I’m Not An Alcoholic, I Hate Haircuts
It’s 8 in the morning. I’m on Sunset Boulevard getting my haircut. I’m drinking an ice cold Tecate. I have to at work in an hour. This is my second beer in twenty minutes.
I’m not one to show up to work drunk. I don’t take the three hour lunches and down martinis and bottle of chardonnay. But for some reason I think that there’s nothing better than having a beer while I’m having my haircut.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that when I was a little kid I used to sit in my mother’s kitchen with a worn pink towel draped across my beck while my mother chopped off chunks of my hair with a pair of plastic handled scissors.
Some days, I was the kid with the mop head and the bangs. Other days, I was the kid with half his hair cut and a sesame street bandaid over his ear. And when my mother discovered clippers, I was the kid with the crew cut.
I lived in a double standard house. Where my sisters would have their hair cut by professionals, but according to my mom, for boys it didn’t matter. And I’m sure it didn’t matter to her. But for and eight year old wearing his sister’s hand me down clothing and a haircut that made me look like Herman from The Munsters, it mattered.
So now, I can’t sit in a barber chair with the black smock wrapped around my neck and not think that I’m going to get cut. My ear chopped off. My head shaved in patches. That someone isn’t going to make fun of me for the artistic vision that the haircutter had, but failed to execute.
So I drink.
Because you never know, the person just might fuck up.
