Stylist Has a Style All Her Own

For 35 years, the same faithful visitors have come to East Los Angeles to fill the one room of Toni’s Hair Salon, hot with hair dryers and no air conditioning.

Toni--everybody calls her Toni--forgets some of their names now, but not their faces. There’s La Senora Ramirez, who has come in, rain or shine, almost every Saturday of those 35 years. There’s Nellie, a 20-year client, who, when her husband died, would cry through her appointments with Toni. And there’s more, many more.

Along with cuts, dye jobs and perms, life stories are exchanged like recipes, the women’s voices rising in a Spanish-English blend above the sound of buses screeching to a halt outside the front door on East 1st Street. For many of her customers, getting through the week was easier knowing that at the end of it, Toni would be there to style their hair.

La Senora Ramirez is Lara Ramirez, 83, of East L.A. But don’t expect her to answer many questions. She only likes to talk to Toni. Toni has seen Ramirez through her husband’s death, and Ramirez has seen Toni through a divorce. Through it all, Toni watched Ramirez’s hair turn from brown to gray.

“You are my baby, right?” Toni says to Ramirez, as she tenderly washes her hair in the sink. Ramirez nods. “Yo le doy besos [I give her kisses],” Toni says, then impishly adds, “Yo le doy nalgaditas [I give her little spankings].”

And there is laughter.

One joke stems from Ramirez wearing the same white jacket and slacks Saturday after Saturday, the familiar floral-print shirt underneath.

“I tell her that when she dies she has to give me her blouse,” Toni says. And when she dies, Ramirez has told her children, she wants Toni to style her hair.

In March, Toni sold the business, trading in a six-day week and devoted following for a lunch hour and benefits at a new salon. But every Saturday, she still comes by to style her “old ladies.”

When Toni told Ramirez about the sale, Ramirez’s son Joe Hernandez worried for his mother.

“Having her hair done [here] is so important that I was concerned with how it would affect her emotionally and mentally when Toni goes,” he said. “Some people might think, you go here or there, but Saturdays are important for her.”

“She is pretty. She is a very good person,” Ramirez finally tells a visitor. “I see her as family, like a good friend.”

Another joke: Toni recalls the time when Ramirez was in a car with her husband, and he stopped at the top of a hill and got out of the car for a minute, forgetting to set the emergency break.

Customers Share Many Memories

The car rolled down the hill, and Ramirez did not escape uninjured.

“Remember when you broke your leg?” Toni asks Ramirez with laughter in her voice. Ramirez gives another nod. She smiles.

“That lady is strong. Her husband passed away and she came in like if nothing had happened--’Can you fix my hair?’ ” Toni says. “She was dressed in black. That’s how I knew.’

Toni is Antonia Paz Monje, 57, of West Covina. She arrived from El Salvador in 1960, growing up on Lorena and 3rd streets in East L.A. She has always been just Toni.

She opened her first salon in 1966, charging $1 for haircuts. Now she charges about $10.

In 1968, her sister, Vilma Gloria Palacios, 50, joined in to help, although she too has retired from the salon.

Toni painted the walls a Barbie pink about seven years ago. Some of the pink bled onto the beige and red linoleum, cracked and bumpy at some corners. Toni cut out magazine photos of women, and a few men, with stylish hair and taped them to the walls.

Salon chairs are beige with pink tulips, and two mannequin heads peek over the front counter, each with different braided hairstyles. None of the beauty salon gowns match--some zebra print, some just black--but nobody minds.

Toni keeps a water bottle and Styrofoam cup that she drinks from. She lets clients make calls on her cell phone. When Toni recounts how she told her clients the news--that she had sold the shop--Toni’s voice cracks and deepens.

“They said, ‘Don’t do this to me,’ ” Toni recalls. That’s when she decided to keep working Saturdays. “I need my old ladies. They love me, and I love them.”

Nellie Garcia, 82, of Pico Rivera has been getting her bright red hair cut and styled by Toni for 20 years. Her hair has started to thin, but, “You’re going to see a miracle now,” Toni says as she begins to twist and turn Nellie’s hair with a curling iron.

Nellie comes in every Saturday. The times differ now, because Nellie can no longer drive.

Today she’s here with her sister, 84-year-old Susan Garcia, who is protective of Nellie. She tells Nellie not to answer any questions. In this salon-sorority, they are suspicious of outsiders.

But Nellie will talk. “It’s for Toni,” Nellie explains to her sister.

Conversation turns to Nellie’s driving. They all laugh.

“They took your license away,” accuses Toni. But Nellie claims that she just didn’t want to drive anymore. “I drove 30 years,” she says, “and I gave it up.”

(Toni later says privately that Nellie was indeed a terrible driver--she used to parallel park in front of the salon and bump into other cars. Then she’d come into the salon saying, “Did you see them hit me?”)

Then the tone turns serious. When Nellie’s husband passed away 13 years ago, she says, Toni helped her.

“She used to make me feel good,” Nellie says.

“You cried a lot,” Toni says.

“Yeah.”

“I give them too much attention,” Toni says, laughing.

“You’re supposed to.”

Working Miracles on Hairstyles

After a few more teases with a comb, Nellie’s hair is done, bright red and piled high like cotton.

“I have wigs for emergencies,” Nellie confides, but when she’s done her hair is full and lovely, and gone are all signs of her white scalp that once peered through.

She puts on her purple sunglasses, gives Toni a peck on the lips and leaves. Their ribbing is all in fun. After all, says Toni, “Estas son las que me han dado de comer 35 anos.” These are the people who have fed me for 35 years.

By late afternoon, the sun has made shadows of the bars protecting the front window and the day’s last customers straggle in.

“Talking to people, it eases what’s bothering you,” says Toni, who sought solace in those old heads of hair and wrinkled fingers when her nephew died. “They’ve been with me all the way.”

Among the final clients is 15-year customer Celia Valenciano, 65, and she recalls a happy time when 20 salon clients ran off together to Las Vegas for Toni’s birthday. (The bus picked them up across the street.) But they recall the sad times too, as when Toni grieved for her nephew.

“I would tell her, ‘You have to go on living. You can’t stop there,’ ” Valenciano says.

“She’d tell me, he’s in a better place, and soon I’ll meet him there,” Toni says.

“If she goes up!” Valenciano responds, laughing. Toni can’t help it and laughs too.

Their laughter rises above the hair dryers, above the traffic.