Bryson's America: I look like a lemon pie with ears

YOU HAVE to understand that I have very happy hair. No matter how serene and composed the rest of me is, no matter how grave and formal the situation, my hair is always having a party. In any group photograph you can spot me at once because I am the person at the back whose hair seems to be listening, in some private way, to a disco album called Dance Craze '97.

Every so often, with a sense of foreboding, I take this hair of mine uptown to the barbershop and allow one of the men there to amuse himself with it for a bit. I don't know why, but going to the barber brings out the wimp in me. There is something about being enshrouded in a cape and having my glasses taken away, then being set about the head with sharp cutting tools that leaves me feeling helpless and insecure.

I mean, there you are, armless and squinting, and some guy you don't know is doing serious, almost certainly regrettable, things to the top of your head. I must have had 250 haircuts in my life by now, and if there is one thing I have learned it is that a barber will give you the haircut he wants to give you and there is nothing you can do about it.

So the whole experience is filled with trauma for me. This is particularly so as I always get the barber I was hoping not to get - usually the new guy they call "Thumbs". I especially dread the moment when he sits you in the chair and the two of you stare together at the hopeless catastrophe that is the top of your head, and he says, in a worryingly eager way: "So what would you like me to do with this?"

"Just a simple tidy-up," I say, looking at him with touching hopefulness, but knowing that already he is thinking in terms of extravagant bouffants and mousse-stiffened swirls, possibly a fringe of bouncy ringlets.

"You know, something anonymous and respectable - like a banker or an accountant."

"See any styles up there you like?" he says and indicates a wall of old black and white photographs of smiling men whose hairstyles seem to have been modelled on Thunderbirds characters.

"Actually, I was hoping for something a bit less emphatic."

"A more natural look, in other words?"

"Exactly."

"Like mine, for instance?"

I glance at the barber. His hairstyle brings to mind an aircraft carrier advancing through choppy seas, or perhaps an extravagant piece of topiary.

"Even more subdued than that," I suggest nervously.

He nods thoughtfully, in a way that makes me realise we are not even in the same universe taste-in-hairwise, and says in a sudden, decisive tone: "I know just what you want. We call it the Wayne Newton."

"That's really not quite what I had in mind," I start to protest, but already he is pushing my chin into my chest and seizing up his shears.

"It's a very popular look - everyone on the bowling team has it," he adds, and with a buzz of motors starts taking hair off my head as if stripping wallpaper.

"I really don't want the Wayne Newton look," I murmur with feeling, but my chin is buried in my chest and in any case my voice is drowned in the hum of his dancing clippers.

And so I sit for a small, tortured eternity, staring at my lap, under strict instructions not to move, listening to terrifying cutting machinery trundling across my scalp. Out of the corner of my eye I can see large quantities of shorn hair tumbling onto my shoulders.

"Not too much off," I bleat from time to time, but he is engaged in a lively conversation with the barber and customer at the next chair about the prospects for the Chicago Bulls basketball team, and only occasionally turns his attention to me and my head, generally to mutter: "Oh, dang," or "Whoopsie."

Eventually he jerks my head up and says: "How's that for length?" I squint at the mirror, but without my glasses all I can see is what looks like a pink balloon in the distance. "I don't know," I say. "It looks awfully short." I notice he is looking unhappily at everything above my eyebrows.

"Did we decide on a Paul Anka or a Wayne Newton?" he asks.

"Well, neither, as a matter of fact," I say, pleased to have an opportunity to get this sorted out at last. "I just wanted a modest tidy-up."

"Let me ask you this," he says. "How fast does your hair grow?"

"Not very," I say and squint harder at the mirror, but I still can't see a thing. "Why, is there a problem?"

"Oh, no," he says, but in that way that means "Oh, yes". "No, it's fine," he goes on. "It's just that I seem to have done the left side of your head in a Paul Anka and the right in a Wayne Newton. Let me ask you this, then, Do you have a big hat?"

"What have you done?" I ask in a rising tone of alarm, but he has gone off to his colleagues for a consultation.

They look at me the way you might look at a road accident victim, and talk in whispers.

"I think it must be these antihistamines I'm taking," I hear Thumbs say to them sadly.

One of the colleagues comes up for a closer look and decides it's not as disastrous as it looks.

"If you take some of this hair here from behind the left ear," he says, "and take it around the back of his head and hook it over the other ear, and maybe reattach some of this from here, then you can make it into a modified Barney Rubble."

He turns to me. "Will you be going out much over the next few weeks, sir?"

"Did you say `Barney Rubble'?" I whimper in dismay.

"Unless you go for a Hercules Poirot," suggests the other barber.

"Hercules Poirot?" I whimper anew. They leave Thumbs to do what he can. After another 10 minutes he hands me my glasses and lets me raise my head. In the mirror I am confronted with an image that brings to mind a lemon meringue pie with ears. Over my shoulder, Thumbs is smiling proudly.

"Turned out pretty good after all, eh?" he says.

I am unable to speak. I hand him a large sum of money and stumble from the shop. I walk home with my collar up and my head sunk into my shoulders. At the house my wife takes one look at me. "Do you say something to upset them?" she asks in sincere wonder.

I shrug helplessly. "I told him I wanted to look like a banker."

She gives one of those sighs that come to all wives eventually. "Well at least you rhyme," she mutters in that odd, enigmatic way of hers, and goes off to get the big hat.

Notes From A Big Country, (Doubleday pounds 16.99)