Students of Barbering Trim Odds of Failure

It’s mid-morning on 11th Avenue near Broadway. A few drug peddlers and junkies stand in front of a boarded-up pool hall looking for prospective customers or buys. Down the avenue, Richard Garcia’s clippers are buzzing while Ray Martsolf watches and gives advice.

“Be sure to go with the grain of the hair, otherwise a mistake could really show up,” says Martsolf, as Garcia guides the whirring clippers over the skull of a 10-year-old boy who wants his close-cropped Afro to have “cuts” like those favored by many professional athletes.

Garcia, 29, a former heroin addict, concentrates on the boy’s hair and tries not to think about the availability of drugs down the street.

Daily Temptation

“I get tempted every day,” he says. “When I leave at night, the peddlers will ask: ‘Do you want weed, dope, crack?’ But if I come in here strung out, I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands steady when I have to cut or shave. I’m not interested in that life anymore.”

Garcia wants to be a barber. There are 13 of them in his family.

It’s been about a year and a half since he gave up guns, knives, his brutal heroin habit and the leadership of an Oceanside gang for a pair of shears and a chance to learn the trade he hopes will support his wife and four young daughters.

Garcia, who will take the state barber license exam in June, is one of the 31 students who are learning the trade from Martsolf and instructor Warren Norman at the Associated Barber College downtown.

The students’ reasons for trimming hair, shaving faces and performing facials are vastly different.

Garcia’s reason was a way out of the vicious world of drug abuse and violence.

‘Not Proud of It’

“If you stay in gangs, you’ll either be dead or end up in prison,” he said. “I’ve been to prison three times, and I’m not proud of it.”

He says he committed his first burglary at age 10. At age 15, he was charged with the attempted murder of four men he stabbed. The last sentence he served was four years for cocaine trafficking.

Now, however, the barrel-chested Garcia, whose arms are covered with tattoos, gives advice to youngsters who sit in one of the college’s 32 green Naugahyde barber chairs while he clips their hair.

“I tell them, you can be a tough guy and still be good,” Garcia said.

Martsolf, who owns the college and has seen thousands of students over the last 23 years, says his motivation for staying in business comes from seeing the transformation of barbers-in-training like Garcia.

“The biggest majority of my students come from families that have barbers somewhere along the line,” Martsolf said. “But I’ve had all types. I’ve had them out of the penitentiary and out of drug rehabilitation.”

Variety of Students

Not all of his students have tainted pasts. A few chairs down, Marisa Flores is shaving a customer’s face with a straight razor, after applying hot towels and shaving cream.

Flores, 29, a recent widow with three children who just became a U.S. citizen, wants to be a barber “because I want to support myself and I don’t want to live off of welfare.” She laughs when she says it took an hour and a half the first time she shaved a customer.

“I was very nervous, and the man was very understanding, even though I nicked him a few times,” Flores said.

With a spot waiting for her at one of her brother-in-law’s two shops, Flores is honing her barber skills while waiting to take her exam in October.

For 66-year-old Victoria Smith, a barber’s license will strengthen the cosmetology license she has held since 1949.

“I want to revise my shaving skills,” she said. “My father had 19 children, and we learned to shave from him because we all took turns. But I know barbers have a different way of shaving.”

And Arsenio Ortanez yearned to learn the barber trade so he could escape what he called the office politics and frustration of being an electrical draftsman for San Diego Gas & Electric.

Ortanez, 23, hopes to work in his aunt’s barbershop in San Francisco until he can buy his own shop.

“The work you do you take full credit for,” Ortanez said. “Here, it’s like an art.”