Touch is tough, as old DAVID readers know. During a period where my tolerance for it was at its lowest, going to the barber for my monthly felt immensely conflicted. Because I both missed being touched and feared it, especially from someone I either didn’t know or didn’t know well, an already tense situation—I started getting barbered in a small town where none of the men cutting my hair were normal about it; for some reason this still affects me—became dramatically tenser.
Draped with black on the hydraulic chair, I felt like the centerpiece of a banquet in a 17th century Dutch still life, the cheese wheel to my tonsurist’s split artichoke, the two of us greasily spotlit and surrounded by brocade and brass, fruit and flowers, frozen in oleaginous silence; his face and elbows fading away into velvet, his straight razor always just on the verge of grazing my neck.
Because that was the tensest part. Over the course of the cut, the frisson of his fingers dotting my skull, bending my ears, and squaring my neck slowly gathered into an electrical charge behind this last moment of cleavage. The modern barber offers the straight razor as a little something extra, when the deliciously hot towel, steaming with eucalyptus, emerges from its box to cleanse and open and refresh. But back then, when the barber approached me as I was armless and bound to my chair, with cotton in one hand and steel in the other—Anubis and his scales—it felt like the end of the gauntlet, the final weapon one encounters before bursting into a clearing surrounded by enemies.
Fear is an entryway. Over time, going to the barber has become much more comfortable, and now the straight razor feels like the treat it’s supposed to be. It helps that I have learned to remind myself, in the rare moment of panic, that I have chosen to be there in that barber shop; that I made the appointment of my own volition; that I waited, arrived, and paid because I love having short hair. Cutting off my shoulder-length mane was the first thing I did to cleanse myself of straightness, executed unconsciously during a teenage blackout.
Last week, I had a scene with someone I hadn’t been with since before the pandemic. We sat in their living room chatting, catching up on our work and our partners, before negotiating our evening, which ended up being significantly different than it had in the past; my interests had changed a lot since 2019, a fact that caused me a great deal of anxiety leading up to our date. It was with unwitting profundity that my sadist, who I don’t know very well but trust very much, reassured me.
“I’ve only ever done what you wanted me to do,” they said. And they were right.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
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