Ironic Hair

Polk Street is an odd San Francisco thoroughfare.  It runs through several very schmancy neighborhoods and yet it manages to be shabby.  Castro is the more well known gay center, but Polk was the original gay ghetto.  We lived near it and I got to know it well enough to realize every block had a liquor store, a dry cleaner, a cheap diner and a gay bar.  Every block.  A very short hop down from the center of what was the rentboy stroll is the front door of City Hall.  It’s San Francisco, there’s not a lot of room to spread out.

But the last decade of skyrocketing rents has routed pretty much every bohemian or louche or plain old funky neighborhood and Polk Street is no exception.  Almost all the old gay hustler bars have given way to guys with oversized glasses and teeny tiny hats drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon.

It’s Hipsterland: expensive, ironic and grimy.

Pretty much I don’t care, they got to go someplace, I suppose, but this week my barber called to say his back had given out and I needed my hair cut and somehow I wound up at the People’s Barbershop on Polk at Bush Street.

A temple to hipster’s fetish of guy-ism with a hearty dash of steampunk thrown in for decor, if it was any more hip, I would have been issued a monocle and a wool vest.  Who am I kidding, if it was any more hip, I would have been barred at the door.

So now I have a $60 haircut I don’t like.  The sides are fine, but the top has sort of a poufy roll which, considering how little hair I have to work with, is pretty amazing.  I look sort of like Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding, but not as attractive.  Or butch.

Our New Favorite Saying

Urban Street Pirate reports that the mother of a friend of his once answered the door and exclaimed:

“Don’t look at my hair. It looks like a chicken slept in it.”

Friends, in the future, before you leave the house,ask yourself “Does my hair look like a chicken slept in it?” You’ll be glad you did.

I wanted to find a picture of a reasonably attractive naked man with a chicken (and when you google “naked guy with chicken” you come up with some pretty astonishing results, let me tell you) but all I could find was this naked man beating egg whites.An allusion, no doubt, to the famous quip “My pubes look like a an unbaked souffle slept in them.”

Hair Don’t

Oh no, Can it really be? Is the pompadour making yet another return? How many damn trips around the track can it get? I never liked it in the first place. No one is so short that piling your hair up to the point of being a traffic hazard is a good idea. Forget it. Stop it. Put down the comb and back away from the mousse.

Exhibit a. Zac Ephebe, or whatever is his name is, has never done much for me, but even I am moved to pity by an image that looks like his wee little neck might snap at any minute under the weight of all that hair.

And those of us of a certain age will remember the last time the poodle do reared it’s tortured head. The early 80s have so very much to answer for.

Certainly Maxwell Caulfield and Ryan Idol have both increased my pulse rate and my pants, but it was their manifold other charms rather than their bouffy dos that did it for me.

Hair Don’ts

Whenever I feel all Boohoo about my rapidly receding hairline, I try to remind myself that as a young nancy-boy-in-training, I desperately wanted Farrah Fawcett hair.
Instead, I rather looked like I was wearing Marcia Wallace’s wig. Backwards.
So maybe it’s no great loss.

Combover Guy

I saw him again, Combover Guy. I don’t know his real name, but really, does he need one? Surely everyone refers to him by that; it’s possible his drivers license reads “Combover Guy.” I want to be clear about this, I am steadily going bald. My hair is not receding so much as retreating, having long since surrendered to my forehead. And imagine my surprise in a threeway mirror a few years ago, to discover my hair is sneaking out in the back, too. Soon, the bald spots will join hands (figuratively) across my pate. Until then, I keep my hair shorty short short just so I cannot be accused of being Combover Guy.

His ‘do is a masterpiece of artifice much like topiaries are to gardening. There is no part in it, the wisps swoop up and back and forward and side to side and every which way to finally gather at the crown in a sort of modified Gibson girl thang.

And how does he give directions to his stylist? (No mere barber could accomplish this. More of a partner in crime than anything else.) Does he plop down in the chair and announce “… and then I want this section to pivot back at 90 degrees to cover the right front quadrant?” I probably don’t want to know.

If I could ever find out his email (info@comboverguy.com?) I would email him “Put your hair out of its misery!!!!!! Cut it all off now!!!!!!! Maybe grow a beard!!!!” Multiple exclamation points are important, otherwise he wouldn’t know how serious the situation was, but really it would be an act of charity and love.