Thinking the barber shop would close at 4pm today, I quickly sped down to Campbelltown mall in the car at 3:50pm. Having spent over four months in lockdown with no access to hairdressers in New South Wales, my hair had grown noticeably scruffy.
I rushed through the mall downstairs over to the barber shop. From a distance, I saw the well-groomed, silvertail Middle Eastern male barber seated on the circular, wooden bench seats outside his open barber shop.
A big smile came over my face. I nodded and smiled from a distance.
“Do you want to get a haircut,”he rose from the circular bench to ask.
As we approached the barber shop reception counter together, I was confronted by all the New South Wales government mandatory covid-19 vaccine certificates check-in signage and symbols displayed on his business shopfront.
It read, “Please show your proof of vaccination. It’s a condition of entry.”
A tinge of nerves overcame me as I approached the front counter. This was the make or break moment between my barber of some years, and my staunch pro-choice values.
“Can I come in,” I casually asked.
He waved his hand inwards, and asked for nothing whatsoever related to vaccine certificates. My nerves dissipated.
The momentary shock nonetheless followed me into the barber shop inner sanctum. I fudged my way nervously through people, not thinking, almost bumping into an obese older Caucasian lady tending to her husband who was standing up from his haircut.
“Oh, sorry,” I excused myself, cutting a disorientated figure as I moved away from the lady to slink my way between both of them to find my way to the chair.
One other customer to my left was in the middle of a haircut. A Muslim woman wearing a hijab and face mask soon came into the barber shop to sit down. The old lady and her husband approached the reception counter to pay.
The silvertail Middle Eastern male barber stood above me with a smirk in his eyes.
He asked me, “How do you want me to cut your hair today?”
That’s when I realized, “I’ve got to talk!”
I was a mess of wobbly maneuvers in an imaginary tumble dryer as I blindly pinballed from greeting the barber shop to becoming seated in a chair, my eyes dancing in a mad rush to ascertain whether there was a credible chance that I would be refused entry merely for being a fit and healthy, disease free, unvaccinated Australian during the covid-19 pandemic.
I spoke up, “Just give me a number two shave around, and shorter at the sides. Just make it neater.”
I was thrown when he asked, “Can you remove your mask, please?”
As I removed my face mask, I digested his request. He needs me to remove the mask so that hair doesn’t get all into my face mask. Breathing my own hair into my face mask would rightly be a health hazard. That made perfect health safety sense.
As the barber began to snip away, I glanced around, and became very self-conscious.
Irrational thoughts brewed, “My hair looks really wild right now. It’s grown out over a few months because I haven’t cut it. Everyone can see that I look like a mini Wolverine! Can they tell by looking at my hair that I have not been vaccinated?”
As I looked in the mirror at the well-groomed male getting his haircut to my left , I had another thought.
I realized that nobody in this barber shop was speaking, in a barber shop!
I had spoken one or two sentences. Then I just shut up.
I believe the hairdresser deliberately avoided conversation too.
It was really weird to me.
I sat there with weird feelings going on through my body as well.
Because I was uncomfortable to speak, I smirked to myself.
I felt elation too, as if I was going to start crying at any moment. I know I’m not going to cry! But I had this nervous tic in my body that could break out into an uncontrollable, anxious tear or two seeping out of my tear ducts.
It was a weird feeling for me to have.
Subconsciously, I knew that if I spoke up and we talked about vaccinated or unvaccinated status, or anything political, it would instantly out me as being unvaccinated in a time when only double vaccinated patrons are allowed to enter barber shops, restaurants, and the like.
The barber would have to respond to that. It would be a very uncomfortable conversation. I was acutely paranoid.
Then I had to convince myself, “Hey, Tony, don’t be anxious anymore. This guy knows you. You’re a regular customer. He hasn’t asked you about your private medical information. He is not going to embarrass you. Maybe he’s afraid that you’re going to embarrass him by talking about your vaccination status. So just relax, smile, and get out of the chair soon.”
It struck me that we’ve gotten to a point in Australia where people who would normally go to a barber or hairdresser and talk their heads off have now become so paranoid about government intervention or snitches, that they zip their mouth closed and refuse to speak.
It was really telling of the dystopian world in Australia that we are living in now.
New South Wales has entered a weird, double-jabbed phase of the covid-19 pandemic response where customers do not want to disclose their private information, business don’t want to ask private information of their customers, either, yet the government has mandated that business asks customers for their private information in order to use the services of the business.
That’s how the haircut was. I kept quiet while he shaved around my head.
Once he cut my hair, he said, “All done.” He waved his hand like magic.
I stood up out of the chair, and engaged in banter as we quietly went over to the front counter to pay.
“You look tired,” he shared.
I said, “Yeah, I’m quite tired. My kid takes a lot of energy out of me. Do you still accept cash?”
He told me, “Yes. It’s $25 today.”
I handed over $50 dollars, saying, “Take thirty out, don’t worry.”
I gave the barber a $5 tip for being human.
I know that when I return home to show my haircut to my wife, she’s going to ask, “Wow, how did you get that done?”
I’ll tell her, “There are some humans in the world that don’t follow lock step with Chinese Communist Party tactics, to try to put their hands in business and control them.”
That is how Australia feels now, like China-lite.
Diary Of A Mad Chaos is a daily diary written from March 1996 until today, of which individual books and book series have been created, namely “The Lost Years” an exploration of young, entwined love, the “Wubao In China (猎艳奇缘)” book series which provides an extensive comparative analysis of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies, and the book titled “Foreigner (华人)” an exploration of race relations in Australia.
