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| The First Devil Defeated |
| 09.29.05 (3:28 am) [edit] |
28 September, 1425 A.A-C.
The grip of the first demonic hand which has been on my throat since my return to Washington has been fatally weakened. This is meet and right for it is thus that I have come. To gain insight into the spiritual warfare, the desert fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, the penitents, anchorites, and pedestal-sitters and, ecumenically, their curious spiritual step-children: The belly-puncturing, snake-handling, 7-story mountain climbing, whirling, piping Sufis.
It was only after I arrived that I learned that I was one of six (out of a total of twelve) US Fulbrighters studying Sufis in Syria this season. So I have decided, at least for the nance, to turn my spiritual warfare in another direction.
The devil of self-contempt, as reflected in my complete disdain for my personal appearance, and, especially for my hair, has been exorcised. I am human again, not ashamed to walk down the street or go out to eat. A Syrian with the smooth face of the 18-year old boy that he was but the rough and untempered voice of a fallah, or peasant, having dropped out of school at age of 15, performed the sacred rites.
The rites of cutting hair in Syria are not those of America. The average hair cut in America takes about the same amount of time as the mowing of a medium suburban lawn by someone who does it every day and is trying to maximize dinero to send back to la republica bolivarana de banana whence he swam.
American (Latin or otherwise) mowers and barbers pride themselves in productivity and conservation of motion: Knock out the big stuff in the middle thoroughly and effectively the first time, trim the edges carefully but not belaboring any minutiae, and then touch up as necessary. I don’t think any American barber has ever been in the “touch up” phase on my hair, no matter its length, more than 4 minutes, and that at the long extreme.
In Syria, a haircut allows 30 and for challenging operations, such as mine today, indulges 45 minutes. Young Mohamed took all those 45 and a few over. After 20 minutes of electric trimmer he finally noticed what a mess my hair really was. After cutting it myself, in darkness, sweat, tears, and rage all summer, it had several different lengths in several different places and, admittedly, was not an easy job.
I had been waiting for the time to be right to get a hair cut. I first had to lose 10 pounds. I was planning on walking all over town and using the embassy gym which is pointedly near my flat. Luckily, nature put me on her own diet program on the day I arrived in Syria and has only let me off for a few hours since. Of the ten meals I have eaten in the sixteen days I have been here, precisely two of them haven’t made me protractedly, debilitatingly, bed- and/or john-boundedly sick. One was at a party at the embassy and the other was at a restaurant in the Christian ghetto. But, gastro-intestinal bumps in the road aside, I’m back to my maiden figure. I can see my abdominal muscles again and the love handles are under control. It was time to strike the decisive blow against the devil of poor self-esteem and fix the hair.
I had told Mohamed in the beginning that I didn’t expect miracles; that I had done it myself, and that it was a mess. But when he started using water and pressure to push down the left rear cowlick to no avail, he realized this was going to be more than the normal job.
He said something to me which I didn’t understand at all. It was an interrogative to which I responded in the affirmative without really considering what the consequences of said affirmation might be. His accent was so thick and his word choices so very colloquial that I wasn’t quite prepared when he got the electric trimmer out again and just mowed down the whole thing.
Fair enough. Sometimes you just have to admit that your efforts in life really are in vain. That was what I did, by proxy, as I watched my uneven but beloved locks falling. But after the full-on attack came the sweeping up. And this was at least 30 minutes of my life. With that blithe comb and scissor combination which barbers master or make it look like they have mastered, he feathered away at every hirsute detail of my cheveux. First he snipped at the ruins of the undying cowlick’s once proud domain, then evened up the right rear to preserve balance and harmony.
He proceeded on to both sides, at 10 minutes/per, and then, only then, once he stopped and commenced to look about, did he begin the unenviable job of straightening out the front at a cost to me of another 7 minutes
He had, then, the blazing audacity to offer to shampoo the little hair left on my head. When I declined, he counter-offered gel, as a permanent seal of my regained ritual purity. Only after similarly declining this did he realize he hadn’t trimmed up the hair on the back of my neck. A mere 3 minutes later and he was saying “Naima”, just like the jazz tune, which another barber told me was the Syrian symbol for double bar lines in the music of barbery, namely, the fine.
The Italian and the English dovetail nicely here to produce the other net result of a service rendered, namely, the fine. Syrians have a neat trick of charging Westerners what the goodness of their hearts seems to award. Taxistas and others who perform services for foreigners which would be prix fixe elsewhere in the world subtly turn beggar when they have a prime young westerner in their astute web.
Psychologically, it works thus: Syrians well know that Westerners are not only ill-aware of the inherent (big mac index, e.g.) value of a foreign currency in a foreign culture so much weaker than their own, they are blithely unaware of the value of their own stinking currency in their own filthy culture!
Witness our blithe willingness to casually toss out $10 dollars plus another $2-5 in tip for a man’s hair cut. It is insane. But they also know that we all (with a few ill-coiffured, hand rolling, non-credit card using exceptions) do it. So, rounding up to reduce sig figs, in our decadent Western minds, the average value of a hair cut is $13 dollars. The Syrian barber knows it, can’t believe it, and wants as much of that as he can get.
Two factors work in their favor when they ask a young American to pay according to the generosity of his heart. They know they can’t lose. There’s almost no way an American will have both the cultural fluency to know both the value of a thing in Syrian terms and the hard-heartedness to actually pay such a pittance.
They were dead wrong on the first count with me. I knew exactly that if I paid anything more than 40 lira (80 cents) I was getting killed. But they got me with the second. The proponents of unbridled markets will scorn me but I just couldn’t pay a man 80 cents for 45 minutes of work which, unnecessary as some strokes might have been, resulted in a decent hair cut which, in comparison with the ragged and unkempt mop which I wore all summer, is downright haute couture.
So, with the whole shop looking at me and watching the delightful game of “Watch The Westerner Make An Ass of Himself”, I decided to diversify my remittance. If an ass was called for, it would be delivered. So I made a bit of a tounge-in-cheek speech in which I praised him for being a “doctor of hair” who had performed the necessary operation to save the life of the patient and that, since he was a doctor, he deserved his fair fee. This was received with the bewildered approbation which, I have found, is the best I can ever hope to win from the Arab street. I then laid 100 lira ($2) in young Mohamed’s hand and reveled in the muted thanks which I received.
A happy smile means you paid 10 times what you should have. A happy smile and a piece of candy on your way out means you just fed a young terrorist somewhere for a year. But a muted and not especially sincere thanks means you paid only a little more than you should, as a capitalist Westerner. Ideally, I would have paid $1.50, or about 75 lira. But coins are cumbersome and no one really carries them. Besides, at $2 for a haircut, I can afford to be a little on the grand side.
Well, not to strike a sour note after all this but I stopped by a seeming clean and well-kept place with a very modern décor and bought myself a burger on my way home from the barber. I waited nearly 20 minutes for it and as I stood up to tell him not to put “mayonnaise” on it, he showed me the ready made and wrapped burger and smiled apologetically. I demurred and said “Khalas” which means “No problem” or “I have other things to fight in my life.” I paid the $125 for two burgers, carried them home where I put on decent cheese and hot pepper and wiped off as much “mayonnaise” as I could before sitting down to enjoy my lunch.
Now, an hour post, it’s time to run back to the john and fight those other things. Next time, I’ll mention “no mayo” upon ordering.
”All the News From Anti-Christendom That’s Fit to Print and Plenty That Ain’t”
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