The Rite of Passage

THE RITE OF PASSAGE

by Victor Epp

 

This started out to be a tongue in cheek piece of nonsense about the time one of my buddies and I decided at the ripe old age of fourteen that we were all grown up. Our only problem was that nobody ever understood. We never ever got the respect from the adults that we figured was our due. To them we were just a bunch of ratty looking nuisances worth nothing but a bunch of trouble waiting to happen. Well that being the case, if we looked more like adults maybe they'd sit up and take notice. What we needed was a real barbershop type shave. Maybe that would help.

Any boy who's ever been fourteen will tell you that given at least one buddy and time on his hands, there's bound to be some adventure in the works. Well, Arnold and I were no different. In fact, you could pretty well count on something unusual happening when any of our group was prowling around.

Not that shaving was altogether new to us. We'd both been scraping peach fuzz off our pimply faces long enough that the novelty had all but wore off. The kind of a shave we needed though was the kind you could get at the barbershop when there was still such a thing as barbershops. That was back when haircuts were thirty-five cents, and for an extra two bits you could get a shave too. You could sit there on a Saturday morning reading Mechanics Illustrated or some other magazine at Charlie's Barbershop. You'd wait your turn to get a haircut and listen to the slap, slap, slap of his straight razor against the strop while his customer lay back under a steaming wet towel. Like a surgeon Charlie would slice lather and beard from the man in the chair, all the while maintaining a steady banter without missing a beat. In a single majestic gesture, old Charlie managed to sweep the towel from the man's neck, splash on some after-shave, and raise the chair to an upright position and voila! The grizzled old ironworker was transformed into a new man about town. Now that was a shave!

So now you know of course where our minds were headed. See the thing was, my dad still had his straight razor, and his strop. He had his shaving bowl and brush. He even had a wall cabinet we called the ‘Look Here’ to put it all in. We called it that because the guy that made it put a little sign under the mirror that said ‘Look Here’. Only by now dad had invested in one of those new-fangled electric razors, so he didn't need it anymore. The old cabinet now hung on the wall in my bedroom so I could have a mirror to brush my hair.

It was actually that very cabinet that drew us into emulating barbers. A strange thing it was, probably home made. The little mirror had certainly seen better days. Under it was a drawer containing all the necessities for shaving - the straight razor, brush and bowl, soap, and the dreaded strop. I knew about uses for that thing besides sharpening the razor.

Well, Arnold didn't really know much about such equipment. He'd lost his father as a little boy, so stuff like this was a natural curiosity for him. He saw the ‘Look Here’ on the wall in my room and naturally, he looked. There it was staring him right in the face - everything Charlie the barber had! We could do this grown up man stuff! It was high time to have a go at it anyway.

Of course there were some things we had to improvise on, seeing we didn't have a barber chair. That didn't matter though. We had the run of the house 'cause dad was at work and mom was somewhere - probably at church with her Ladies' Auxiliary. That meant we could turn the kitchen into our barbershop.

There were certain things I already knew how to do because I'd seen dad do them. For one thing, when he sharpened his razor, he'd hang the strop off the back of the kitchen chair, put his foot on the seat to steady it and slap away until he could pull a hair out of his head and slice it in two with the blade. Then he'd fold it up and lather himself before he started the scraping ritual. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. He always kept a spare packet of Zigzag cigarette papers handy in case he nicked himself. There were times he had three or four little pieces of the paper pasted to his face. That usually happened Sunday morning if he was running late for church.

Nothing would do for us but the full treatment - hot towel and all. Well, we could always hang it on the clothesline to dry. We drew lots and it was my turn to get shaved first. We made a big deal out of all the preparations. Slap, slap, slap went the razor on the strop. I pulled a hair out of my head only because Arnold wore one of those brush cuts and his was too short to work. Well, we kept on slapping and slapping but never could slice that hair. Either there was a trick to it, or the razor was too dull. We could have been slapping 'til the cows came home and still wouldn't have sliced the hair. Finally we decided to proceed with the rest of the operation anyway. We reasoned that our beards were softer than old peoples anyway so the razor was probably sharp enough.

The first thing to go wrong was the hot towel. We'd put it in the kitchen sink and poured boiling hot water over it out of the kettle. I was already leaning back in the kitchen chair, making out like it was Charlie's barber chair. When Arnold went to wring it out, he burned his fingers. Instead of throwing it back in the sink to cool off, he flung the steaming rag on my face. The shock of the scalding towel after about a second brought me flying out of the chair, tossing the thing across the room and onto the floor. Arnold was still blowing on his scalded hands and laughing at my dilemma.

Undaunted, he grabbed the brush and proceeded to work up the lather already in the bowl. He convinced me to sit down again and started to paint what used to be my face with the soap. By the time he got done, the foam had actually taken out some of the sting and I was able to sit still long enough to get the soap out of my nostrils. At least I was smart enough to keep my yap shut or he'd have shoved a brush full in there too. This was just not going the way we imagined, but once we started we were going to finish. Well, now for the moment of truth.

Flipping open the razor, he held it just so, with the blade between his thumb and forefinger. The handle was between his pinky and ring finger - just like Charlie.

“Careful, careful!” I yelled, in case he got too confident. That thing was sharp and I didn't want my head being separated from the rest of my body.

“Ow - that hurts!” Of course! Somebody pulls a straight razor across your first or second degree burned skin and it's bound to hurt.

Well he tried; I'll give him that. Not one nick on my tender skin. But somewhere along the way - I think it was around when he had the razor at my Adam's apple, he began to see the funny side of this disaster. Now was really not the time to start giggling. Somehow he managed not to slit my throat, and eventually got most of the lather off my sorry face. Then he went over and picked up the soggy towel off the doormat where it had landed and proceeded to wipe off the rest of the foam from my ears and nose and even my eyelids. That hurt worse than the scraping.

Thank God we didn't have any after-shave. Dad kept that with his electric razor. I went to my room and looked in the Look Here. Well, it wasn't what I'd expected. Instead of the handsome, sexy smelling man about town, there was this fourteen-year-old kid with a beet red face and just about as much peach fuzz on it as there was an hour ago. I was somewhat disappointed to say the least. Well, I could do better.

Arnold allowed that it was a pretty good job. What was I complaining about anyway? He hadn't murdered me had he? Well, the truth was, he hadn't. By now my face was starting to dry and the remnants of the soap in my skin tightened it up so that it actually felt kind of good. Maybe it wasn't too bad after all. I'd had my first barber style shave with a straight razor, hadn't I? Well, so I did and now it was my turn to return the favor. That gave my confidence a boost.

It turned out that Arnold was a whole lot less brave about his ugly mug than I was. Of course, he'd had the advantage of seeing what he'd done to me. He needed a lot of convincing to get him just to sit down in the chair. The only way he'd do it was if he could wrap the towel around his own face. You can bet he checked the temperature pretty carefully before he did it too!

I should have known something stupid would happen the way his eyes were darting around while I was lathering him up. What the heck was he so nervous about anyway? I didn't stick the brush in his eye or up his nose the way he did to me. I told him to shut up and sit there while I gave him his shave. Finally he did.

With the blade balanced ever so lightly between my thumb and forefinger and the handle between my pinky and ring finger, I looked more like Charlie the barber than Charlie himself. With the other hand I turned his head sideways to shave his cheek. Before I could make the first stroke, Arnold grabbed the razor out of my hand in a panic. Of course I wasn't hanging on tight to it so it came away a lot easier than he expected. His hand snapped back toward his face and the sharp edge of the razor landed right on the end of his nose making a beautiful long gash on the tip and right up the middle. I grabbed for the Zigzag cigarette papers.

It took most of the rest of the afternoon more or less, to clean everything up, including Arnold's wounded nose, but finally we managed to get it all done. By the time we were finished, we had started to see the humor in it and it turned out to be a worthwhile adventure - that is until my mother wanted to know what happened to my face, and what was that filthy towel doing on the clothesline? The only thing that saved my bacon was my dad killing himself laughing when I explained the whole sordid mess to him. Mom was not impressed, but she let it go.

Well I don't know about Arnold, but I've never touched a straight razor since. Even so, I've always thought of that day as the defining moment of my coming of age, even more than the next year when I was allowed to smoke in the house in spite of my mother's indignation and disgust.

In a way I suppose it was a rite of passage from childhood to manhood - our own celebration, our own claim on our identity. That got me to thinking, whatever happened to such an important ritual anyway? It seems to be as much a need of adolescents as it is a function of adult society. At one stage of our evolution when young males started to feel their oats, the Elders would perform some painful act upon them. If the young folks survived, they'd be handed a spear and told they were now hunters. The threat of starvation was always a very good incentive for them to succeed.

To put your finger on the issue, you have to once again acknowledge the ticking of a biological clock. There comes a time in every boy's life when he has to become a man. Not only that, but he has to be recognized to be a man. He has to take his place among men. Of course I can't speak for girls, but I suspect that the same principle holds true. That's where the necessary interaction between parent and child becomes critical. Only we seem to have forgotten the drill.

The days of the spear are long past, so what is a boy to become? What has he trained for all his young life? Well, let's see. There's rollerblading, there's Nintendo - oh that's a good one. It develops hand/eye co-ordination. At school he learns to read and write after a fashion, maybe even learns to count. By the time he enters high school, he's qualified to be just about absolutely nothing - pretty impressive, huh? Now his instincts tell him he's a man, but there's nothing to be a man at. Hell, he hasn't even got an identity. He's just a stupid teenager. What has his father taught him in all this time? Well, think about it. Dad's at work, or in jail, or in the detox center, or he split from the family, so what's a boy to learn from that? Mom's in about the same boat so there's strike two. Well, there's always day care and the school system. As far as I'm concerned that's strike three.

Even the so-called educators can't stop the biological clock. It surprises me that they even try. The drive for identity in the realm of adulthood is as strong and certain as puberty, old age and death. One way or another, it will be expressed.

As I said at the outset, the anecdote about Arnold and my adventures was intended as a tongue in cheek bit of entertainment, and I hope it is. At the same time it illustrates the point of what young people will do, with or without guidance from their Elders. Instead of addressing the issue and taking ownership of the deficiency that lies clearly with parents and grand parents, we white wash it by calling these the ‘teenage years’. We build community clubs and send the kids there. We have movie theatres and video game houses and we send the kids there. Whatever the case, we are always sending our kids somewhere. We send them to school and to camp and to lord knows wherever else. Everything is fine as long as we can send them somewhere. Then horror of horrors, we discover one day that they belong to a street gang of some sort, or are arrested for burning down a building or two, or doing drugs, or trying to kill somebody. How could this have happened?

Well hello! Welcome to reality. The light seems to be on but clearly, nobody's home. It's as simple as cause and effect. For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. Where have we heard that before? Mind you, this problem has been a long time in the making. If you backtrack through time, it has been quite a while since anybody even knew how to make a good spear, let alone teach someone else to do it. It's something that has to be learned again. There's something else that we have to re-learn. The job of teaching belongs to the parent and he/she has to be held accountable for the teaching. You don't just go around hiring a bunch of educators or social workers or corrections officers to do the job that nature itself has delegated to the parent. That's just like hiring somebody else to breathe for you because you don't feel like it.

Of course, an attitude like that will make a lot of people nervous. If everybody suddenly starts to do his or her job, there are going to be a lot of people out of work. Governments are going to have to redirect our dollars to the moms and dads instead of day care and social services and corrections all the other band-aid industries they've invented. Well, they shouldn't worry because by this time we have a lot of work to do in trying to figure out what kind of symbolic spears we need in our arsenal to be good hunters. If we can get that done, there might just be a lot of other things that will fall into line. I think we should give it a shot anyway.