on his forearm that he got in the days when only sailors and rough men got them.

Valentino's newspaper reader has been replaced by a portly man. Wolf Blitzer is now grilling Condoleeza Rice on the tube as Valentino snips some wiry gray tendrils off the man's head.

Portly man (about Condi): "She's got a Ph.D. in Russia."

Valentino (feigning surprise): "That right?"

Portly man: "Yeah. She knows all about the Russians."

Other men stop by. Everyone knows each other and greets or nods or asks how'ya doin'? Each ends up in the chair in front of Bob or Valentino, but not one of them seems to need a haircut.

And suddenly I realize: both Valentino and Bob are smiling, genuinely content in their work. They know they are doing far more than trimming a man's hair above his ears, or providing expert shaves with a straight razor. I remember reading somewhere that Al Capone went to the barbershop every day of his adult life. It was about the community of it all.

Outside, hybrids and Big Blue Buses pass by containing people with I-pods jammed into their ears. But if you squint through Valentino's window just a bit you could swear they were Packards.