A cautionary, evolutionary tale of two barbers—Justin Lovato and Jake Bricks—and the retro barbershop scene

PHOTO by JEFFREY R. GOULD

It will be a month on Monday since Justin Lovato—barber and character at Hawleywood’s Barbershop—collapsed and died at 33, and no matter how loudly Bo Diddley lays down the big beat, a hush falls between songs.

The man who once slipped a live cockroach under someone’s stack of clean towels, who poured talcum powder on the ceiling fan blades at night to start a dust storm the next morning, is gone forever. His red vinyl barber’s chair still sits empty, a shrine to the missing man.

If that sounds like an extended period of mourning—or a great way to lose business—well, that’s just how they cut hair at Hawleywood’s. With tradition. So much tradition that there’s an unwritten policy that reads “No Women”—that includes old ladies, girlfriends, dames, frails, twists—inside the shop on Fourth Street’s Retro Row. The same is true at the Long Beach shop’s sister location in Costa Mesa. (Better make that its brother location.)

Haircuts and hot-towel straight-razor shaves here are strictly a guy’s thing, dispensed by a staff of well-groomed male barbers. Some are noticeably tattooed, others are not, but each has an eerily neat and clean vintage style. Work slacks by Dickies—since 1922—help the look. So do the greased, swept-back haircuts-you-can-set-your-watch-to most of them wear.

This was Lovato’s milieu: the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer glasses along one wall in darkly wooded niches. The matching chairs. The stuffed deer’s head, mounted over the giant throne of a shoeshine stand. The linoleum floor, set in checkered sepia-toned squares, and the full bar in the back. The television would seem out-of-place, were it not tuned to manly broadcasts like baseball playoffs—and, sadly, to the Viagra commercials which help pay for these broadcasts.

Despite being born in the 1970s—or perhaps because of it—Lovato thrived on all this pomp and circumstance: the series of rituals that elevated what otherwise remains a simplistic but exceedingly difficult blue-collar craft. Now, until shop owner Donnie Hawley decrees otherwise, he’s memorialized by the vacant chair he once stood behind—as Hawleywood’s tragic hero, its first fallen comrade.

Lovato also serves as a reminder of the vintage barbershop scene’s mythic and unofficially first troubled, talented prodigy. This would be the late Jake Bricks, whose little shop in Orange near the Orange Circle changed the way we thought about men giving other men haircuts. Or, more precisely, changed it back.

Before Bricks, the exacting art of a man’s shave-and-haircut had fallen into disregard and dotage, becoming the province of old guys with faded blue Navy tattoos on their arms and stories they could tell. If anyone would listen. Bricks did. He listened to a guy named Ray—an old guy, or at least older than him—and after barber college, he worked awhile at Ray’s Barber Shop in Orange.

Then came Jake’s Barbershop, which opened in 1990 and lasted the better part of the decade. It wasn’t men-only—and maybe it didn’t have to be, with the girlie magazines and the talk about horsepower. But it quickly drew a male clientele for whom cuffed Levi’s, wide whites and maybe a Hollywood flat-top were a passion. A Hollywood flat-top? It’s a flat-top with fenders.

“Jake redefined the attitude,” says Eric Webb, who’s been barbering for 18 years, including a spell at Jake’s from 1992 to 1995, before going on to cut hair at Hawleywood’s, and now, for Syndicate, which is also in Long Beach. “It wasn’t just for old people anymore.”

With a jones for souped-up rockabilly, an eye for the wayward youth and an impeccable sense for how a lubed-up pompadour should rise and fall like a cresting wave, Bricks helped redefine rockabilly, then primed for another revival. And his shop epitomized what would someday become the retro barbershop scene that now stretches from Orange County to Los Angeles and out-of-state to cities like Portland, Ore.—and, one imagines, all of New Jersey.

“I think Jake’s sort of started off the trend,” says Orange County roots music legend Robert Williams—the Big Sandy in Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys. “It’s interesting to see how other places have come along.”

Jake’s became the place to hang and to review all things vintage—in the days before unbridled nostalgia and DSL connections let us all look like a lot of gabardine-wearing truck drivers and coffee-shop waitresses. Its owner’s unbridled zeal for his work seemed to heighten the moment of a haircut.

“He’d smoke while cutting your hair—ashes falling in your hair. He really ran it like it was the early 1950s,” says Webb. “Not to mention he owned the place, so if you didn’t like it, ‘Get the fuck out.’ ”

Williams—that is, Big Sandy—remembers, too.

“When Jake had his shop it was like a sort of social gathering place for us—where we found out about gigs or talked about cars or . . . talked about girls,” he says.

Williams wrote a song about it in 1993—“Jake’s Barber Shop,” which the Fly-Rite Boys played to considerable acclaim live and lent to a public-access TV commercial for the shop. You can see it now on YouTube, of course. Williams recently did.

“I felt a little weird,” he says. “Jake and the other guy who was sitting on the couch in the clip, he’s gone now too. Eric.” That would be the late tattoo artist Eric Maaske of Santa Ana, who died of a drug overdose in 2004.

Bricks, as the Los Angeles Times reported after his death at 30 in May 2000, had a troubled history of his own.

Twice convicted on felony charges, he was arrested again in November 1999 on suspicion of burglary—and faced a third strike and the possibility of life in prison if found guilty.

So the barber, whose wife happened to be stricken with terminal cancer, apparently did what he felt he had to, according to OC Weekly writer Frank Seddigh: While awaiting trial, he fell out of his bunk at Theo Lacy jail in Orange on the night of May 11, 2000.

“They took him to Western Medical Center in Anaheim for treatment,” Seddigh reported. “While leaving the hospital, Bricks jumped a police officer and, according to Sergeant Joe Vargas of the Anaheim Police Department, ‘beat the hell out of the guy and took his gun.’

“Police say Bricks bolted for an idling medical transport vehicle, a Geo Metro, and drove off, speeding down the streets of Anaheim with police cars giving chase. After passing the Anaheim police station, the Metro hit a parked car and came to a stop.”

Officers arriving saw the gun go off and found Bricks slumped inside, dead.

Friends and family buried him at Forest Lawn in Cypress—the same resting place as proto-rockabilly Eddie Cochran, felled in 1960 by a car accident in England. And the Fly-Rite Boys took his tune out of their jukebox.

“Every once in a while I get a request for that song, and I politely decline,” Williams says. “Too many memories. It’s pretty sad. He could have been doing very well for himself. He had some other issues and personal demons.”

That’s a heartrending epitaph, and it could apply to Justin Lovato, too. Like Jake Bricks before him, Lovato had served jail time and struggled with substance abuse before discovering the neatly coiffed, bippin’, boppin’ school of barbering. Well, sort of.

“Jake was more pink and turquoise and black—’50s Elvis, ‘All or Nothing,’ heavy rockabilly,” says Hawleywood’s co-owner and namesake Donnie Hawley, who opened the original Costa Mesa store in 1999 and the Long Beach location in 2006. “We play Dean Martin, country music—everything.”

There’s more to it than that—otherwise Long Beach wouldn’t be able to support three retro barbershops, each with its own distinct identity.

The vibe at nearby Syndicate—opened by former Hawleywood employee Pedro Zarmeno—is more choppers-and-punk-rock, and the scene at Mac’s Barber Shop in California Heights is old-school 1950s neighborhood barber. (Both shops periodically hang lowbrow art on their walls.) But each caters to a need men have for a great basic shave and haircut, performed in the company of other men.

“I think the ’80s were just a weird time—the end of the ‘80s, when people were so high on cocaine, it was all about salons and having these weird haircuts,” says Syndicate’s owner Chris Cobb, a former employee who purchased the shop last year from its original owner. “At the end of the ’80s you had all these people who just wanted a nice clean haircut that people didn’t know how to do.”

These barbers do it, with 99 percent less C+C Music Factory—which is the point.

“There was no place for a guy to be a guy in the 20th century,” Hawley says of his own M.O., which lately includes Grooming the Groom—a shaves-and-haircuts event for grooms and groomsmen. “It’s all for women—hair salons, workouts. Other than the run to Vegas, guys didn’t have anything.”

Now they do: Start getting your hair cut regularly at Hawleywood’s, and after about 10 times, they may ask you to, well, join them. It costs about $100, one of the barbers tells me, but it gets you a PBR glass in a monogrammed niche (your choice of nickname)—and the promise of something to fill it. Testosterone? It’s what merchants on Fourth Street thought when the shop opened for business.

“No one ever opened up the shop for the neighbors or came to meetings,” says Portfolio Coffeehouse owner Kerstin Kansteiner, who is president of the Fourth Street Business Association. “We actually had a meeting at the Pike, and [Hawleywood’s co-owner Mike Clem] came down, and we talked about it. And since then, I feel like they’ve really taken it upon themselves to get involved. I think they’re making an effort.”

And what about the no dames rule?

“They’re a barber shop. Women don’t go to barbershops—men do,” Kansteiner says. “It’s like us. We don’t do smoothies. That doesn’t mean we’re discriminating against smoothies, we just don’t do them.”

“People in the field like Donnie Hawley—that [gives] it really that hard-ass edge,” Webb says. “If it weren’t for guys like him, we wouldn’t have the—what’s the word? The rebellious barbershop.”

Rebellious—that was Justin Lovato.

“From a young age,” says Stacia Lovato, his estranged wife, of Huntington Beach. “By the time I met him, he was 16 and on the run from the cops.” His fiancee, Dusty Wensevic of Fullerton, who met him in December 2006, says much of the same.

“Every time I would go to bed, he would go and get in trouble—drink more beer or go out and go to the [barbershop], and drink more beer ’cause it was free,” she says. (The couple lived in Long Beach until just weeks before Lovato’s death on Oct. 10.) And yet?

“He’s a free bird, and so am I. He was just so charming,” Wensevic says. Lovato’s wife echoes her words, days later.

“There’s just something magnetic about him. It wasn’t just that he was hot,” Stacia says. He was easy on the eyes, but not always so easy to live with.

“You never knew with Justin. It was moment to moment. He might be great one minute and then just terrible the next,” Wensevic said when I interviewed her at work. A former dancer for Jane’s Addiction, she leads pole dancing aerobics classes.

“He was very up and down,” says Wensevic’s boss Crystal White, who talked to Lovato when he’d come to pick up Wensevic. “He tried to be happy, but there was something in him that he was fighting all the time.” His wife agrees.

“He had some demons on his back,” Stacia says. “You just never knew what Justin you were working with that day.”

And sometimes, it was rough.

“I got pregnant at 17. And he stole a case of beer with a gun—he and his friends were just being stupid. And he got five years,” Lovato says. “But I did the whole thing. I was just in love. I married him in prison.” Armed robbery.

“It did happen, but he was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” says his mother, Marcella Lovato of Temecula. “And you know the law—if you’re standing there when it happens, you’re just as guilty as the next person.”

Guilt dogged him, even after he emerged from prison. But he clawed his way back into life—getting a decent construction job, and coming home at night to his wife and sons, Isaiah, now 14, and Jacob, now 6.

“The construction thing was just ’cause he had no education. But it’s just a ball-busting job,” his wife says. “He did that for probably four years. But he’s always been an artist, and since I’m a hairstylist, I kind of encouraged him to go in that direction.”

Or, as Donnie Hawley remembers hearing it, “One day he came out of the pipe and said ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ ”

First came barber college, then a job at a salon in Huntington Beach where he was a little bit country and a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, and they . . . were not. But someone Lovato knew from school had landed at Hawleywood’s, and finally so did he.

It was his dream job—but his wife says he struggled with success, just as he had with defeat.

“At one point he was like ‘I feel like a yuppie.’ And I’m like, ‘This is it, babe, the California dream, you’ve got your kids, your truck, you live in a house on the beach,’ ” Stacia says.

At Hawleywood’s, his haircuts were tight, his practical jokes paid off big, and the nicknames he bestowed on a slew of customers seemed to stick like a gob of Donnie Hawley’s Layrite pomade.

“He had a lot of demons, but barbering allowed him to have that serenity,” Hawley says. “When he was behind the chair, it was the only time he was grounded.” His wife saw this too.

“I think it was a great thing for him socially and ego-wise,” Stacia says. “Even though everyone loved him, and he always acted cool, he was very insecure.” But still she worried, particularly when the couple attended the grand opening of the Long Beach Hawleywood’s, where Lovato would work.

“At the opening I realized they had a full bar in the back, and he’d never told me that. It’s like, ‘You don’t get to do this every day—party-time U.S.A. for Justin.’ Not when you have kids,” his wife says. Before he took the Hawleywood’s job, the couple discussed it at a 49ers game, and she says he told her, ‘We’re not going to get a divorce over a barbershop.’ ” But the couple separated immediately after the opening of the Long Beach shop.

“Christmas Day [2006] I think was his last day home,” Stacia says. “He opened presents with the kids, and that was it.”

He’d still see the kids, but they were no longer together. And then Lovato met Wensevic.

“They were soul mates. You just knew when you looked at them,” says V Room bartender Jessica Lilly, who added all her tips from a Saturday night to a donation collected after Lovato’s death. (Other Fourth Street businesses—including Hawleywood’s and Ashley’s restaurant—did the same.) “They had their names [tattooed] on each other, and they’d been through a lot.”

“We lived in Sunset Beach, and we tore it up. At Mother’s, that was our spot,” Wensevic says. As is the local custom, the couple contributed an item to the array of donated objects—many of them brassieres—which decorate the bar. Theirs was a $1 bill inscribed from Lovato to Wensevic: “To My Friend N Lover/Soon To Be My Wife.”

“Justin was an alcohol addict,” says Wensevic. And it became increasingly clear during his last year of life. Twice, he was arrested for driving under the influence‚ and The Man tore up his license, so Wensevic had to drive him everywhere.

The couple rented a bungalow near Fourth Street and Cherry Avenue so he could walk to work. But shortly after the bars closed on July 22, Lovato was reportedly walking Patron, one of the couple’s two pit bulls, when two men stopped him near Hermosa Avenue and Fourth Street to ask for money.

Information on the incident is sketchy, but Long Beach Police Sgt. Dina Zapalski says when he didn’t give it to them, one of the men stabbed him in the abdomen, penetrating his stomach and large intestine. Lovato walked home. Wensevic drove him to the hospital, and after exploratory surgery, he went home again to recover.

“He came back to work after, like, two weeks, and he was like, ‘Book me an appointment every two hours,’ ” says Hawleywood’s barber Leo Lopez. “He was a little slow, like he’d do a haircut and then rest for a half hour, but he was determined.” He was lucky, but maybe he didn’t feel that way.

In a Xanax-fueled outburst—seven Xanax and several beers—he caused several thousand dollars worth of damage to the rental, Wensevic says, and the couple had to move out. (Simultaneously, she says he showed up drunk and shirtless at the bar where she worked and cost her a job.) That was it for Wensevic, and she laid it on the line, just as Stacia had a decade earlier.

“He got sober ’cause that’s what I said: ‘The only way I can stay with you, Justin, is if you stop drinking,’ ” Wensevic says. “And he did, he was really good, and people commented to me they could see the change. I just couldn’t believe it; he looked so good.” The guys at work saw the change, too.

“Before, when he was at work, he’d have a beer every two hours,” says Hawleywood’s barber Carlos Gomez. “The last month he was drinking RC Cola like his life depended on it.” Things seemed to be looking up—again. Lovato was photographed for a spread on Fourth Street in the August issue of Los Angeles magazine. Then, Inked magazine did a spread on the shop for their December issue. It isn’t out yet, but it reportedly will have a dedication to Lovato.

The very day he died, Lovato scored another coup: Hawleywood’s visited the ritzy Standard Hotel in Los Angeles to do a Grooming the Groom event. Photographs taken that day show Lovato and Wensevic afterward—at the bar, though he wasn’t drinking.

Wensevic says he was sober when they returned home—to their new apartment in Fullerton, away from the bar scene on Fourth Street—and he was still alive when she went to bed, shortly before 8 p.m. Something woke her around 11 p.m., and she found him where he’d fallen, across his side of the bed.

“That’s when I flew up and said ‘Justin, honey, why are you sleeping like that?’ ” Wensevic says.

“I flew 90 miles an hour from Temecula to Fullerton, and I was there in no time,” his mother says. “He wasn’t ready to go. He was a busy guy. He had things to do and shows to do, and people would always want him to do things. He was just a good, good man.” But troubled.

“He always told me when he was little that he wasn’t going to live long. He was going to die of a heart attack,” Stacia says. (Results of an Orange County Coroner’s autopsy are still pending.) “People wondered, ‘Why is she still putting up with this guy,’ and I’d be like, ‘Justin’s not going to be around very long.’ And I thought every time I picked him up if that was his night to go, and I didn’t pick him up, I couldn’t deal with that.”

Did Hawleywood’s policy of no women—having to wait in the car around the corner while her estranged husband cut her sons’ hair—bother her? Stacia says no. They were in the same line of work, and she understood.

“It’s like, ‘Why not let your husband get a haircut without you being up his ass?’ ” she says. “Your husband will come home all right. Mine won’t, but yours will.”

That blows me away.

“You’ve got to laugh about it,” she continues. “People are like, ‘Aren’t you mourning him?’ and I’m like, ‘I mourned him two years ago.’ I almost knew that this was going to happen. I got myself ready for it.”

Tags: barber shops, hawleywood's, Justin Lovato, Long Beach, retro row