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The City that Hair Forgot
November 9, 2006
Original The Times-Picayune article→
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I was dressed in my usual post-Katrina daytime attire, which is torn, paint-covered jeans and an array of sweatshirts from the Contemporary Homeless selection at Thrift City and my hair looked like lightning had just struck the side of my head and that’s how I presented myself to the counter at the Oak Street Cafe for my breakfast and my New Orleans moment.
The Times-Picayune
The City that Hair Forgot
A roundabout trip to the barber’s chair produces a perfect New Orleans moment
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Chris Rose
A friend of mine had been telling me: “If you want to experience a nice New Orleans moment, go to the Oak Street Cafe for breakfast. There’s a piano player there and he plays for tips while you eat and it’s a great scene.”
So I went to the Oak Street Cafe for breakfast. I was thinking I could use a good New Orleans moment and can’t we all.
I was also thinking I could use a haircut. Only my immediate family knows what my hair really looks like; that in its natural state it assumes an Afro shape that rivals that of former mayor Marc Morial’s famous high school yearbook picture, the only difference being that he was a teenager when he had his and it was the ’70s.
And — oh, yeah — he’s black.
At night, I tease my hair up into a fright wig that looks like those old troll dolls we used to play with and I scare the pants off my kids, which seems like a warm-and-fuzzy domestic portrait until the dawning realization: My hair scares my kids.
So, before I went to the Oak Street Cafe, I went to the barber shop down the block because another friend had told me that if I wanted to experience a nice New Orleans moment, I should go to the old barbershop on Oak Street because the guy who cuts hair there has been there for something like 90 years and he’s a character.
I figured that anyone who went through the Marc Morial high school years and the Beatles era and then Flock of Seagulls and all that would not fear my hair, so I went to visit him before going to the Oak Street Cafe, with the idea that I could just stack up a full morning’s worth of nice New Orleans moments there on old Oak Street, so architectural and antiquated, lost in time, where movies set in the ’50s come to film street scenes because they hardly have to change a thing.
But the barbershop was closed. It’s closed a lot, according to the sign on the door and I guess I’d be closed a lot if I had been cutting hair since the Teapot Dome Scandal.
I was dressed in my usual post-Katrina daytime attire, which is torn, paint-covered jeans and an array of sweatshirts from the Contemporary Homeless selection at Thrift City and my hair looked like lightning had just struck the side of my head and that’s how I presented myself to the counter at the Oak Street Cafe for my breakfast and my New Orleans moment.
The piano player was there. The energy was just right, soft and languid, diners slowly leafing through newspapers, the tinkling of spoons in coffee cups, sleepy-eyed conversations.
I was behind three women in line. I spied an exotic dish called Eggs Beauregard on the daily chalkboard and was ready to order when the first woman in line turned around, regarded my presence and said: “You look like s - - -.”
That’s what she said. Just like that. And in a town that refuses to filter itself, I suppose it was in itself a small New Orleans moment but I’m thinking, well, she’s right — but what the hell?
The two women with my fashion critic turned and looked at me and kind of nodded in agreement and then turned back to the counter to gather up their food and utensils.
Then the woman who had addressed me turned her attention to a woman wearing one of those generic white institutional uniforms that everyone from a nurse assistant to a cafeteria worker wears and she inquired into her life and the customer said she worked at a salon just up the street.
As the woman in white was leaving with her meal in a Styrofoam package, I stopped her. “Does your salon do men?” I asked and she said yes. “Ask for Lynette. Lynette Boutte, she’s a master barber.”
Now, this woman in white was courteous and professional. But she was also black and I was wondering if I should make sure we were on the same page by explicitly asking: Do you do white men with poofy, thinning, dried-out dead limbs of hair? A follicle hard case. A desperate man, with hair like Beetlejuice dipped in volcanic ash, asking strangers in a diner if they’ll cut his hair?
But I didn’t ask. So, after my Eggs Beauregard (exquisite) accompanied by boogie-woogie piano (sublime New Orleans moment) I wandered up Oak Street to where I thought the woman in white told me her salon was and as I tried to walk in the door, two thin, beautiful caramel-colored young men blocked my way, rendering onto me a look nothing short of horror.
I’m pretty sure one of them was about to ask me if I was there to fix the broken heater vent.
I had indeed walked into a hair salon, but not the one I had been directed to and the uber-hip stylists with their tight shirts and fashionable shoes quickly pointed out the error of my ways, leading me down the banquette to a decidedly busier, noisier, messier salon than theirs and I wanted to sneer at them, “Hey! I was metrosexual once — before the storm!” but I figured it was a lost cause.
And so I walked into the salon where the woman in white works and it was bustling with women of all ages, doing what women do in salons all day, which is talk a whole lot, mostly about men and food, but it kinda got silent in there when I walked in.
It’s amazing how you can be wandering the streets around here in your comfort zone and you walk through a door and you’re in somebody else’s world and I was picturing that scene from “Animal House” where all the white rube frat boys walk into a blues roadhouse and I wanted to call out, “Otis, my man!” but there was no Otis and I was alone.
A woman broke the discomfiting silence by saying to me: “You must be the man my daughter met at the restaurant. I’m Nettie. C’mon in.”
Everyone in the joint laughed when they heard I tried to get into the salon in the front of the building and Nettie said to me: “Honey, they don’t have customers that look like you,” and I’m sure she meant that in the best possible way.
I sat in her chair. “Can you make me beautiful?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, “but I can cut your hair.”
So, amid the chatter of women and the smells of exotic hair products I have never heard of, Nettie Boutte cut my hair.
She is one of the 10 Boutte siblings and extended family members (the Vaucresson sausage folks, for instance) whose imprint on New Orleans is immeasurable, all those singers and chefs and artists. She had a salon in the 7th Ward but it got whacked and she spent three days on the overpass after Katrina (“Don’t get me started!”). She now drives an hour from the north shore to get to her temporary business on Oak Street and she stopped cutting my hair at least 50 times to direct her employees or answer the phone or greet customers, one of whom actually said to her: “How’s yo momma?”
Sometimes I forget that people really say that here.
Athelgra Neville walked in while I was there. She is the Neville Brothers’ sister and a singer in her own right, and she was asking everybody: “Did you see Aaron on ‘The Young and Restless?’ “
With my belly full and sitting there in the overpoweringly nurturing warmth of a room filled with women at work, I was indeed having a New Orleans moment and I vowed to start dressing better but I was just caught up in my reverie and that probably won’t happen.
I left Nettie’s salon with decidedly less frightful hair. Nettie is an artist, if you ask me … taking into consideration, of course, the raw canvas I gave her to work with.
In my car, driving down Oak Street, I turned on the radio. It was WWOZ and there was a song by the Bob French Band and the vocalist was Sista Teedy — aka Tricia Boutte, one of the legion of far-flung kin — and she was singing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” and I couldn’t have contrived a better transition if I were directing a movie.
It really happened that way. It had been a somewhat awkward journey, but I had gotten my New Orleans moment, and it was staying with me as I drove away, locked into New Orleans in my head and on my radio.
I said to myself: Don’t touch that dial.
… … .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com; or at (504) 352-2535 or (504) 826-3309.
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