Rebarber
Alonso was classically Italian — round and good at what he did best. It was a niche service, a storefront slotted in between an aging fish and chip place and the only butcher for three miles. The closest barber was across the road and Alonso benefited more from them than they did from Alonso. A small concrete island in the middle of the road separated the two provincial lanes.
People would come from all over and they would find Alonso outside his store smoking, waiting for his appointments, booked singularly in his only chair, and with generous time on either side to avoid others learning his secrets. He was his own billboard of sorts, with the perfect hair that was the ideal advertisement. Alonso made it a habit not to make eye contact with those entering or exiting the barber across the way. It was, he’d decided, impolite because he would see so many of them later on. They left with their hands in what was left of their hair, their hats and hoods back on as they cast their eyes to the ground and made their way back through the village lanes to their cars.
Sometimes they would see Alonso and the inverted scissors in his window and they would get curious but not ask and, back in the warmth of their vehicles, they would search for him and find his simple website and there they would call and he would not answer. The booking page was front and centre and so, sometimes, they would.
When they’d booked, they would arrive to find himself always smoking, with the permanent scent of ash, and he would wordlessly usher them in and seat them in the tall leather chair. In the same silence — part of his rules and part of, as he said if anyone asked, “his process” — he would grow back their hair. But he would do it the way he fancied, the way he liked, the way he weighed up a face to look after the regeneration.
When we asked him for comment as he smoked beside us out the front of the store, suspecting an opportunity to give away nothing but generate the kind of coverage he’d heard had been so useful for other businesses, he told us that unpredictable exclusivity is the key to success.
He showed us no part of the process, not even as we gave ourselves poor haircuts beforehand, but he did show us the proof of his quiet success. Not ledgers or profit statements or bags of secret money but a simple button on a slow web app on an old phone that let him cancel all of his bookings with a single tap.
