Free Haircuts For The Poor At Bronx Social Agency

Bronx - The barber arrives on Tuesdays at 10 a.m. The men are already waiting in the hallways — some have been there for hours, knowing that the latecomers will have to idle past lunch.

Some clutch folders of legal papers; others carry loaves of bread from the pantry downstairs. With housing crises to sort out, empty stomachs to fill and bureaucratic tangles to unravel, they have come to this social service agency on Webster Avenue in the Bronx for something more pedestrian yet somehow just as crucial: a haircut.

The agency, Part of the Solution, offers legal assistance, free meals served on tablecloths, and showers for the homeless and the destitute.

But it is the haircut program — relatively unusual in New York’s social service constellation — that provides a look at the most unguarded moments of and revealing surprises about the lives of people stuck on the city’s margins.

The barber chair is part confessional, part salon; some come to sharpen up for a job interview or a court appearance, others to pour out their troubles, a few just for the camaraderie.

“If I have too much hair, it’s stressing,” said Gilbert Morales, who suffers from depression and is recovering from knee surgery. “You don’t know what to do with it. You don’t know whether to wear a hat. You don’t know how to comb it. It’s something else you have to deal with in life — your hair.”

“When I get a haircut,” he added, “I feel a lot of, like, load off my head.”

Despite their grinding problems, the men still care about their hair. Like Upper East Side matrons, they direct Alexander Castro, the barber, to style their hair just so — Mr. Morales wanted a standard fade and “just a little bit from the top”; Edwin Cruz, a legal assistant who was recently laid off, wanted a Mohawk; Jason Worrell, who collects scrap metal, suggested a short cut to hide his bald spot; Jorge Ramos, a recovering drug addict, asked to keep his ponytail long.

Free haircuts are also available at the Riverside Church soup kitchen on the Upper West Side (Monday and Tuesday afternoons) and at the Yorkville Common Pantry in East Harlem (Wednesdays, 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.). Here at Part of the Solution, Mr. Castro has given 795 haircuts to 353 people over the past year, up from 712 the previous year, and the most he has given in a year since the program began in 2000. Most weeks, he has to turn people away before packing up his shears around 5 p.m.

On one recent Tuesday, Anthony Chavis, a towering man with a gravelly voice, settled into Mr. Castro’s chair and asked him to shave off his mullet — “zoom it away to the bone” — and leave a spiky crew cut on top. He had an interview with a security-guard firm, and he wanted to look the part.

“A haircut starts at $15, $20 — I can’t afford that,” said Mr. Chavis, 50. “Here, they do it for free and it’s a gift. And I’ll take that gift. I need help right now.”

“Blow dryers, shampoo and all that — it’s just not the time for that,” he added. “It’s not a matter of being pretty now. It’s a matter of being real.”

Mr. Chavis said he spent two years recovering from a savage beating in Elizabeth, N.J. The attack cost him his teeth, and the hospital bills ate up his savings. “I lost everything,” he said. “A psychiatrist told me I was depressed. Come on now. If I wasn’t depressed, then I would be insane.”

With a carefully shaped beard and a baseball cap deliberately askew, Mr. Castro works meticulously, sometimes spending up to 45 minutes per head. His regular job is at a popular barbershop in the Kingsbridge neighborhood, but he comes to Webster Avenue each Tuesday for $100, which works out to about $5 a head.

“There’s people coming in that haven’t got a shower in a while,” he noted. “They’ve got all that dirt on their heads and stuff. I really try to clean them up a little bit, but there’s not really much I can do about it.”

Mr. Cruz, the laid-off legal assistant, said he wanted Mr. Castro to shave the sides of his head but leave the long floppy hair on top. Mr. Castro suggested something a bit less avant-garde, but Mr. Cruz was adamant.

“I usually do something very simple, but I have to take advantage when I’m not working,” he said. “The legal world is not the setting for hair creativity.”

After Mr. Castro buzzed away, Mr. Cruz checked his hairline in the mirror and admired his admittedly eccentric look.

“If I get a job, trust me, the look would change instantly,” he said. “It’s a very temporary look. It’s the ‘till I get a new job’ look.” Rudy Ortiz, a truck driver who had been out of work for four months, said that when he goes to a job center, “I feel awkward when my hair stands up.”

“I dress up, but no matter how much I comb it, it sticks up,” Mr. Ortiz explained. “So I like to get it cut short.”

As the day wore on, Mr. Ramos, a stocky man with tattoos up his arms and a ponytail down his back, sat down in the barber’s chair and made a statement that left Mr. Castro at a loss: “I don’t really want to cut my hair.”

He would accept a slight trim, but what he really needed was to tell the story of his battle with heroin.

“I have done things that I’m really ashamed of,” he said, looking toward the windows. Before he used drugs, he had heard stories of addicts stealing from their families. “I said, ‘Man, you’ve got to be really, really desperate to take money from your mom.’ And I did it.”

He said he was clean now and working hard to re-establish a relationship with his teenage daughter, who lives in Boston with her mother and “somebody else that she calls Daddy.”

Mr. Ramos treats his long hair as a symbol of his long climb to sobriety. When he finally sees his daughter again, he said, he will give her the honor of deciding whether he should cut it short.

“All the time, when I comb my hair, I think about her,” he said. “If she wants me to cut it, I’ll cut it.”

NY Times