I Should've Gone to Black Barber Shops All My Life

When he was almost finished, Richard wet a towel, patted it on my head and grabbed a fistful of my hair.

"Gotta add some moisture," he said. "And I can see where the weight is in your hair."

He kept grabbing fistfuls of my hair, all over my head, till he found my cowlick. "This is where all the weight is. See up top, where it's nice and light? And here, it just wants to curl up on itself."

Curly hair is mostly a curse. My hair looks nearly the same when I get out of bed and when I do anything to it.

When I was a kid, and all through college, I just went to the local $12 place, Supercuts or Great Clips. They always used the clippers and on Day 1 I had a military cut; on Day 21 I had a great leonine fro.

When I moved into the Western Addition, I looked on Yelp and found a Burner woman who cut hair out of her kitchen. She was around the corner and never used clippers, so I was happy there for a while. But she kept encouraging me to grow out a mullet, and I haven't gone back.

The trendy salons up and down Divis – like Population and Orange – caught my eye. The stylist there, with his black leather vest and a ten-gallon cowboy hat, did some new things: He tried to follow the curl of my hair, and it looked good, but at $55 a pop I couldn't make it a habit.

So I finally walked into one of the black-owned barber shops on Divis, Westside Cuts. The barber, Nate, who had retired from driving a Muni bus for 30 years, took a whole hour to cut my hair and trim my beard – I'd never had that done before. He was a little gruff, but the haircut was great and my beard has never looked that good, before or since.

Yesterday I went back to Westside Cuts, but Nate wasn't there, so I walked across the street to Chicago's. The barber upstairs, Richard, fit in me in.

Stevie Wonder was playing on the radio and for most of the hour we talked about the 49ers.

Richard approached curly hair like a science, instead of just trying to buzz it off or grow it out. He told me what it would look like in profile if he did this, and how the cowlick would behave if he did that. The guy before me tipped $10 on a $20 cut, and now I know why.