Bad Hair Day (DOC)

							                           Bad Hair Day

       Who needs the Hadron Collider? Go to the barbers: time
slows down and goes backwards.
       I had recently turned a corner. I had stopped thumping the
desk in anger at work and saving for a shotgun to shoot myself
with. Somehow I had managed to give up all hope and resigned
my emerging pot belly to a life of invoice filing until the day I
fucking die. With courage and strength I had joined the
downtrodden and the numb. Amazing what you can do in today's
society with a bit of positive thinking. My rage had gone missing
and I had allowed myself to be ground down into fragmented
molecules: some sat on the sofa and stuffed their face. Some
heard themselves mention that the plot line in Coronation Street
was good. Others had merely become interested in big blue cars
on the X-Box. I had rolled over so that mundane life could tickle my
belly and feed crap into my ginger visage. (All the more reason to
get some of it cut off).
       Obviously when anger dissipates it goes somewhere; like
lightning shooting into the ground. The barbers had always been a
suitable depositary. Once you step through the door it does not
matter if you are the only person there or not, somehow, some
determined way, you will be held there for eons.
       The queue pissed me off, first. It was 11 am on a Sunday -
why weren't these people at home with hangovers? Okay some of
them were twelve but this is London. They should have had a free
cut from the prison barber by now after a heavy weekend on the
Alco pops with an occasional stabbing to take care of the
sideburns.
       I had to sit and watch their picky, pedantic, testosterone
fuelled demands. It was apparently absolutely essential that the
back and sides of their hair were almost bald and that a massive
disproportionate quiff sat on top of this. Otherwise the girl stars of
Sucker Punch would never come round and cling desperately with
their fingernails to the windowsill while trying to attack them in the
night for sex. After thirty minutes of watching their insistence on
slight tweaks here and there and their knowing glances to each
other, suggestive of Caligula on a Saturday night, I really wanted
to throw them out their chairs and point out that the rudiments of
English vocabulary and grammar might be necessary if they
wanted to diffuse unused sperm in the direction of a woman with
all her faculties. Perhaps this was not a priority.
       The real danger lay in the woman next to me. Obviously she
would extend the time warp by a good few hours as soon as she
hit the chair. How do people find so much to do with their hair? Is it
like the Omen? Are they on some terrible mission to find the book
of revelations in there? Or some miraculous scab in the shape of
an equation disproving Einstein? She wore a cape like wrap over
her shoulders - prepared against falling locks well in advance. She
had spread books on styles and fashion across the customer sofa
and most dangerous of all…had an expression of beatific joy on
her face before the scissors had even reached her nauseatingly
high-on-life head. I tried subtly giving her the eye - whatever that
means - in an attempt to provoke the usual reaction of hurried
departure and screaming. Unfortunately hair won the day and
sublime anticipation held her in check.
       As it was Sunday I had no recourse to pedantically phone
the town hall and point out there was no 'Unisex Salon' sign in the
window and have her arrested. Having said that it was probably
unnecessary given that a neon sign announced: 'Hollywood
Brazilian'. I was seriously tempted, when my turn came, to insist
but it does beg the question - what do you get if it's not
'Hollywood'? Dread to think what the Coronation Street version
would be. I tried to settle into a state of patience by imagining her
disappointment on leaving with a purple rinse down there. (Of
course, there was always the slight possibility I had
misunderstood).
       My turn came about two decades later (Berlusconi face down
in a strip joint with the Pope etc.) The barber looked at my
bedraggled dog like barnet with disgust. Admittedly I had started
catching my own reflection in shop windows, thinking - 'why
doesn't that bloke get his hair cut…oh fuck its me'. What finally
convinced me was footage on TV the night before showing
Margaret Thatcher on a windy day - the similarity was too much to
bear.
       I offered the usual in-depth aesthetic analysis:
"Like this but shorter".
       And then the questions began. Round the ears? Over the
ears? Tapered? Square to the neck? Side parting? (Yeah sure -
let's celebrate accountancy while we're still bored). Pathos,
dramatic irony or litotes? It’s a world of swift media sound bites -
why can't they just cut to the quick; stick a load of water down my
neck while talking crap about Arsenal?
       Why do they spend hours minutely pairing up the odd stray
hair on either side? You're practically jumping out the chair
because there is nothing whatsoever left to do but oh no - there's
another six fucking days left while they over compensate for the
fact that they can't cut hair into any style whatsoever. Especially if
the pictures on the wall are anything to go by: sun-faded Italian
wife beater circa 1958. Just the look I was going for. Can you do
me a ..? No Sir but we can fuck around with a microscope and
twiddle with the most irrelevant, minute, fine wisp that nobody
would ever notice unless conducting a post mortem on you if you
don't shut up moaning.
        By now I had been there two centuries (The Royal Bank of
Bin Laden by the steps of St Paris Hilton Cathedral etc). It was like
painting the Forth Bridge - by the time he got to the end it had
grown back.
        Finally the ecstatic moment of release came. I was ready to
leap out the chair and do a jig with the newly released from
Pentonville up the road. But oh no: first you have to look at the
back of your own head sixty times and find out something to say.
But there isn't anything to say. It was long and now it's short and
as long as there isn't a bit of topiary that spells 'anyone looking at
this is a wanker ' and you haven't been electrocuted then surely
that's a wrap?
        But even as I nod in exaggerated satisfaction, as if Michael
Angelo has rained down artistic gifts of forgiveness in hair form, he
still has to get out a flat razor and bend so close to my neck I could
get an X-ray and fuck around nipping and slicing fluff I can't even
see. Just in case I might get followed by the police with a
magnifying glass six days later.
        Finally the day of my release comes and I wander back into
daylight in time for the Thames to rise and swallow me whole.
        Which is a shame because I had cleverly asked for a blade
two round the back and sides and a massive, disproportionate quiff
on top. Because you never know when the cast of St Trinians are
going to come round screaming…