HBM159: Final Haircuts

February 19, 2025·32 min·2 clips

Rocky cuts a client's hair for the last time as he faces terminal cancer, seeking to restore his identity.

1. Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman interviews Rocky Villanueva, a hairdresser from Los Angeles now based in Berlin for 22 years, about the experience of giving clients their final haircuts. 2. Rocky Villanueva has worked in salons, backstage at fashion events, and on photoshoots for 22 years; he is on Instagram at rockyvilla.hair. 3. The episode's central question is what it means to give a haircut to someone who is dying — a ritual act performed under awareness of finality. 4. Rocky opens by describing how house calls reveal a client's whole life: their aesthetic, whether they are neat or chaotic, what objects they value — all of which inform how to frame a person's character through hair. 5. He defines hair as 'a time log of your past' — each patch of hair grew during a specific period of a person's life and carries biological and chemical records of what was happening then. 6. When asked how many haircuts he has given, Rocky calculates roughly 15,000–20,000 over his career; of those, only four were final haircuts before a client died. 7. Rocky's mother, an immigrant to the United States who arrived in her mid-30s with two children, pushed hard for him to become a lawyer; he describes his response as stubborn and rebellious, knowing only that he wanted something creative and hands-on. 8. He narrates the central story in present tense at Jeff's request: it is fall 2015, he is 34, going through a divorce, living in a cold art studio in Neukölln with very high ceilings, concrete walls, and a floor painted black, sleeping on a couch in a room with a hole in the floor. 9. A longtime musician client who had been hospitalized earlier that year with cancer sends a message asking for a haircut; Rocky bikes to Prenzlauer Berg. 10. The apartment door is already open when he arrives; the client, usually seen in a music room surrounded by guitars and recording equipment, is now in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank and unable to walk. 11. The client's usual look is described as English mod or pop — stylish, mid-length hair — and his request is simply 'to feel himself once more' and regain his identity one last time. 12. Rocky describes the technical challenge: hair that has been overgrown and affected by cancer treatments, changed facial features and body, requiring precise judgment about length to preserve texture without flopping — 'if you cut it too short, it loses the texture; if you leave it too long, it'll flop around and not sit well.' 13. As Rocky works from behind and the client faces the wall, the first thing the client asks is how Rocky is doing — Rocky observes that when death comes into focus, 'people tend to focus on what's most important for them,' and in this case the client's caretaking instinct came out. 14. Rocky describes moving around the chair, hearing the oxygen tank and monitor, and 'trying to find his spirit in there' — when he finally faces the client to cut the bangs, he says: 'his eyes, there's the familiarity. I see the person that I know.' 15. He deliberately tries to slow the session down and finds it 'hard to say, OK, now we're finished.' 16. The client had pre-recorded advertising jingles so that any future commercial use would generate royalties for his daughter — Rocky says 'it spoke volumes of his character.' 17. Six days later, the client's wife emails to say he has died and that he was 'very happy he was able to get one last haircut and how helpful it was for those last days.' 18. Rocky continued cutting the hair of the client's wife and young daughter, returning to the apartment where the client's guitars were still on the walls; the daughter was 'quiet for the next couple of years, almost not a word,' but would look at Rocky with familiarity. 19. Rocky eventually moved back to the United States after his divorce, then returned to Berlin and asked a long-term client to meet up — a relationship that became six years of partnership and plans to marry. 20. He closes by saying that being backstage at Fashion Week or onstage with people he admires 'does not come nowhere near close as having the honor of cutting someone's hair the last time before they die.'

As heard by us

A haircut becomes a quiet study of identity, care, and the clues people leave at home.

Here Be Monsters treats a haircut as a way to notice care, identity, and the small traces people leave behind. The house-call setup gives the episode its edge: in a home, the setting can suggest how someone lives, how orderly or cluttered they are, and whether pets, children, or…

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Why you'd press play

A house-call haircut that turns into a close study of character, self-image, and vulnerability.

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