Kat Hair

I’m looking for Kat. I’m pretty confident she spells her name that way, though it could be spelled with a ‘C’. I called the place where she worked a week or so before Christmas, and they told me she no longer worked there. I asked, politely, if they could tell me where she had gone but they were – at least to my ear, less than friendly.
They don’t know and, it’s obvious, they don’t care.
My sense is that this is not unusual, in the salon business. Stylists are independent contractors, and if they get a better offer, off they go. Still, it was a shock to me. I’ve been getting my hair cut – off and on, for over 50 years, and Kat is the best I ever had. I foolishly thought she would be around, when I needed her.
Have you seen her?
I’ve reached a point in life when I can take or leave most things: including my hair. If I can’t have it cut by someone I trust, I just won’t have it cut at all. I’ll leave it to its own devices, which is a bit like knowing a hurricane is headed your way but refusing to evacuate.
It wasn’t always this way. There are pictures that suggest that for the first few years of my life my hair was tame, shiny, and – as the commercials say, ‘easy to manage’. And, like most two year olds, I could care less.
I remember though, when I first cared, or was aware, of my hair. Pants that year were bell-bottomed, belts were preposterously wide, the Stone’s “19th Nervous Breakdown” was echoing out from the youth center at Ramstein, and I wanted my hair just a little longer. Those details would place this epiphany somewhere around 1965. Unfortunately my father – the Colonel, and the barbers ‘on base’ had a secret pact to deny me even that small sign of independence.
Remember the old electric clippers – the way they hissed and popped like a snake in the grass?
Remember the look and smell of the old barbershops, with their shiny checkerboard tile floors, seats that came out of Dr. Frankenstein’s ‘Catalogue of Surgical Apparatus’, and the barbers themselves out of American International (the film studio responsible for wonderfully awful movie versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s more gruesome stories)?
Those barbers were circus lion tamers, going after every follicle with a whip and a chair, and a cap gun.
A good haircut then was the one you avoided.
Nothing much changed until the late sixties, early seventies when the crew cut prisoners were released and the barbershop morphed overnight into a unisex salon. Barbers didn’t do this willingly: they were forced by economic realities. Young men had learned to avoid them for months, even years. I had personally let “my freak flag fly” for over a year by the spring of 1970 but Holly – my girlfriend at the time, loved Rod Stewart and was doing everything she could to make me over in his image. Under her tutelage I acquired tall, lace-up black boots, a short suede jacket, and a variety of oddly colored corduroys. All that remained (besides plastic surgery) was to get the ‘shag’ haircut.
For Holly’s sake, and believing that stylists were different from barbers, I made an appointment; only to discover that the White-Smocked Meanies I had known as a child were still there – in disguise. They had longer hair themselves, but the same barely repressed anger. They served beer, had art on the walls, but they took a razor to your hair – often leaving it looking like something that should be on the floor, underfoot.
Gradually it became less and less about the style, and more and more about the stylist. When you’d first meet a new stylist they’d ask you a series of perfunctory questions - implying they were interested in your opinion, but when the smoke cleared, your hair looked suspiciously like theirs.
My favorite stylist of this period was Henny, as in ‘Henny color’ (an old Stooges joke).
Everything about Henny was on the cutting edge. His body was tattooed from head to toe, his face (and other regions) were liberally pierced, and his tri-color hair held about a pound and a half of ‘product’ - which actually made his head list a little to the left.
Henny - no surprise, thought I should try a little product too, and a little color, and have my upper lip stapled to my forehead. Over the course of a year, and perhaps seven or eight visits, I tried several variations on his theme and, well, let’s just say it never took. I wasn’t Henny, and Henny wasn’t actually himself. I needed a haircut that didn’t require product, or prep-work, or a bi-weekly visits for minor adjustments.
I needed a haircut that let my freak flag fly, without getting in my eyes or taking up too much time. That wasn’t much to ask, but still between 1966 and 2006 I probably had two haircuts I actually liked.
And then I met Kat.
Kat used to come into a cafe that I did some freelance marketing work for. I liked hanging out there: they let me make a few lattes for customers who couldn’t tell the difference, have my fill of espresso and - if they were busy, even work the register.
Kat came in to get their famous triple mocha lattes for the crew back at the salon, and let slip that she cut the hair of every one of the cafes’ workers too – except mine.
Why not, I thought: how bad could it be. Besides, at that point I had a lot of material to work with: I’d been avoiding scissors for over a year by then and my hair was halfway to the Cape.
So I let Kat at it.
I’m not exactly sure how she did it. I know she washed my hair, but that’s not unusual. I know she gave me a quick massage, fingering the back of my neck, the top of my spine: sort of the way that lobsters are hypnotized. After that it got kind of hazy. I know I must have gone from the shampoo station to her chair, and I do have vague recollections of a conversation, and of the monotonous sound of hairs being snipped. But that’s about all I can recall. All I really know is that, when I came back to full consciousness, it was me I saw in the mirror: not a mini-me version of the stylist, or a motif out of stylist school. Me.
. For over forty years I left the barbers’ chair hair feeling – at best, as if an uneasy calm had descended over a battleground, as if a truce had been declared between my hair and head, a temporary end to hostilities.
All that changed, with Kat.
And now she’s gone and I’m holding out again. Now my hair is headed south, again. Now Mary is threatening to send me to the lion tamers.
If you seek Kat, let her know I’m looking for her.