Before I begin talking about just what Valentine’s did to my head this morning, let’s take a moment to realize a couple of things. Men, in general, spend around zero to no time thinking about their hair, comparatively speaking. When I had hair down to my butt, I didn’t do anything with it. Every so often I’d get the ends trimmed to kill the split ends, but that was less at my own urging and more of the females in my life. The women I know, however, have the stereotypical acre or more of haircare products.
So it’s really not surprising that most of the guys I know take a laissez-faire attitude towards their scalp and the tonsure growing out of it. From the Bunny Faja, a DJ/Insurance Agent in the south came a recommendation of a chap who works in nothing but clippers. From another friend came a recommendation that I just have my significant other, T, attack my head with clippers.
But for me, getting a haircut on that level is definitely comparable to the kind of beer you drink. I’ve always shot for the beer on the higher shelf (comparatively speaking) and tried to steer clear of the beer-flavored fizzy water that passes for most canned American beers. While New Belgium has made strides this way, canning their Fat Tire and a couple of other decent brews, most beers worth drinking are still in glass bottles. At worst, I’ll go with PBR if I need canned beer, or if I’m still on a budget, I steer towards Henry Weinhards’ – not exactly the highest eschelon of brews, but still relatively good and drinkable. For those truly divine beers, I head to the People's Pub in Ballard - staffed with people who have no idea what manscaping is, but host to some of the most exquisite beers in all of Seattle. Also, deep-fried dill pickles. (No, seriously. Eat them. EAT THEM, PRECIOUS.)
And so it goes with haircuts. Since I moved to Seattle I’ve been getting my hair clipped, buzzed, and shaped at Rudy’s Barbershops, a chain that reaches around the city and meanders over to Bellevue. Rudy’s definitely qualifies under the Henry Weinhard’s rule of consumption. Not bad, but definitely not the poshest you could get.
The nice (and worst) thing about Rudy’s is that it’s a complete walk-in system – you need a cut, you go over, plop down, read a magazine, and wait to get your head clipped. But you’re not guaranteed to get a stylist you like, nor are you always guaranteed to get someone who focuses on your type of head, or your type of cut. Even though Rudy’s Barbershops seem to cater nearly 70% to men of all sizes, hairstyles, and gender orientations, they still manage to get populated by women who don’t quite know what to do when a male head confronts them in a barber chair. And when they don’t know what to do, they go with what they know.
My most memorable Rudy’s experience was sitting in front of a vivaciously tattooed woman with a picture of her and her girlfriend dancing on a beach, and me smarmily (and probably, stupidly) saying, “Make me look totally hot. You know, like you’d want to date me.” I wound up with a haircut that made me look like an extra in a K.D. Lang music video. Upon arrival at T’s place, she gave me the universal, “I like your…haircut?” To which I replied, “I look like I should be out protesting male dominance over womyn.” Sweet woman that T is, she began hicupping with laughter, telling me that she didn’t want to hurt my feelings when I first came home, but as long as I knew what I looked like, she was okay with rolling on the floor pointing at me and losing her vocal cords while she shrieked in the throes of hysterical giggle-agony.
At least that’s what I think she said. She began snorting and coughing, wheezing about five minutes into the experience. But the message stayed pretty clear – I wasn’t exactly James Bond material in this haircut. More like Fraulein Dietrich Von Wulfenstein, and not the slender blonde one, either. At the very least, I was able to pull her from the floor before her neighbors called in a domestic disturbance, and I’d have to worry about an accidental discharge from the responding officers as they joined T on the floor laughing their heads off.
In other words: maybe it was time to upgrade my haircut. Rudy's "It's Cheap! It's Sexy" seemed to apply to people who prefer the first over the latter, because frankly the latter, in my direct experience, was so definitively the garnish, not a main ingredient to the menu.
And don't get me wrong, Rudy's is still a great place to get a haircut in Seattle, but the barbers are definitely hit-or-miss. Rudy's still has a location with a tattoo parlor and piercing studio somewhere up on Capitol Hill in Seattle, and the all-in-one body modification system seems to attract a clientele that adheres well.
But again, time to put the big-boy pants on and go get an actual haircut at a place that knows how to 'scape a man's head. So, I tried two different spaces.
My adventures into salon barbershops began a series of misfires. One upscale place in the downtown Seattle area was substantially lacking for what I got – the stress of parking for two hours while I got clipped and shaved in addition to a less-than-cheerful atmosphere made me ponder why I even bothered heading there in the first place. The pain in the wallet made it even worse - I wound up looking like an extra on the set of Dick Tracy. I headed back to Rudy’s and my semi-Lillith Fair ‘do.
As luck would have it, every drive north up Greenwood to make it to T’s place for dinner would take me by Valentine’s. I’d driven by it for years without noting it much. It’s not really flagged in bright neon or emblazoned with huge lettering. It’s more of a subdued place with leather chairs and lounges in the background. Originally, I mistook it for a clothing shop in the same vein as others along Phinney Ridge and Greenwood – boutique, independent shops with higher-priced items.
And around June 20th, I needed a cut for a wedding. While I don’t really take much time to plan this sort of thing, I rang in and asked for a haircut from the perky receptionist. “Nope, sorry, we’re booked up. We have a lot of weddings today.” Oh, the irony.
“So, is it possible to get it next time around?”
“How far is the next time around?”
“Well, how about four weeks from now?”
T elbowed me in the side. The girl’s got some sharp elbows.
“Oh, right. Five. We have an event that weekend.” An event that I would probably return from, looking bedraggled, mussed, and generally like the night of the living dead, possibly with a minor burn injury to my hair from random sparks of fire and other combustibles after serving a lot of very happy people much whiskey and playing much blues music in a traditionally thumpa-thumpa environment. Also, scruffy. My predictions are startling accurate some days.
“Sure, Saturday at 11 is when we have open. And we’ll have you getting your hair cut by Valentine. Did you want a straight razor shave? Manicure? Pedicure?”
Wait, so the guy who's going to cut my hair is the actual guy who owns and works at the place? Not some strangely ficitious character exhorted to stop his messing around by The Specials? I had visions of an old-school Mafioso type with leather suspenders and a belly rapidly expanding. Then I remembered that this is Seattle and revised it to a black t-shirt and suspenders.
“No, just a haircut is fine.” And I promptly forgot about it for five weeks. Heck, I didn’t even look at the website. Which is a good thing, in all honesty. It truly would have fulfilled my impression that a small Mafia family ran craps games out of the back room, staffed by bubble-gum chewing women with teased hair similar in shape and structural integrity to the conning tower of a submarine. (Yes, I’ve been to men’s salons in New Jersey, and yes, it left an impression.)
The Date With The Razor Blade
This morning T woke me up playing Saturday Morning cartoons in the living room, rapidly switched to Talk Soup once she heard me stumbling into the bathroom. A none-too-gentle reminder to me regarding my hair involved, “Honey, I’m glad you’re going to get your hair cut. You look like a rumpled hedgehog.”
“The cute kind?”
“No, the other kind.”
Since the only other kind I could really think about was the roadkill kind, I didn’t pursue it and headed down the road in t-shirt and shorts and some old runners I’ve not really had much cause to throw on in a few years, managed to get parking in front of the building, and meandered in.
When His Mighty Schlubbiness entered the door, I was possibly one of three customers in there, but at that time of the morning, the place was already staffed by three women and two men – a Japanese-American stylist with a full beard, and a slender man wearing a pinch-front straw fedora. A quick look makes you think that the place is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a salon. Full leather club chairs, loungers, magazines neatly arranged on distinctly masculine topics (though I failed to see anything skimpier than a Maxim, and nothing more erudite than a National Geographic Outside). And the dresscode of the people working there (even some of the clients) was far in excess of my own, but then a guy wearing a white t-shirt, with a five-day old scruff of beard meandered in and I no longer felt like King Schlub. Small victories.
Valentine’s looks and feels like a 1950s’ men’s club with a vaguely office-type feel. The cabinetry and autoclaves fit into the décor, as opposed to occupying space or glaring out in neon blue and chemical disinfectant. It’s one of those places where you know that the entirety was designed to a purpose and the people who run it are very good at knowing what their clientele wants and expects.
Checking in at the high counter (the first one I could happily rest my 6’5” elbows on), the first thing I heard was, “What would you like to drink?”
Drink? What? Drink? Most of the time I would meander to the Fremont Coffee Company for a NASCAR Special – four shots of espresso in a single cup and a $1.50 PBR before hitting Rudy’s when I lived in the Center of the Universe. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, and often removed any lingering feelings of trepidation at my impending diesel dyke makeover. But apparently Valentine’s feels differently. I briefly wondered whether ordering a Vesper martini would be out of place. No such luck, apparently – Valentine’s doesn’t have a liquor license.
They do, however, happen to be located next to Diva Espresso, which means that they have most excellent coffee and tea. I opted for the water, which came out gently presented on a coaster with a napkin in a martini glass.
And with just enough time past 11 for my appointment to relax in what is most definitely a smooth, comfortable chair, one of the extraordinarily efficient women walked me over to Valentine, and introduced me.
Definitely not the pot-bellied Italian, Valentine, a slender, casually-dressed guy in plaid shirt and leather fisherman sandals seems to be one of those guys who has the quiet sense of humor in the background – the one that’s way, way funnier than the loud, obnoxious guy standing up on stage making strange noises into the microphone – but you’ll never hear him, because the jackass with a sound system is busy pumping a drunken audience for yuks.
Don’t get me wrong, most of the time, I am one of those guys. I have a megaphone with a sticker on it that says, “You know what they say about guys with megaphones. They’re compensating for something.” It’s best delivered through the megaphone for a triple entendre. It’s even better when someone tries to decipher the humor. But I’m much more of a fan of the guys who smarm quietly and manage to get away with it.
Valentine had a stylist shadowing him while I sat there, and so I got a basic lesson in barbering the male head while he showed the slender, well-dressed woman behind me how to look at the horizons of the hairlines and blend it seamlessly together. (Seriously, some of the people working there could have easily gone to a Seattle summer wedding with five minutes’ notice.)
Since my general theory up until now has been, “Hey, it’s hair. Eventually it’s going to fall out (THANKS A LOT, GRANDPA) and I could either try to massage hair regrowth tonics into it or just age disgracefully” I more or less handed my hair and style over to Valentine, but he more or less looked at the shape of my head and vastly improved on the zip-zap-zip job done on it five weeks previously.
Now, I’ll admit, small talk in the barber chair is one of the things I’m not a huge fan of, but the small talk of the morning wasn’t about sports, politics, or anything else – it ranged from professions, the history of the place, the fact that I was a first-timer to the shop in Valentine’s chair, my significant other, and a few other bits and pieces. Thank god for that – I managed to talk about the methods to stave off red wine-enhanced drinking headaches, and chatted a bit about the place and its history, the expansion plans, and the added services.
Digression: If you’re sensitive or get nasty headaches after drinking red wine, don’t drink heavy Bordeaux, Cabernets, Malbecs, or other richly tannined wines. Apparently my assertion that it came from the sulfites in the wines is completely wrong, but that Red Wine Headache is a pretty common thing, and it occurs with the stronger reds, though one of the reduction effects can be placed by drinking a cup of strong-brewed Irish black tea, straight, between glasses of wine. It’s apparently suspected that tannins in the red wine – both from the oak aging process and the natural tannins of the red grape are partially to blame in certain people sensitive to tannins, which would explain why lighter reds don’t have the same effect. The tradeoff being, of course, that the bioflavinoids of the black tea that seem to help reduce the Red Wine Headache are accompanied by a screaming rush of caffeine. On balance, I think I’ll stick with shiraz, pinot noir, and temperillos in the future. Frank Sinatra might have loved his Cabs, but I’m not going to risk a headache because of ol’ Blue Eyes’ preferences.
As to the history: Being a barber has been the career of Valentine since he opened his first shop on Greenwood at the ripe old age of 23. A few years back, Valentine got tired of dealing with the aesthetic. Realistically, barbershops that have the old swirling pole don’t attract fantastic clientele, and the move to more upscale digs seems to fit the nattily-dressed crew well. The whole place would not be out of sync if there was a Wurlitzer in the background bubbling away on show tunes. And I’ll admit I wouldn’t have nearly as much fun scrunched up in a metal waiting chair, or Craigslisted church pew staring at scuffed linoleum and half-assed magazine collage work highlighting as many naked pseudo-1970s images as possible. But I thoroughly enjoyed being parked on a deep chocolate leather club chair sipping chilled water out of a martini glass. And I didn’t have to sit next to the crazy lady talking about saving the hair scraps so she can take them home and compost them in her urban garden*.
Yes, yes, I know. My punk roots are fading faster than my bleach-blonde roots. Sue me. (And that was probably the third dumbest thing I did to my hair this year, behind the Lillith Fair Experience.)
At any rate, the conversation was smooth, and far from stilted. I may attribute that to the 400mg of caffeine jouncing around in my brain, or just that it worked. In either case, what would normally be a pretty rough-and-tumble morning wound up working fairly well.
The time that the cut took was the most impressive thing for me, personally. A fast-and-dirty cut at a salon or barbershop by comparison takes around twenty minutes if you’re feeling slow, but Valentine and his crew take their time. It would be intensely frustrating if you had less than an hour to kill on a Saturday morning and just needed a quick clip, but that is not what makes this an experience. And after looking at myself in the mirror like a peacock for a half hour afterwards, I’ll admit the time difference is hugely important. Again, it’s like chugging a handcrafted, lovingly poured Czech Pilsner imported at great expense like you were shotgunning a can of beer. Not really the best idea, no. Valentine and his staff seemed to go slower not to rip through the clientele, but to actually do a really good job and take their time to make sure they got the hairs right.
Valentine’s is a full-service man’s salon, which I took to mean that they deal with the guys who aren’t into the whole manscaping routine, except as a matter of course and/or luxury. What I got was the basic package – a haircut, shampoo and lather, scalp massage, styling and drying, and for $35 plus gratuity (not included), that’s not bad at all. But they offer cleanups at two weeks for $25 – exactly what it says, a trimming and quick servicing of your ‘do to keep it going till the next cut, full straight-razor shaves ranging from $45 to $75, and package treatments ranging from $75 to $275. Manicures and pedicures are $35 and $45, respectively.
Since I wasn’t able to go the whole hog on The Emperor’s Treatment (for $275), I can only go with my cut experience, though once I get over my minor issues regarding someone else holding a straight razor to my throat, I may try it out. At any rate, after a good forty-five minutes of being snipped, Valentine handed me off to a slender woman with star tattoos on her arms who led me in the back to a hairwashing station under blue lights. “Why the blue lights?” I asked.
“It’s so that when you open your eyes from the hairwashing, you don’t get blinded by the bright fluorescents. Also, I think we’d get some strange looks if we had red ones in here,” she said, fingers rubbing at my head. Shampoo or not, gentle fingers washing your hair that aren’t your own are definitely a luxury, and damned if it’s not a nice one. The fact that I didn’t get blinded by buzzing fluorescents immediately afterwards – a definite bonus. And she beat me to the obvious joke. These people know what they’re doing.
After having my head soaped and massaged over a sink with lukewarm water, then dried, I headed out to the styling chairs – overstuffed with comfortable, clean tan lines. Three minutes of stylish mussing later I looked, and felt, like I was a sexy god of men, albeit one still dressed like a complete Saturday morning schlubbie.
In other words, I think I’m a convert to the ways of Valentine’s. For those in the north end of Seattle – and by that, I mean anywhere north of the Aurora bridge – it’s an experience worth trying at least once. I’m planning on going back. Even by the slightly higher cost standards, the quality of service you get from a cut there and the laid-back atmosphere truly does make you feel like you’re there to get your handsome on.
I know that it's rare I spend such a long amount of time NOT disparaging something about the main subject of the place, but the most striking thing about Valentine's is the lack of music overlay in the place. It's quiet, but not distractingly so, and the layout makes it feel like when you're there, you're in a private world of your own. For me, that's a unique experience, and something I rather like.
Maybe I might swing by my old stomping ground, Rudy’s, once in a while, or if I need a cut in Eugene I might stop in at my Dad’s barber down on 13th Street, but I think I’ve found my new favorite place to get my ears lowered.
*No, really. Rudy’s in Fremont has some FASCINATING people who go there. Which is why four shots of espresso and a can of PBR was the pre-attendance ritual. I was told in no uncertain detail about how one could compost dead cats, rats, dogs, hair, bones, and other items of garbage, even wrapping cardboard as I steadily and unsuccessfully tried to show intense interest in Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ newest love spat. Off-kilter Fremonsters – crazy, but persistently so.
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