He stood with a beatific smile on his face, a little nervous in his cricket attire, holding a pair of steel scissors, unsure what to do, not understanding a word, eventually putting down the weapon and rubbing his hands on the grubby cloth draped over his shoulder.
After a game of mime and hand gestures he got the gist and I settled back into a creaking bar stool while he prepared the cut-throat razor. My face was smothered in some sort of watery white oil, then foam, before receiving the most gentle shave of its life; the blade caressing the skin.
Next up was a kneading of my face with his fingers starting at the chin, then over the nose, squeezing and molding and pinching, circling my eyes with fingertips before rubbing vigorously, open-palmed on my forehead. After that he ruffled my hair and pulled and pushed it about for a bit, massaging each follicle. Deftly he snapped a length of cotton thread from a reel, and bizarrely, kind of coolly, gripped the thread between both hands and ran it over my entire face, raking off the scraps.
I mistakenly thought it all over and started to get up, but with a speed of turn to rival Johann Cruyff, he wrenched my arm back, and back further, until I yelped in pain and he laughed and kneaded the length of the arm, yanking and cracking knuckles before swapping to the left.
Then I was pushed forward so my arms lay on the counter, my head on them, and he punched my back so hard with the base of his fist that my breath exploded from my mouth and he kneaded down through the muscles and flesh and made me giggle with a ticklish pinch of my waist. We all laughed at that and it did signal the end of the 30 minute/ $5 session.
Outside had become dark o’clock.