Getting a Haircut in Prison

I had put off getting a haircut after I saw what happened to Red. Red was a fresh inmate, having just hit the compound after a few months of "diesel therapy": inmates who self-surrender to a location other than the one to which they've been designated, or who have been incarcerated since before their trial, will often get bounced from one prison to another until finally landing at their designated prison. Red made a bunch of "friends" that first night, including one guy who agreed to give him a tattoo at some point in the future. Red put up a book of postage stamps -- face value $8.40, street value $6.00, prison de facto currency -- as down payment and said guy agreed to give him a haircut as a gesture of goodwill.

The gesture cost Red his namesake locks. And both eyebrows. And the book of stamps; when Red got mad at the guy he was told to forget about the stamps and walk away while he still could. So I hesitated for some time to get a haircut.

It was customary, I learned, to pay eight stamps or so for a haircut in the housing unit. The beard trimmers used for the purpose were in short supply; a recent prison warden had decided to allow transferring prisoners to keep their trimmers if they had them, but not sell them in the prison commissary. (His rationale was that a beard trimmer could be converted into a contraband tattoo needle.) I didn't understand why this was the case when there was a prison-run barber shop on the compound, complete with swivelling chairs and Bureau of Prison - standard lists of rules and penalties for non-compliance stamped in plastic and glued to the wall -- in two languages and riddled with typos. (These signs greet us at every juncture: "Do not rest your foot against the wall," "Discharge waste continuously to eliminate foul odors", etc.) The guys cutting hair in the barber shop were paid by the BOP -- starting wages are twelve cents an hour -- and so expected less, four or five stamps. What would happen, I wondered briefly, if you got a barber shop cut and refused to pay the stamp payment, which according to BOP policy is a violation both for payer and payee? Physical violence, perhaps -- I've seen fights start over who farted -- or other repercussions, but probably just the wordless frustration and confusion with which people everywhere confront acts of rudeness or social ineptitude. I decided to go with the mildly more sanitary and less verboten of the two rates, which also happened to be cheaper.

My first trip was nearly a wasted effort. Every horizontal surface on a prison yard is likely to hold one or several inmates "killing time". The spectrum of industry runs the gamut from inmates working the equivalent of full-time jobs to those who have never worked long enough to buy so much as a pair of shorts for the rec yard, and who subsist entirely on benevolent family members or the alms of other inmates. Of the fifteen or so inmates packed into the barber shop ("No more than 10 inmates at a time in barber shop" read the plastic plaque on the door), some were waiting for a cut, some were waiting for a guard change or ten-minute move to run some contraband across the yard, and some were just killing time, passing part of a day staring at a different cinder block wall. Ignorantly, I failed to approach one of the barbers and inform him I wanted a haircut. Eventually I was served, and began going every two or three weeks: at $1.20 a visit, I could afford to stay well-shorn and presentable all the time.

Eduardo used a chair that stood apart from the others. I heard from one inmate that he was the best, that he actually enjoyed creating a good coiffure and approached each client as an artist approaching a piece of marble or canvas. I heard from another that the chair he used was reserved by inmate convention for grey-market barbers who operated under the tacit approval of the guards and staff, but without their official endorsement. One day, on a whim, I approached Eduardo and asked if he had time for one more cut. He did.

He was young, perhaps twenty, with a playful mop of brown hair and a manicured goatee like a Victorian garden, with various areas clean-shaven like gravel sidewalks, stubble-close cropped like lawns, and longer but uniform like well-kept topiary. He sat me down in the chair, impatient when I did not immediately disclose my desired cut and more impatient when I was unacceptably vague. Finally we established the extent of the project I was patronizing, and he declared the level of endowment. "I charge ten stamps for the haircut and the facial," he explained, just a bit apologetically. (By "facial" he meant the beard trim I had requested.) The other barbers had always done the beard gratis; at $3.00 this would be the most expensive haircut I had received in some time. I hesitated only a moment. Certainly to follow either of my impulses, negotiating down in price or refusing his services, would be exceptionally bad form. With the air of one who has just paid double for the nicest suite in the hotel, I sat back to see what I would get for my money (twenty-five hours at my starting salary, I figured; only sixteen hours if I got my promised raise to eighteen cents per hour.)

He had the confidence and authority of a professional, adjusting my head's angle as one might adjust a stubborn desk lamp. The way he switched rapidly from one set of clippers to another, the way the fingers of his other hand pressed into my scalp as he guided the clippers this way and that way, betrayed the tentative motions of the others to be those of rank amateurs.

I had gone to him to see what was superlative in his work. It was not his gentleness -- I had razor burns for the next several days -- and not his price or politeness. But it was worth the price for the little touches, and the way he bent down to eye my freshly sculpted goatee with a critical eye and announce, "I'm going to box that out, okay?" When he did, it sounded like an electrician saying something like "I'm going to put insulator caps on these two bare wires." It wasn't a question.

Learning how to get a haircut had been like learning how to flirt in a foreign language and in a vastly different culture. The problem was exacerbated by a Byzantine conglomeration of confusing and counter-productive BOP policies that ignored the realities of market economies and supply and demand. But in getting my first Eduardo haircut, I felt that I had ascended a prison totem pole and reached its pinnacle.

And I still had both my eyebrows.