The Zanesville Cut
The pandemic has improved the quality of a few things, among them being my tri-monthly haircuts. These days, it is accompanied by a glass of whiskey and Winston the Balinese cat pawing viciously underneath the bathroom door at whatever tufts of hair he can get at and chew for a bit. Courtesy of Ms. McMahon, I emerge a better-looking man, which has not been the case at even pricey barbershops in San Francisco.
Barber sessions were not always so convenient. There was once a time in my life when a far more lengthy ritual had to be observed for the haircut, which took place in between visits from abroad. I never trusted hair cutters in foreign lands after bad experience seasoned me; they were either expensive beyond feasibility or featured a language barrier which might result in decapitation. Subsequently, I would wait until back in Ohio, to hie for the J.C. Penney hair salon, anchoring the northern end of the mostly-abandoned Zanesville mall. It started as a lark but was cemented as a tradition which only a pandemic could end.
The sacrament of the Zanesville haircut achieved a delicate and detailed perfection in its final days. The J.C. Penney salon is tucked behind dusty luggage and well-maintained but never-used bathrooms, past endless rows of discounts that grow steeper each visit as the department store wages futile war with Amazon. It was reliably undermanned and yet the wait was never more than five minutes; if longer, you could go disport yourself with a dollar beer and two-dollar potato skins at the nearby Cheddar’s, now deceased. The sort of girls J.C. Penney salons employ follow a reliable mold: freshly from cosmetology school, born, bred and breeding in the area and have not ventured beyond the pale of Ohio in all their years. They themselves have pixie cuts, a sign of things to come, and possibly an adventurous dye job. They find Ohio weather frightful, they dream of living some place exotic (Columbus or possibly Miami). But they have a hope for the future which transcends that of congressional candidates describing America during their upcoming term. All of this, you infer as a writer. You are paid to, or invent it.
“So what do we want today, a little off the top? Maybe just the sides?”
I have devised a series of instructions for my hair designed to confound any girl under the age of fifty, and I stick to it reliably. “You know Robert Redford in the old Great Gatsby? Barring that, an inch-guard all around the sides, then just a half-inch guard halfway, then a quarter-inch guard up a quarter of the way, then a no-guard trim on the border of that. Off the top, maybe an inch, not too much. I don’t want to look like one of those European soccer players.” The only part of this that gets through is European soccer player and I usually come out with four-five inches on the top and a nice putting green on the sides.
This is just as well and I deserve it. I am not interested in the haircut. I am interested in them and the above produces a reliable fifteen-minute interview; the Zanesville cut was one of the ways I kept the pulse of the heartland, to know if it was dying faster than me. Happily, it never was. It is through Tina, or Jane, or Courtney, that I learn whether the economic tides have lifted high enough to raise boats in the Ohio headlands; whether modern American culture really is what social media has us believe; whether political parties are legitimate or, as I suspected even from afar, vestiges of the fringes who actually enjoy a good shouting match. Whether small town America really was moving to the big cities out of quiet desperation or if it was simply that cities were growing faster and these folk were remaining here in quiet contentment. Ohio culture was, even then, moving beyond what I knew it as; fairs are less popular, cellphones and their accompanying amusements are; there is still a growing resentment of the coasts as being richer and happier and warmer, the cellphones say so as the televisions did. But there is that quiet appreciation of the Ohio winters they pretend to hate, an admiration of the countryside peace which sometimes gets a bad rap as being dull. The ladies remain, haircut after haircut, as the sales in the surrounding J.C. Penney’s grew steeper and steeper. Engagements, marriage, children, love, family, friends — arguably, the real businesses of humanity — keep them there.
Folks would often laugh at the haircuts I emerged from this salon with, usually something quite severe; subtlety is something that comes with experience, not a spell, however educational, at the Central Ohio Technical College. But I relished the opportunity. It was not my world that I learned about — I should bust there — but it was theirs and their real world encapsulated my ideal one and kept it safe. They were happy enough to only pretend they wanted to go somewhere else, but stay when push came to shove, and I would know all was well. The folks at the J.C. Penney salon were more genuine locals than I was; for they loved a place enough to live there, permanently.
And so I would emerge, looking every bit the midfielder for Manchester United but feeling every bit the Ohioan.
