Joshenilia (8)
By:
February 1, 2016
One in a series of posts exhuming the juvenilia and significant objects of HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn.
When we were teenagers, my friends and I were connoisseurs of Boston’s barbershops. We disdained SuperCuts; we only patronized barbershops that were cluttered time capsules.
There was a barber (Lee?) in South Boston, for example, who hadn’t bothered to stock any new girlie magazines since the early ’60s. So while Dooley, Papo, Kev, and I were waiting our turn in the chair, we’d pore over tattered issues of Hi-Life, Joker, All-Man, Caper, and Frolic. Weirdly enough, in that era before satellite, somehow swing music was always playing on his radio.
Sam (shown above) was one of two barbers whom we’d frequent in our own neighborhood, Jamaica Plain. The walls of his shop were plastered with photos of yesteryear celebrities with classic haircuts; instead of describing a cut, you’d just point to one. (Right next to Sam’s chair was a photo of a young John F. Kennedy — I mean, JFK as a child! — showing the front, back, and sides of his head.) Sam himself had quite an eccentric look going — Wolfman Jack meets Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.
Another barber of whom I was quite fond was Joe Q, in the then-desolate Forest Hills section of Jamaica Plain. His shop was filthy, and there were never any customers. Just a bald idiot savant (Steve?) who’d sit in a corner, all day long, rambling on and on. Joe would occasionally yell at Steve to shut up… but he seemed glad of the company. I once persuaded Joe to show me the closed-off back half of the building, which I believe he owned; there, shrouded in dust cloths, was a pool hall… heated by a wood stove. There was also a readymade sculpture back there, a cabinet full of personalized shaving mugs for customers long dead — each one containing a rusted-shut straight razor.
PS: I wrote a manifesto about barbershops, for Mike LaFave’s zine Minnesota Nice, in the mid-’90s. I’d like to reproduce it here, but I’ve donated my zines to the University of Iowa.
READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE