Cobb's Anatomy

by Irvin S. Cobb

"Indeed?" said Frisbee. "You say it covers my coat collar?"

"Yes, sir," said the barber. "You can't see the coat collar at all."

"Have you got a good sharp pair of shears there?" said Frisbee.

"Oh, yes, sir," said the barber.

"All right then," said Frisbee; "cut the collar off."

But not all of us, as I said before, have this ready gift of parry and thrust that distinguishes my friend Frisbee. Mostly we weakly surrender. Or if we refuse to surrender, demanding just a shave by itself and nothing else, what then follows? In my own case, speaking personally, I know exactly what follows. I do not like to have any powder dabbed on my face when I am through shaving. I believe in letting the bloom of youth show through your skin, providing you have any bloom of youth to do so. I always take pains to state my views in this regard at least twice during the operation of being shaved—once at the start when the barber has me all lathered up, with soapsuds dripping from the flanges of my shell-like ears and running down my neck, and once again toward the close of the operation, when he has laid aside his razor and is sousing my defenseless features in a liquid that smells and tastes a good deal like those scented pink blotters they used to give away at drug-stores to advertise somebody's cologne.

Does the barber respect my wishes in this regard? Certainly not. He insists on powdering me, either before my eyes or surreptitiously and in a clandestine manner. If he didn't powder me up he would lose his sense of self-respect, and probably the union would take his card away from him. I think there is something in the constitution and by-laws requiring that I be powdered up. I have fought the good fight for years, but I'm always powdered. Sometimes the crafty foe dissembles. He pretends that he is not going to powder me up. But all of a sudden when my back is turned, as it were, he grabs up his powder swab and makes a quick swoop upon me and the hellish deed is done. I should be pleased to hear from other victims of this practice suggesting any practical relief short of homicide. I do not wish to kill a barber—there are several other orders in ahead, referring to the persons I intend to kill off first—but I may be driven to it.

After he has gashed me casually hither and yen, and sluiced down my helpless countenance with the carefree abandon of a livery-stable hand washing off a buggy, and after, as above stated, he has covered up the traces of his crime with powder, the barber next takes a towel and folds it over his right hand, as prescribed in the rules and regulations, and then he dabs me with that towel on various parts of my face nine hundred and seventy-four—974—separate and distinct times. I know the exact number of dabs because I have taken the trouble to keep count. I may be in as great a hurry as you can imagine; I may be but a poor nervous wreck already, as I am; I may be quivering to be up and away from there, but he dabs me with his towel—he dabs me until reason totters on her throne—sometimes just a tiny tot, as the saying goes, or it may be that the whole cerebral structure is involved—and then when he is apparently all through the Demoniac Dabber comes back and dabs me one more fiendish, deliberate and premeditated dab, making nine hundred and seventy-five dabs in all. He has to do it; it's in the ritual that I and you and everybody must have that last dab. I wonder how many gibbering idiots there are in the asylum today whose reason was overthrown by being dabbed that last farewell dab. I know from my own experience that I can feel the little dark-green gibbers sloshing round inside of me every time it happens, and some day my mind will give away altogether and there'll be a hurry call sent in for the wagon with the lock on the back door. Yet it is of no avail to cavil or protest; we cannot hope to escape; we can only sit there in mute and helpless misery and be filled with a great envy for Mexican hairless dogs.

For quite a spell now we have been speaking of hair on the face; at this point we revert to hair in its relation to the head. There are some few among us, mainly professional Southerners and leading men, who retain the bulk of the hair on their heads through life; but with most of us the circumstances are different. Your hair goes from you. You don't seem to notice it at first; then all of a sudden you wake up to the realization that your head is working its way up through the hair. You start in then desperately doing things for your hair in the hope of inducing it to stick round the old place a while longer, but it has heard the call of the wild and it is on its way. There's no detaining it. You soak your skull in lotions until your brain softens and your hat-band gets moldy from the damp, but your hair keeps right on going.

After a while it is practically gone. If only about two-thirds of it is gone your head looks like a great auk's egg in a snug nest; but if most of it goes there is something about you that suggests the Glacial Period, with an icy barren peak rising high above the vegetation line, where a thin line of heroic strands still cling to the slopes. You are bald then, a subject fit for the japes of the wicked and universally coupled in the betting with onions, with hard-boiled eggs and with the front row of orchestra chairs at a musical show.