Spasm Cuts: not all booked but all chaos

Humor by Max Zonana
Aug. 5, 2020, 10:23 a.m.

In light of hundreds of people protesting quarantine and complaining about their hair gone crazy, barbershops and salons opened in Santa Clara on Monday. Everyone flooded the barbershops with appointments, especially since Gavin Newsom is having the shops shut down again on Wednesday. The desperate population swarmed popular shops, leaving people to turn to Spasms Cuts, where all barbers, including manager Max Medona, are living with Cerebral Palsy.

David Cash, the man behind the counter, says “Wanna haircut?” to Ben Dean.

As a man in his 20s, Chris Pash’s face turns to horror as a chunk of his hair falls off his head, revealing a bald spot. 

“Why not? It cannot be worse than my hair now,” Dean said unnervingly. 

Right as Cash goes to get Dean’s barber, Jeff Todd, the second bald spot is awarded to Jerry Breby. A gnarly souvenir from his barber completely losing his balance, a zigzag line of baldness creates an exotic path on his head.  

Todd appears right as the Breby’s barber is on the ground. Though Todd was able to maneuver around the barber in his chair, Cash trips over Breby, knocking over the barber who gives Pash another bald spot.

By now manager Medona comes out to reassure Dean.

“What can we do? We do not mean to,” Medona said. “We just can’t help it when spasms happen.” 

“Usually it is very rare for customers to get a bald spot from our spasms; rather they become not the best aesthetically, but surely the most unique,” Todd added as he led Dean to his spot.

Though the barber asserts that bald spots are not typical, the claim appears to be, unfortunately, a bald-faced lie, since of the 10 customers who got cut that day, only one of them did not get a bald spot. Instead, he left after an incident early on in the haircut involving blood with the clippers and his ear and declined to comment for this article for obvious reasons.

Pash’s haircut finished with an uneven cut and ended up with three bald spots, which was below the daily average of four.

“I went here because nowhere else had an open slot,” Pash said. “And I was like ‘how bad can it be, it can’t be worse than Supercuts where I usually go.’ Turns out, I am sourly wrong. This place is so bad, it puts the super in Supercuts.”

When Dean had finished with his time in the barber’s chair, he fashions a cut that looks like he tried to go bald with a weed wacker. His face revealed his displeasure with the haircut and its 6 bald spots.

“I needed a haircut so badly, and this place made me need one even more.” Dean ranted. “This is an abomination of a business and should be shut down. I’ll talk to my wife Karen about filing a lawsuit.” 

“Lawsuits are part of the job of running a disabled business,” Todd said.

Spams Cuts used to be Spasms Cuts, Tattoos and Piercing but a series of lawsuits made it unsustainable to do piercing and tattoos, according to Medona.

All of Medona’s employees have ended up in lawsuits due to working here.

For example, Joseph Rodman ended up in a high profile lawsuit where he was going to pierce a young girl’s ear but due to a spasm ended up piercing her nose, which required surgery to fix. Another time, he was supposed to tattoo a competitive food eater’s stomach with an “I” but instead he gave him a Harry Potter scar and a trip to get 23 stitches and a blood transfusion.

“I feel bad, but spasms happen,” Rodman said regarding these cases.

Not all customers are angry when they leave, like Matt Nice, who is Spasms Cuts’ only regular customer but disliked by the staff because of his patronizing attitude toward them, according to Medona.

“I hate Matt,” Cash said. “When he pays, he always says how much his haircut is as if I do not know it and then proceeds to tell me how to swipe his card.”

“I swear he thinks if he goes here, his haircut is tax-deductible,” Cash added.

During the haircut, Nice maintained a smile while telling Rodman what to do.

When Rodman made a mistake, Nice said, “Oh it is okay Joey, you are doing a great job,” in a kid’s voice to Rodman.

“A lot of our customers are condescending, Matt being the worst to us, the rest walking out angry,” Rodman said. “I prefer the people who storm out — because I know that is their genuine feeling — rather than being insulted by customers who think they can trick us that they like it.”

Rodman’s last customer, John Bell, is neither angry after the haircut nor condescending to any of the workers even though he tallied a record eight bald spots and looked like he had tried to go bald via electrocution.

“Hey, at least I can put a hat on for Zoom, and no one will know,” Bell joked through his CDC-recommended facemask.  “At least my beard is intact,”.

“After Nice and Dean came in, I thought to myself that it is probably for the best that we have to close back up tomorrow,” Cash conceded. “We do not want to cause unhappiness — we just want to do our jobs.”

Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.

Contact Max Zonana at maxzonana ‘at’ gmail.com.

Max Zonana is a high schooler writing as part of The Stanford Daily's Summer Journalism Workshop.

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