There IS a worse barber than Sweeny Todd.

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They say that Madrid is a relatively safe place to live. You might be the victim of a pick-pocketing, but no one is going to seriously maim you for your metro pass or anything.

If you would have asked me last week if I´d agree completely. The only danger I´d been subjected to as of then was my own clumsiness, mainly while cooking (I don´t think I have any feeling left in my fingers). Not that I was going for a run in back alleys at night or anything, but still. Safe.

Until Friday happened. On Friday, I was the victim of a serious and unforgivable crime. And it wasn´t really what was taken from me that bothered me, but rather the wounds I´ve been forced to go in public with in the aftermath. Because, you see, as a girl, I never really like my hair anyways, and therefore losing some now and then doesn´t matter one way or another. But the Spanish demon barber of Eloy Gonzalo made me seriously reconsider the worth of my previously disrespected hair.

It started out like any horror movie starts, with a seemingly pleasant situation. I had just been hired for a new job as a teacher, meaning an extra 50 or so euro a week. Plus, for some reason, these people decided to pay me for the first day where I did absolutely nothing. Things were looking up. I walked home in a particularly bright mood, blind to the pain I was to experience only too soon.

There´s an inexpensive salon right down the street from our apartment that I passed on the way home, and I made the impulsive decision to get a haircut, my rationalization being that I´d never paid for a haircut on my own before. Since college started I´ve probably had 2 total: One was a gift, and the other was my very own hair stylist Laurel Bentley (which cost me a Chocolate bar, which is the common currency between Laurel and I in matters of business).

Everything started out harmlessly. A petite Spanish women named Carmen dyed my hair back to it´s more or less original color. This process included that head massage you get when they wash your hair, and put me in a quite relaxed (and therefore vulnerable and unsuspecting) state of being.

That´s when he showed up. His black and white uneven mohawk and manner of holding scissors as if they were a weapon should have tipped me off from the start, but, like I said, I was in post-head-massage heaven, where nobody is a bad guy. He asked me innocently,'"¿Qué quieres?" and I told him not to take off too much, but give me a few layers here and there. Have fun with it, I said (This line was probably the equivalent to saying "I´ll be right back!" in a horror movie. Because whoever says it must have a death wish). First, he suggested keeping one side long and shaving the other side. I kind of thought he was joking, but said no with an uneasy laugh, because, honestly, it wasn´t really funny. It especially wasn´t funny when he looked genuinly disappointed to my response.

That was the point that I started becoming aware of the danger of the situation. I straightend up in the chair a little bit, thinking I should keep an eye on him from then on. But as I watched in the mirror, as he took a lock from the top of my head and chopped all but one inch of it off, I realized my complete and utter powerlessness in the situation. I tried to protest, but he just kept saying "No te asustes. No te asustes. Te quedas con el largo" Don´t scare myself. Don´t scare myself. I´d still have the length. But the more he said it, and the more he kept chopping from the top, the more I kept thinking about that definition I wrote about several blogs ago about a certain haircut...and how yes it´s long in the back...

I´m not going to report him, because apparently half of the Spanish population has already been the victim of the same crime, and no one is doing anything about it yet, so what is the rage of one foreigner going to do? Learn to rock the mullet, that´s what.

Okay. We all know that I´m somewhat of an exaggerater, especially for the sake of a better story. So I want to reassure you all that it´s not so much of a redneck couldn´t afford the rest of your pixie cut kind of look, but more of a wannabe 80s rockstar one. The first few days it was worse, but I´m learning to tame it now, and I´m sure by the time you all have to see me again it will have returned to acceptable stylish normalcy. Until then, you can all say a prayer of sympathy for Laurel, or maybe send her an occasional reminder of what decade we are in fact in in case she forgets from too frequently eyeing the gremlin on my head.

I´m quite aware that this is a "travel" blog, so I guess the moral of the story is that in the wrong hands, your hair can travel to whenever it wants to.

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Comments

[bean]

evidence
i want pictures, stat.