Albanian Shave & Haircut

Albanian Shave & Haircut

          My father, who had minimal impact on my life due to his choice to be absent for most of it, gave me only one piece of meaningful advice.  He told me to never let anyone other than an Italian cut my hair.  I get it.  Italians are often good at style and good at attention to detail.  My only problem with Italians who make things is that they make them look great and then they usually fall apart too quickly.  Despite the aqueducts and Coliseum, durability is generally not the strong suit of Italians.  Since a haircut is only expected to last on average one month, I doubt durability needs to be a key objective in the hair cutting realm.

          I am one of those guys who was blessed with a good thick head of hair and no genetic tendency towards male pattern baldness.  In fact, when I was young my hairline connected to the out edges of my eyebrows, making my forehead about two square inches in size.  I used to be concerned that I was part Simian or at least very low-brow.  I now proudly boast a small, but defined forehead, but my hairline has not receded much at all.

          In high school and college (the end of the 60’s and early 70’s) my thick head of hair needed to be long to keep me in step with my long-hair age group.  Besides being thick, it also gets wavy when long.  I was quite a sight with these waves of hair going off in several strong directions, never quite symmetrical and always looking like a guy in a windstorm.  As for the beard, my strength back then was in my sideburns.  I sported what are often called mutton shops that were as thick and furry as my head hair.

          When it was time to go to work after business school, I was able to start cutting the hair shorter and not be a complete dork.  Beards were not an option in 1976 unless you were a jazz musician.  I kept my hair well-trimmed in those days, never really having a favored barber since my hair seemed to be a simple matter of keeping it short and thinned.  I felt anyone could cut my hair almost as well as anyone else.  I worked on Park Avenue, so I tried the shop at the Waldorf for $80 and the hole-in-the-wall place on East 48^th Street for $7.  No difference and not usually an Italian event.

          Now then, as for Albania, let’s be honest, most of us know little or nothing about Albania.  We were shaken by Taken and clearly remember Liam Neeson messing up Marco from Tropoja, Albania in a Paris overrun by the Albanians.  I, for one, have been on motorcycle rides to Kotor, Montenegro, just north of Albania, and to the Island of Corfu, Greece, which is spitting distance from the southern border of Albania.  In both instances I was warned off going into Albania by a Turkish guide who seemed genuinely scared of the place.

         My life in New York now seems surrounded by Albanians.  My favorite downtown Italian restaurant is staffed by what I thought were pure Italians.  They look Italian and speak Italian with me in perfect form.  When I asked, I learned that they are all Albanians. When I follow-up by asking why, they just stare at me.  I was once asked by an Octogenarian Jewish real estate developer how come I was not Jewish.  I imagine I stared at him the way the Albanians stare at my question.  What I can say is that these Albanians are highly service oriented.  They are very much like Italian waiters in their attentiveness.  I imagine if things are rough in Albania as they tend to be in southern Italy (a.k.a. Il Mezzogiorno), it pays to be service oriented if you want a piece of the good life.

         When I moved downtown a year ago, in addition to finding a new favorite Italian restaurant that was really Albanian, I had to find a new barber shop.  Just north of Bowling Green, a small Old Dutch park where bowling lawns use to be favored, there are lots of old limestone buildings lining Broadway.  The sidewalks down here are imbedded with dates of famous ticker-tape parades that have been held over the years.  If you go up to about 1928 and Amelia Earhart (for her Transatlantic Crossing) you will find the famous big bronze bull of Wall Street.  Watching 14-year-old Asian schoolgirls taking selfies with their hand on the bull’s testicles has always made me wonder what’s up with that.  Just across from that in one of the stone and brass lobbies you will find a little barber shop.

          That barber shop seems to be open all day every day and its 250 square feet is jammed with an ATM machine and eight old mismatched barber chairs.  The shop is staffed with a dozen young to middle-aged guys with beards so dark and heavy as to give them all five-o’clock shadows all day long.  Half of these men have yarmulkes on their heads, so I assume they are a Jewish family.  There is never any waiting so long as you consider the guys interchangeable and are not choosy.

         The first time I went there I thought they were something like Uzbeks since they were speaking what I thought was Russian and some of them had clear Mongolian or Asian looks about them.  They chatter away amongst themselves in several languages to be precise, most of which seem Eastern European and mostly undecipherable.  I never thought they were Italians, but that has never stopped me from going to a barber.  When I asked, they said they were Albanian.  I asked, making a bad movie joke, if they were from Tropoja.  They said, yes, they were.  I went quiet as my barber of the moment came at me with a fresh razor to shave my neck.

          This is now my regular barber shop since it is so convenient, and I am intrigued by the exotic nature of the staff.  I now sport a beard, so I get a haircut, a beard trim and a shave of the rest of my head and neck.  The whole affair costs me $27 and I always give Marco $40 just to make sure I keep getting good service and keep my neck in one piece.  I think I will ask the barbers if they know the waiters.  No, better for me to ask the waiters if they know the barbers.  The waiters look like they take their knife play out on fileting the branzino, while the barbers look like they are less discriminating with their knife play.  I’m getting to like and respect Albanians, but I will still think of Liam Neeson when I sit in the chair waiting for my shave.