He was a filipino man, young, good looking, wearing a black tight fitting cap. As he he came at me with the straight razor, I thought, "Maybe I should not have come here."
It's remarkable, really how quickly you can go from a nice neighborhood, such as that around the Moscone, to a sketchy neighborhood. It only takes one block in the right (or wrong) direction. I walked that block in search of a haircut. When I got to the barbers, I noted that is was old. All of the tools, the chairs, the tables, they were all old. Not they waiting chairs, tho. They were relatively new folding chairs. Now, before you come to the wrong conclusion, everything was clean and well kept. When I sat in the chair, I noted that all of the reading material consisted of Penthouse and Hustler magazines. The barber was a young filipino man and very clean cut. He spoke broken english, and had a speech impediment, so getting across the haircut I wanted was not straightforward or easy.
As he cut my hair, there were a number of times when I was concerned that he did not know what I wanted. My concerns were unfounded and came from the fact that I have never had a barber who was so meticulous or precise. He cut hair on the sides and back first, going over it at least 4 times with a clipper and once with a straight razor. He looked at each part of my head from every possible angle, using the mirrors on all sides to make sure that the opposed sides looked good from up close and from farther away. All totaled he spent 30 to 45 minutes cutting my hair.
Toward the end of the cut, he asked me a question.
"Your gur brend lik tis, uh?"
I smiled and chuckled.
"Ho many gur brend you got?"
I made the jump in logic that he was asking about "girlfirends".
"I've got one wife."
"Uh. No gur brend?"
"Nope. Just the wife and two kids."
"Uh."
I will be going back there again next year.
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