I looked in the mirror. I looked the same. My cowlick was a little less severe now, and if I used both hands to bunch it tight, maybe I could collect a new sprout of loose strands, but hardly a pony tail. I couldn’t see the problem. I looked the same.
But my dad hadn’t agreed. 1968, he understood that with twelve year old boys, hair did not simply grow - it was a wild thing. And left on its own; ravenous, and fueled by riot and chaos. Let hair out of control at your own peril. Tomorrow was Saturday. It was time to get me under control.
Just before bed, I was alone in a dark kitchen scooping Rocky Road. In the light of the doorway, I watched my dad pull two bills from his wallet and lay them next to the telephone. He gave me a nod and then stole my ice cream.
The long hair thing was was all out of whack. I wanted to ask him why. Johnny Cash was growing his hair, and he sings country. But then again, he was a criminal, and probably a drug addict, so that hardly settled my point. I sifted through the possibilities. But other than Einstein, I couldn’t come up with a decent example. John Lennon was out, the Maharishi had seen to that, and mentioning Jesus was just plain stupid. I scooped out another bowl and turned out the light.
In the morning the house was empty. On Saturday everyone goes everywhere. I walked into the kitchen and checked on the time. Over the stove the cat was shifting its eyes, swishing its tail and its belly telling me it was a just few minutes before nine. I drank orange juice from the bottle and picked at a cold meatloaf in the fridge. Cold cereal had never made any sense. On the counter, next to the telephone, I saw the two one dollar bills and my father‘s crisp handwriting, “Don‘t come home without a haircut.” He’d let me slide, two weeks in a row, but I knew not to push it. He played things by the book.
I chopped out a square of the meatloaf and carried my plate to the living room and plopped on the couch contented. My first Saturday of summer vacation and blurry waves of heat were already wiggling around on the hood of my neighbor’s car across the street. Our air conditioner rumbled and kicked. A blast of warm air, spicy with heat and a faint taste of duct work and dust circled the room and then disappeared .
I tried watching some television, but the room was flooded with sunshine; so bright I couldn’t make out much on the screen. A white haze washed the screen and sucked out the colors and didn’t leave me with much but black outlines, but I really didn’t care. Close enough. I didn’t bother with the drapes. I’d just listen to the sound and squint. Maybe I was lazy, maybe it had something to do with my hair. I ate meatloaf and listened.
A man named James Earl Ray had just been arrested in London. They said he murdered Reverend King. An announcer narrated some pictures I’d already seen: black men in heavy coats pointing out from a balcony. Then they left one on the screen I’d never seen. A frail looking man in heavy rimmed glasses looking straight into the camera. He looked guilty enough to me, so I switched the channel.
Channel 7 was showing pictures of a train. Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train. It was moving slowly south toward Arlington, passing ragged gatherings of ragged looking people crying into hankerchiefs and waving. But Bobby Kennedy was dead. I wondered who was waving back. Lousy deal. I tried the other two channels and it was more of the same.
A red pick-up pulled up and I watched Bennie Ryan get out and jump in the back to throw out his bike onto my lawn and then he stood there talking to the driver and leaned in for a kiss. Then I heard him run up the steps and I opened the door.
“Heh.”
“Heh.”
My best friend Bennie was husky they liked to say, with a fuzzy light blond line of beginnings across his upper lip. The kind of a kid where you see the adult; and you’re surprised when he occasionally acts his real age.
“You want some meat loaf? “ I asked. Just being polite.
“Nah, just brushed my teeth. Whatta ya watching?”
“That’s the guy that killed Martin Luther King. He’s in London.”
“My dad said they’d never catch him, if they even bothered to try.”
“Why wouldn’t they try?”
“I don’t know, my dad didn’t say.”
My own dad, hadn’t said much about it either. But he was a cop - the quiet kind. He never said much about politics or things like that, so he always surprised me on when he did speak up. A rare man who seemed to know answers without asking questions. I heard somebody call it “cop’s nose”. When I asked him about how he did it he said, “Not that hard. You can usually tell what most people are going to do. Don’t think too much, just pay attention.”
When we heard about King getting killed, he didn’t seemed too surprised about that either. He just sat in a quiet that I’d never seen before; in his recliner with the newspaper, precisely folding it by halves and then unfolding it again. A guy waiting for a bus he really didn’t want to take. When Bobby got killed, a few days ago, it was like the bus had arrived, and everything running on it’s predictably savage schedule.
I was scaping my plate in the kitchen and called out, “I thought we could ride down to do the barber shop first thing, I don’t want to be waiting all morning behind those cowboys that come into town on Saturday listening to them shoot the shit like they have all day. “
Bennie was sitting at our piano, straddling the bench, slowly poking out the high part to “Heart and Soul.” “Sounds like a plan.”
I turned off the television and locked up the house and we were gone. We glided our bikes off the big hill in front of my house, peddling hard and coasting, feeling the sting of the sun on our necks, gaining momentum toward town. A California morning already burning with the stillness of candles.
We pumped our bikes through the crosswalks without looking both ways and jumped up the curbs with our shadows following, black as ink, on the pavement. We mashed on our brakes and left long black rubbery snakes on the sidewalk in front of the barbershop.
We were late.
On our way into town, we’d checked out the library to see if anybody was hanging around and put some air in our tires at the Mobile station and stayed there a while watching Herb Cloony using his cutting torch. I wasn’t surprised the barbershop shop was already full of cowboys. We were late.
I stood in the doorway.
It was a three chair shop, but I’d never seen them use number three. It had always been just Bill and Bard - as if we had only ever needed two barbers in town. One of the Hinton boy’s, the oldest one I thought, filled the unused chair flipping through Field and Stream. He had a cold in his eye, it was a pinkish swell and glazed over with tear. He was staring at me, the best that he could.
Bill Noe, the barber I liked, round shouldered and somber as church, looked up from chair number one and pointed toward us with his comb. “You boy’s getting’ haircuts?”
“No, just me.”
“Gonna be a while.”
“Maybe we’ll come back.” I looked over at Bennie. He shrugged.
“Might wanna have a seat, Saturday’s busy, but…whatever you want to do.” Bill turned and returned to his customer’s head.
He wasn’t being a jerk or anything, I knew the rules. You sat down and waited your turn, or you left and came back…. and went to the end of the line. Everybody knew the rules.
I looked at the wait.
There were the three Hinton boys, and their dad, but I couldn’t tell if they were all getting haircuts. There wasn’t than a handful of hair between all four of them, who knows what they were up to. There were two cowboys in new shirts - definitely waiting for haircuts; and two guys already in the chairs. I didn’t have any choice. I bit on a bullet took the last chair. Bennie came over and told me he’d find something to do for a while, was going to ride around town, and then he’d be back.
In chair number one, Bill Noe, the one that I liked, was pulling his comb through tough sprouts of reddish hair growing from the head of a rosin faced man in his sixties. He was wearing a good starched white shirt and a bow tie with matching paisly suspenders. The barber nipped from a unfiltered cigarette, and reached for his scissors soaking in a tall jar under the giant mirror that ran the length of the wall. He was making conversation.
“How are those Giants treating you lately.”
“Pretty damn good this year, two games out. McCovey’s knocking the piss out of the ball. They’re playing the Pirates this afternoon on the TV.” The customer tilted his head, and held still letting the barber push up at the tip of his nose and clip out some stray hairs.
“Mays doing anything this year?” the barber asked.
“Not Goddamn thing, he’s making too much money. Getting old.”
“Hmm,” the barber sniffed and just sounded old.
One of the cowboys, a skinny one with a sunburned face and thin lips that twisted his words spoke up, “Sounds like you Pat,” meaning the man in Bill Noe’s barber chair, “rich, old and lazy,” he piped. He’d amused himself, his smile twisted more and he poked at the other one’s elbow, pushing it off of the armrest.
“Oh hell,” he said, “you know these guys. One year they hit .300, sign a contract and then spend the next year sittin’ on their ass." Pat brushed at his cuff and glanced at his fingernails.
“Most of them boys never had a real job, ‘less you count picking cotton. 'Bout what do you 'spect,” said the cowboy.
The barber shot the skinny cowboy a glance and pressed his lips together the way some people do when they have something they don’t want to say. He looked back down at the head in his chair, “You want that neck shaved up, Pat?” the barber asked.
Bill’s customer nodded and grunted in the affirmative. The barber turned to the nub left smoldering in the ashtray and put in his lips, leaving both hands free to work up lather in a cup.
“You got that right. Last week they threw Mays out at first base from right field, you believe that?” The man’s face went sour. The barber clicked his tongue. He could believe that, but didn‘t give it much weight. He dabbed out a foamy trail over his customer’s ears leading down to his neck with the brush.
“What kind of hustle is that?” the man in the barber chair asked anybody. “I tell you. The kind you get when yer ball players start to getting uppity,”
“Ugh hugh, I see what your mean,” the barber’s answer went soft and flat. He wiped his hands and reached back into the jar for his scissors again and worked a spot just behind the ear.
The cowboy spit into a paper cup he had at his feet.“Maybe they oughta just put some watermelon on first base, he’d bust his ass getting after that,” he said.
“Er a slab of pork ribs,” the customer in Bill Noe’s chair added. “Lazy over-paid bastards.”
The barber was concentrating.
Suddenly the man’s feet jumped off the brass foot rest and he reached for his ear and let out a howl.
“Holy cow Pat!” said the barber, “did I nip ya there? Damn.” The barber reached for a hot towel.
“Nip me! Think you cut my whole ear off!” The man was grabbing at his ear now, but the barber already had pinched it in a towel.
“Look her Pat, isn’t but a drop. But I’m awfully damn sorry anyway. I don‘t do that but once in a blue moon.” He held out the towel and The man looked at the tiny red spot. “There, not even bleeding.”
Pat looked surprised. “I guess it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. Boy, I’d sure hate to have you mad at me.”
“Yeah, I guess you’d know it alright.”
The barber lit another cigarette and threw the used towel in a small white metal bin on the floor. I watched Bill’s customer settle back down in his chair and he quickly got comfortable again. The barber reached into a drawer. Out of a small wooded box, a straight razor flashed in the light from a curved handle of pearl.
He worked the razor in long precise strokes on the leather strop hanging from the barber’s chair, turning the thin blade over and over, and he seemed to enjoy it. In the chair, Pat liked the feeling of the warm lather and attention. He closed his eyes and and smiled softly, “Bill, I think you may as well work that razor all over. No reason to go home and shave, I‘m sitting right here.”
“ugh hugh, that‘s what I was thinking.” The barber padded the blade a few times more on the strop and tested it with his thumb. I thought I saw a smudge of a smile.
Over in chair number two, one of the Hinton boys was up. Mickey, the youngest one, climbed into the chair, his legs stuck straight out, too short to dangle. Bard wrapped his tender neck with tissue and snapped on the apron then spun the tiny Hinton for a look in the mirror, “how do you like it cut?”
But his father answered first. “You know what to do Bard.” Then with no more thought than a man might give to stepping off a curb, Hinton’s father looked away and lighted a smoke. The other two Hintons looked down into their magazines and concentrated on the pictures of monster bass and trophy bucks in the rut.
Bill pumped at the brass arm on the side of his chair reclining his customer flat on his back and turned his face into a soft mountain of foam.
“You want keep them side burns about where they’re at?”
“Naw, why don’t you bring them up… just a bit.”
I looked at the clock and wondered what Bennie was up to. I pushed around at a pile of magazines worn and bloated with time. The Hinton kid over in chair number two had gone silent. His watery round blue eyes following the barber’s clippers swiping deep channels through his fine hair, leaving half an inch of prickly fuzz. One of the cowboys had drifted asleep. The only sounds left in the barbershop were the tick-tick scrapings of Bill’s shiny razor against his customer’ face. I watched the tick-tick. Every so often, he would stop to pull the shimmering blade, slowly, through a clean towel, refocus his squint, and start over again.
With his friend asleep, a small black and white television silent with movement up on the shelf caught the skinny cowboy’s eye. More pictures of that man they were saying shot Martin Luther King.
“Looks like they caught that guy,” the cowboy said to nobody in particular.
Bill’s customer lying uncomfortably quiet and still sounded grateful for the opening, “What guy’s that?”
“Guy who shot King down in Memphis.”
“They say why he did it.?”
“Probably ‘cause he couldn’t think of no reason not to,” the cowboy chuckled. Bill’s customer grunted at the logic and added his own short chuckle. Inspired the cowboy rolled on, “you get them negro preachers agitating down there, poking at them southern folks, and it ain’t hard to figure out what’s going to happen.”
“Yeah, that guy probably had to stand in line for the job,” Bill’s customer said.
The barber looked up, held the razor away, then hit the strop again with his blade. He decided to light another cigarette sliding one out his pack on the shelf. He one handed his lighter open and dug out the flame with his thumb. Then he went about making the little scraping sounds on his customer’s face.
The volume on the tv was too low to really make out. In a few seconds, Bobby’s train appeared on the tiny screen and the cowboy took the chance for more commentary.
“Busy day, they’re burying Kennedy.”
“Good day to be in the television business. Hope them bastards don’t talk over my Giants game today. Especially for that nonsense.”
The barber turned the man’s head and worked with a smile on his throat. Tick-tick, scrape scrape.
“Oh, they wouldn't do that.” said the cowboy. “Who’d you think people would rather listen to…. Curt Gowdy or Kennedy’s fat brother talk about what a great guy his brother was? Them television guys aren’t that dumb. They got to make a buck, they know how things work.”
The man getting the shave was thinking about that. He was also thinking Bill Noe was sure taking his sweet time with this shave. Tick-tick. “Yeah, guys like that, Kennedy’s and all, they’re always great when they’re dead. I never saw what all the fuss was about anyway.”
“One thing’s for sure, we know there’s one guy who didn’t think much of him,” said the cowboy.
“Hell, I heard somewhere that if Jack would’ve lived, he’d been the worst president of all time.”
“I don’t doubt it,” cowboy turned back to the television, “look at all them people. They don’t know what they’re even crying about.” The cowboy twisted his lip and spit in the cup.
Pat in the chair was getting impatient. “You about finished there Bill? Blood’ s starting to go to my head.”
“Oh yeah, I’m just about done with you.” The barber cleaned up the remaining lather and returned his customer to the upright position. He spun him around and admired his work. “You want aftershave or witch-hazel Pat?
“Give me some of that aftershave,” he pointed to a elegant triangular bottle filled with golden liquid, “that’s the good stuff if I remember.”
The barber reached for the bottle. “I’ve had this one quite a while, they tell me this it stings a bit,”
“Oh, I don’t know, put some here, I’ve used that one before.” The man stood up, adjusted his tie in the mirror and cup his hands and let his barber shake out the tonic.
Bill Noe stepped noticeably to out of the way, like a man getting out of the way of a land mine.
The man splashed his face and the quiet barbershop exploded in screamings of pain. The man in the chair jumped straight up with a bloodcurdling yowl and began tearing at his face with his sleeve. The sleeping cowboy bolted up and hit his head on the wall. The Hinton’s went bugeyed. I swallowed my gum.
“Good Christ Almighty! What did you do to to me. My face is on fire!” He ran to a sink in the corner and frantically began dousing his face.
Bill Noe, the barber I liked, pulled a smoke from his pack and flicked open his lighter calm as a preacher. “Come on Pat, can’t be as bad as all that.” He pulled on the smoke and blew into the sky. “ Sorry, as I can be Pat. I must have shaved you just a little bit close. But don’t worry, it’ll be okay in a minute or two, just as soon as it quits hurtin’.
With that, the barber looked at the cowboy and brushed off the chair, “You’re next. How’d you like yours cut?”
