“Tilt your chin back,” he says, stretching the skin on my neck taut and raking the blade against the grain of whiskers I cultivated over the weekend.
I’ve seen too many movies for this experience not to conjure up torturous images of Chelsea Smiles and Sicilian Neckties, but that brand of fiction only poisons the mood for an instant. That’s because the man grooming me, Steve Boldizar, the owner of Capital Barber Shop on Main Street, is a veritable fountain of charming anecdotes, which he interrupts only occasionally to deliver the not-at-all-terse instructions.
Steve insists that every one of his stories is absolutely true, which he maintains is the only quality that makes his stories truly great.
“A barbershop is full of stories, and there’s always room for another,” he says.
But even Steve’s oldest stories don’t change over the years because “they’re too good to embellish.”
Like the time an Alaskan fisherman needed a haircut, and Steve sent him home with some business cards to stick into wine bottles and drop in the ocean.
“I’ve got a handful of cards floating around up there,” he says.
It’s precisely the sort of out-of-the way publicity Steve thinks is such a gas. The guy’s old school. He doesn’t accept appointments, refuses to stock pomade and hair products, and the sign on his door always reads “closed.” A haircut is $15 and a shave is $14. Cash only.
“Just come on in,” he told me on the phone. “The sign says closed, but that means I’m open.”
In the heyday of straight razor shaving, I might have been familiar with the proper conduct and comportment to adopt under these circumstances. But in this age, when the practice is illegal in parts of the country, I figure my safest bet is to remain perfectly still unless Steve tells me otherwise, or pulls the blade away from my throat to let me speak.
At one point, I?tell Steve the joke my father’s very first barber told him: “Boy, you’ve got the hair of a god.” Only Steve already knows this one, and beats me to the punch line: “A goddamned dog!”
Grinning, I let my head relax against the black Naugahyde vinyl and stretch my arms over the padded armrests, whose steel-plated fliptop ashtrays passed into desuetude years ago.
The straight razor shave isn’t some nostalgic luxury, like catching a whiff of grandpa’s pipe smoke. It’s a full draw off the pipe. The warm shaving cream, the hot towel wraps, the potent astringent and the unctuous facial massage are all part of a masculine ritual that modern cosmetologists and beauty shops have all but fazed out.
For one thing, straight razors require a terrific skill to hone and strop, and while the technique was a large part of the curriculum when Steve attended barber college, it’s no longer taught.
But that’s not to say you won’t learn a thing or two at Capital Barber Shop, where Steve has been holding court for more than 20 years. Before that, he set up shop at various buildings around downtown Missoula for another 20 years after apprenticing under an old-time barber called George.
All in all, Steve’s place is basically just a well-stocked clubhouse - the walls are decorated with almost every sports team’s pennant and the magazine racks are teeming with Playboys - but it may be the secret to male happiness.
It certainly enlightened me.
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Richard Cervi wrote on Mar 27, 2009 6:41 PM: