The Jehr Hair

When I turned thirty a few years back, I asked my mom for a haircut. She usually emails a month in advance to ask what I would like for my birthday, and so I told her about a special haircut that was (gasp) one hundred dollars. I didn’t think my mom would react as she did, “I want to know what a hundred-dollar haircut looks like,” she said. Of course, she was the one who started me on this trend when I was fourteen. She took me to Charles Ifergan, an upscale salon in Chicago and its suburbs, where a striking Italian named Pascal cut my hair unlike anyone ever had. Since I have such thick hair (the kind that hairdressers would call over to their colleagues just to say, “Hey, come here. Feel this,” for as long as I could remember), Pascal shaved underneath my top layer of hair and cut it into a “bob,” which was the haircut at the time. My hair swung beautifully while I ran down the field hockey field, but friends made fun of me once the bob finally grew out and all you could see were the razor lines from my under-layer shave when my hair was in a ponytail.

I found out about this new hundred-dollar haircut when a co-worker had taken the weekend to transform from girl into woman, and since I was turning thirty, I figured I needed to do the same.

“His name is Jehr. They wrote him up in San Francisco magazine. He’s expensive, but he’s amazing.”

There’s something about a girlfriend with a great haircut. It’s similar to when she meets the best person in her relationship log thus far, you just want to go out and do the same.

Mom agreed and said she’d send the birthday money. My oldest sister was on her way out for her first San Francisco visit and would accompany me to the haircut. What arrived in the mail from Mom wasn’t the simple blank check that we wished for from our parents every so often during adulthood, but instead, was another one of my mom’s practical jokes. In my birthday box was a Kleenex box, with a slit at the top and a one-dollar bill sticking out with a Post-It note attached that read, “Pull here.” When I pulled, dollar bills kept coming—all one hundred of them. She had taped them together and rolled them around the cardboard roll of a toilet paper roll. When I called my mom, she was laughing from the moment she picked up the phone. That afternoon, my sister and I prepared for the cut the next day by sitting on the back porch of my house, peeling Scotch tape off each dollar bill in an effort to not rip any.

When we arrived at Jehr’s loft, we noticed that he had taken minimalism to the next level. The downstairs room with a separate entrance was his hair studio. In the studio sat one retro green chair. There was no mirror. There was no tea. There was no lounge music playing over a good sound system or the new issue of Vogue to flip through. It was just Jehr and the chair for one hundred dollars. I was perplexed.

Jehr had a shaven head and wore a black flight jumpsuit, with hair cutting shears that stuck out of his front pocket. I immediately thought of Dr. Evil. I had never had my haircut by a man without hair, and I wasn’t sure if my thick hair and his lack of hair went well together, but then I remembered my girlfriend’s haircut and decided to let go of any judgment.

Jehr called me into the bathroom, where he put his fingers through my hair in front of a mirror to discuss vaguely what he might like to do. He didn’t go into specifics, and luckily, I was ready for a change from my long mane—in high school, my friends nicknamed me “Lampshade.” I was ready for Jehr to take off the lampshade and bring in some light.

He sat me in the chair, talked to us about his newborn baby, and clipped away.