der haircut slut
(published in Vernis magazine, May 2007)
Today, I’m in search of a haircut. I’m looking in a neighborhood, that according to a few Austrian friends of mine, I should never, ever go to for vegetables. “The Brunnenmarkt is filled with Turks and Yugos. The quality is shit,” they tell me. Maybe, but I’m American, we actually prefer shit-quality food, and I like the Brunnenmarkt. I like how dirty it is. Compared to the behind-glass, museum sheen of the Innere Stadt districts of Vienna, the Brunnenmarkt feels alive to me. Its dirty, with tacky pictures of Jesus and awful clothes for sale everywhere, but alive.
I went to the Brunnenmarkt looking for a haircut because my hair is getting too long, firstly, and I’m getting a bit bored with my regular haircut neighborhoods–the Neubau, the 6th, Spittelberg–all seem like haircut wastelands today. Its not that I don’t enjoy the haircut experience in these other neighborhoods–I’ve met many beautiful hairstylists in Vienna–svelte and perky breasted, great hair and great outfits. Their salons are all immaculate and modern. They play really hip electronic music and their hair products smell like heaven. We talk, about me mostly. I tell them funny stories, we laugh. They massage my scalp. Tell me, “you look hot,” that my “new cut brings out your cheekbones.” I pay them fifty euro or so after we finish and I feel hot, and cool, and hip, like them, for a day. Then after a month, I look for someone new. Maybe I’m afraid to commit, maybe I’m waiting for the right girl, I’m not sure of the reasons, but I leave these salons feeling empty. Looking good, but empty–like a haircut-slut. I suppose then, this is what I’m hoping to find in the Brunnenmarkt, something real; a haircut, with a soul.
Otto, owner of Frisor Ruya, right on Brunnengasse smiles a wide, toothy smile. A Pensionister, he works two days a week, Fridays and Saturdays. He tells me the 16th district used to be the real Vienna, a working-class neighborhood. I don’t ask where he’s from, but I’m guessing from the names on the postcards stuck to the mirrors behind him–Riga, Ukraine, St. Petersburg, the Black Sea, that he’s Russian, or from some ex-Russian satellite we’ve forgotten about. Otto’s 22 year-old daughter hides from my camera behind a huge hair dryer stuck to the wall–untouched since, I’m guessing, Otto opened his shop and installed them thirty years ago. She speaks bad German, no English, and is as shy as a six year old. Otto tells me the neighborhood has changed. That, “it used to be all Austrians, and the business used to be a lot better.” I ask him if he ever plays electronic music in his salon to get all the Austrians back, because apparently they seem to like it very much in the other districts. “Nein,” he answers. His customer is almost as old as him, and I get the impression Otto has been cutting his hair as long as the shop has been open. They crack an inside joke, probably about me, that I wish my German was good enough to understand, and chuckle about it like little kids.
I’m back on the Brunnenmarkt, making my way towards Friedengasse. I find myself in Frisor Laila. Maybe the stylists at Frisor Laila could give me a haircut with a soul, but I could give a shit, I just wanted to get out of there. Eight overweight men sit inside, frowning and smoking, all staring at me in silence. “Does anyone speak English?” I ask, regretting it immediately. Silence. “Spricht jemand Deutsch?” More silence. The Friseur, also a fat guy, is doing some kind of jumpy movement with an orange string to his customer’s face. He stops, looks at me and yells, “ALTCHIA!,” and says, frowning, “Deutsch,” points to the door in the back, and goes back to the string thing on the face of his customer, also a fat guy, also frowning at me in the mirror. A picture of Orlando Bloom from Pirates of the Caribbean hangs on the wall above them.
“ALTCHIA!,” a round, middle-aged, Turkish-looking woman with nice eyes comes from the back room. She tells me they’ve been open two years, and most of their clients are Turkish and Yugoslavian, and that the jumpy string thing is a procedure to remove hair from around men’s eyes. I reply, “That’s interesting,” and nervously say “thankyou” and “goodbye” and leave.
Friseurenboutique Karin on Gaullachergasse, is so old its cool. I think fashion people refer to this phenomenon as, “Retro.” Three old ladies sit, hair up in curlers under massive, full-headed, orange hair dryers. Hilda blowdrys her customer’s hair with a cigarette hanging from her lips. I take a business card from under a little tree with little easter eggs hanging off the branches, and ask if I might take some pictures because I think her salon is really nice. “Keine Werbematerial!” she shouts, looking at me in the mirror. I try to speak again. Hilda turns off her blowdryer, stomps out her cigarette and shoos me out onto the street, “Keine Werbematerial!,” she shouts again, and locks the door behind me.
This isn’t going so good. I came to the Brunnenmarkt to find something better, a haircut that meant something. All I’ve found is old men who laugh at me, frowns, and mean old ladies who lock their doors behind me. I develop a frown of my own, and bury my hands into my pockets as I walk through the rows of empty vendor stalls of Uppenplatz, an abandoned outdoor market at the end of the Brunnenmarkt. Its industrial and cold-covered in graffiti. I decide to get a kebab. Maybe this is how it ends for haircut-sluts–when the glamour fades, when the electronic music stops, you find yourself alone, rejected, and unhip, eating a kebab in a desolate platz in the middle of an immigrant neighborhood where the vendors can sell you fake Puma’s and a picture of Jesus for a “Gute Preis.”
At the end of Uppenplatz I find Aswal smoking a cigarette outside his salon, Frisor Kristal. He’s good-looking, wearing a striped shirt tucked into faded jeans and white Chuck Taylors. He’s had his shop for seven years. He tells me the neighborhood has changed a lot, and business isn’t as good as it used to be. The platz used to be a busy open-air market, but since the Billa, Hofer, Spar and Zeilpunkt supermarkets all opened up within two blocks of it, the food and vegetable vendors were put out of business. All that’s left are these guys selling clothes on Brunnenstrasse, he tells me. Still, the open-air cafes that line the north end of Uppenplatz are buzzing. “Yugoslavian, Turkish, Russian food,” he tells me, nodding with his pointy hair as he lights another cigarette.
He asks me if I want a haircut. I look over his shoulder into his shop. Young Turkish dudes sit around, all with the same spiky haircut, earrings, thin-immaculately manicured beards, some with the shaved eyebrow thing–all sort of looking identical. “No thanks,” I say, “I’m shaving my head.”
Shaan on April 7th 2007 in Uncategorized