The Price of the Haircut
by Brock Clarke

On Monday, an unarmed black teenage boy was shot in the back and killed by a white city policeman. On Tuesday, there was a race riot in our city, a good-sized one. On Wednesday, the mayor formed a committee to discover why there had been a race riot, and on Friday he held a news conference to announce the committee’s findings. The mayor told us (we were watching the news conference at David’s house, because David’s house had the biggest TV and was furthest from where the riot had been) that the committee had initially believed the race riot had been caused by the black, unarmed teenage boy being shot in the back and killed by the white city policeman-because there had been other unarmed black teenage boys shot in the back and killed by white city policemen, fifteen in the last five years to be exact, and because, of course, the riots had happened the day after the boy had been shot-but the mayor put the matter to us as he’d put it to the committee: that this was too familiar, too obvious; that riots had been caused by events like this too many times already; and that would-be rioters would be desensitized, bored even, by such a thing. The mayor had scolded the committee for their highly unimaginative findings (and we were a bit ashamed of ourselves, because we, too, had assumed that the riots had been caused by the shooting).
In short, the mayor told the committee that its initial findings were no good and that they should go back and find something else. And so they did, and this time, the mayor told us, the committee had found the true cause of the riot: it had been caused by a barber named Gene who charged eight dollars for a haircut and who had said something racist while giving one of these eight-dollar haircuts and the customer who had been getting the haircut had responded in kind and word had gotten out and one thing had led to another and finally to the riot. The mayor brought out charts and graphs that showed exactly how one thing could lead to another, and he also brought out eyewitnesses and experts who testified that, yes, indeed, this barber was to blame for the race riot, and then they showed us an enlarged picture of Gene, who had a good head of white hair and a thick white mustache and large glasses with translucent plastic frames and who looked much like all our grandfathers- which made sense, since each of our grandfathers had also said not a few racist things in his time-and all in all, the presentation was convincing in the extreme. The mayor concluded by saying that he was certain this revelation would help begin the difficult racial healing process and restore confidence in our unjustly criticized police officers, and then the news conference was over.
"Wow," we said, turning off the television set."Eight-dollar haircuts."
Because for years we’d been paying fifteen, seventeen, sometimes twenty-plus dollars for a haircut, and the haircuts were never good, weren’t ever good enough to justify the amount of money we’d spent on them, and often, after we’d had our hair cut, we’d sit around telling each other that the haircuts didn’t look that bad, that maybe if we parted our hair differently the haircuts would look better, and that in any case the bad haircuts would eventually grow in, and it was embarrassing for us, grown men all, to have to sit around and lie like this, to ourselves and each other, about our awful, expensive haircuts. It was emasculating, if you thought about it, and we did, all the time: we thought, for instance, how we could never imagine our fathers sitting around telling lies about their haircuts, how this was another way in which we’d failed to live up to their example, and how if we were to continue to get such bad haircuts then our self esteem would be totally and permanently in the crapper and if we were to continue to pay so much money for those bad haircuts then our sons wouldn’t be able to go to the best colleges, either, and would end up like us, graduates of cheap state universities who had unfulfilling jobs and sat around fretting about bad, overpriced haircuts.
Because they really were bad haircuts, and we really had paid way too much for them. Trent had paid fifteen dollars to get a severe Roman-centurion haircut that Marc Antony might have been jealous of; Michael had paid seventeen dollars to have his sideburns butchered so badly that one was gone entirely and the other had somehow gotten longer, thicker, more muttonchopish; David had paid twenty-five dollars to get a haircut that was all business in the front, all party in the back. Right after he got that haircut, David ran into his ex-wife on the street (all of our wives had left us, and although they, our now ex-wives, never said as much, we all knew they had left us in large part because of our bad haircuts, and who could blame them really? Who would want to be with a man with such an awful haircut, and who could respect a man who paid so much, time and time again, for such an awful haircut?) and she took one look at him and said,"Hey, nice haircut."