Death Breath and a Conversation with a Stylist

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Who hates idle chatter? Me too. Anyone else despise small talk? Polite conversation with people you’re paying to do stuff? Yeah. It sucks.

I don’t really wanna have a conversation with these people, but I feel like I owe them some entertainment for touching me. I’m one of those people that make a mental list of conversational topics to fumble as soon as I’m with them. This conversation will take real effort. I have to turn the switch on and make an effort. It’s exhausting, right?

This is because I don’t want to have boring conversation. I don’t want to talk about the weather and the same crap everyone else talks about. I can’t be the only person that feels the need to add a splash of color to their otherwise pedestrian day of servitude. Not unlike the dental hygienist, or the Uber driver — if you have to be in close proximity to me, shouldn’t I at least try to be interesting?

Or am I just becoming my dad?

Getting a haircut is one of these places. These days I’ve been seduced by a corporate chain haircutting place. One of those ones specifically for men. It feels sexist even walking into these places. Male stereotypes adorn the walls. Big TVs show sports highlights and talking heads yell over them. Yuck. Loud, opinionated sports-mongers yelling at each other over insignificant events.

So, I find myself swimming upstream. As the young lady cuts my delicious but marginally thinning locks, I complain about sports culture. I explain that I don’t give a half a crap about sports. She agrees. We are now connecting. This isn’t made up — I do actually hate sports culture, though admittedly I’m part of the problem. I’m still a fan and junk.

Anyway, in the middle of my haircut, suddenly I find the need to explain why I’m there. Aside from the haircut, of course. It’s necessary to explain how I left my hometown barber of 20+ years. Why do I feel the need to explain? She doesn’t care. Nobody cares. She’s just there to cut my hair and pretend to listen to me for a few minutes.

But I launch into my story without warning. It’s like idle chit chat, but, like, worse somehow.

“Yeah, you know, you’ve never seen me in here before because I went to a REAL barber for the last twenty years.” It is at this point I fear for the safety of my scalp as I’ve probably offended her. Nonetheless, I forge on.

“See, something was wrong with this guy. I don’t know if he was sick or on some drug trial or something, but his breath was so bad I had to stop getting haircuts there. I totally used Covid as an excuse to stop going. He’s gotta be dead by now.”

She played along, if only to make time move faster. “That bad, huh?”

“Worse than anything I ever smelled. It was so bad that it stuck to me. You know when a smell, like, gets in your nose and you can’t get it out? For days? You keep thinking you smell it. It may be on your clothes, or in your hair…but it won’t go away. It has permeated your very cells. That’s how his breath was. I had to go home and shower afterwards and wash my clothes. And I swear I could still smell it.”

And it was true. I’d never dealt with anything like that before. I never said anything to him because he may have been mortified. So, I stopped going there altogether — a much classier way of dealing with a problem.

“Regarding his breath: that shit was plain offensive. It was like he drank dead hooker smoothies before cutting my hair. To the point where it smelled like I forgot to put the Ninja lid on and splashed liquified dead hookers on me after they decomposed in the dumpster behind Applebee’s.”

She had to be uncomfortable, but I didn’t notice.

“Before opening the shop and sweeping yesterday’s hair from the floor, he must’ve gone down to the freezer to get a freshly thawed out harlot, then cleaved off a nice slab to put in the Ninja blender. (Those things will liquify anything, so dead hooker flesh and bone should be no problem.) For flavor, he likely added a few cloves of garlic, a brick of moldy raspberry Bellavitano, some unwashed gym socks from the 90s, and a gallon of milk that was in the attic for a year. Alright, that’s probably an exaggeration. You can’t liquify gym socks.” I Laughed, she did not.

She stood behind me motionless for what felt like an hour. The clippers hummed away, but I couldn’t see the fear in her eyes because my glasses were on the counter.

Last I heard my old barber sold the barber shop and retired. It’s a real shame he’s gone, because I’m blacklisted at every coiffeur in the tri-state area. Yet, I still regale these people with this riveting tale of a murderous halitosis. It’s funny how that stench stuck with me this long.

Hmm. Maybe I should’ve just introduced him to my dental hygienist.

What’s that smell?