Classic cuts, cutting jokes

Richard Bird is as sharp and quick as the straight razor he uses to shave his customers’ necks and trim around their ears. He’s a lot less careful with his mouth than his blade.

And he doesn’t apologize for that.

“This is a male chauvinist barber shop,” Bird said. “And women come in here at their own risk. My wife won’t even come in here during working hours.”

Only a few women have set foot in the Coeur d’Alene barbershop and not been teased, Bird warns as he finishes up a flattop on a former FBI agent.

“But you’re not one of them,” he said, drawing chuckles out of the gray-haired gents waiting for their turn in his chair.

It’s hard to separate true tales from yarns at the Best Avenue Barber Shop, which Bird will close Friday after 40 years in the business.

Bird said he’s ready for retirement after years of flattops and buzz cuts, and ready to spend more time buying and selling stocks. And to give his 67-year-old arms and wrists a rest. His longtime business partner, 75-year-old George Inglis, hasn’t worked since he had shoulder surgery earlier in the year.

“My wrists are going,” Bird said. “It’s a hard job, really.”

None of the men waiting in the vinyl-covered chairs at Bird’s shop Tuesday morning was a first-time customer. Some, like Rin May, have been coming to Bird for more than 30 years. His father was a regular, too.

Dick Powell, the former FBI agent, moved to Coeur d’Alene five years ago. He said he was driving by the barbershop and spotted Bird out front, wearing a sandwich board proclaiming, “Will cut hair for food.”

“I pitied him,” Powell said.

“He bought me a sandwich,” Bird said.

“It was a bologna sandwich,” Powell replied, and only then did the joke become obvious.

Jab for jab, the conversation continued. Then Powell reminded Bird that there was a female reporter in the room.

“Just do a nice interview,” Powell said. But Bird wasn’t about to let up.

He told a story about a college student who came in to get his head shaved because he was portraying a Buddhist monk in a play. As the student waited his turn, a woman came in with her elderly father. She watched as the student sat down in the barber chair.

“Just a light trim?” Bird asked, making sure the woman overheard.

“I take my closest clipper and run it down the middle his head,” Bird recalled. “She was screaming. … I’m making his head look like a Michigan football helmet.”

Bird said he spun the student around in the chair to face the mirror.

“He says, ‘It’s just perfect,’ ” Bird said. “She’s going, ‘But … but … but.’ “

The woman never came back, he said. It made no difference to Bird.

“Good jokes only come around every five years,” he said.

He hesitated a moment and then asked his Tuesday morning customers if he should tell the story about the “beamer.” A moment later, it was clear Bird was not referring to a BMW.

“You know what a beamer is?” he asks, stretching his hands out from his hips. “It’s a woman wide across the beam.”

Bird then launches into a story about one such woman who came in looking for a job. When Bird said he didn’t have time to talk and didn’t have any openings, she began chatting with the customers.

She had recently moved up from Mountain Home, Idaho, she told them.

When a customer asked why she wasn’t working as a barber there, she explained that most of the men had gone off to fight in the Iraq war.

“She says, ‘I’m losing my ass down there,’ ” Bird said. “And everything went quiet. I got a chair between me and her. I lean over and say, ‘Unh, unh,’ and I duck.”

Bird said the woman swung around as he hid behind the customer in the chair. “She ups and kicks the guy and runs out the door,” he said. “You don’t think I’d hire a violent woman like that?”

After Bird finished cutting Powell’s hair and giving him a hot shave with a straight razor, Powell rose from the chair. May was next in line but offered his spot to Bob Rackham, a former Marine Corps colonel.

“I’m not in any hurry,” May said.

“Neither am I,” said Rackham, climbing into the chair.

Bird wasn’t in a hurry, either.

“I drove down the road and the sign said ‘best barber shop,’ ” Rackham said, explaining how he happened upon the business three years ago. “I said, ‘I have to try that.’ And it was. It’s the best barber shop.”

May said he didn’t know what he was going to do after being with the same barber for 30 years.

“I’m kind of old-fashioned,” May said. “I’d just as soon go to an honest-to-goodness barber, not one of those put-on places with pool tables.”