From Widow’s Dozen, forthcoming from Turtle Point Press, Spring 2014
“Most heads are routine,” he says. “Set the attachment at one of eight lengths, then slide the clipper up the back stretch, cruising from base to crown. The trick to it is there’s no trick to it. Confidence, son! If coffee’s making your hands shake, stop drinking the stuff. How can the customer trust you if your hands tremble all the time? See, one of the things you’re doing, you’re reassuring him…laying to rest any second thoughts he might be having about coming in, in the first place.”
It wasn’t a week, and Ward had already had it up to here with his talkative mentor, Frank Reed aka Frank the Barber, in particular his habit of calling Ward son whenever he wasn’t using “Billy.”
“Why? Who knows why? Men are complicated creatures. He figures he wants change and fears it at the same time.”
As a matter of fact, the customer was looking askance at the chair Frank had tilted back for him, the barber’s prawn-shaped torso tipped over it in a white smock, his expression smoothed through years of surreptitious practice in the wall-length mirror opposite, with the disinfectant drying on his scissors—fresh from the pickle jar.
“Everything you need to know can be learned from the shape of the head, from the parts to the patterns of the hair across it. Look. Here, here, and here. These are yours. The preferences of the patron come in second—a distant second. This is where every one of you kids go wrong at first…by actually listening to their preferences. See this customer? What do you think he asked for when he first came to me, when was it? Six years ago? How can a layman judge what’s right for his own head? Do you trust what you see in a mirror? ‘A Dreyfus?’ I told Larry—go ahead, tell Billy, Larry, didn’t I say that? Exactly? ‘With those ears,’ I told him straight, ‘—not a chance! Try the Soviet Bachelor instead.’ And you can see how well that’s worked for both of us—because once I’ve found the right haircut for one of these fellas—once they see it grown out after, what—three weeks?—they’ll be back. They’ll be asking for the same exact haircut their whole lives, with only minor corrections for age and balding patterns. And if they ever do leave the County—ha!—they’ll remember me and never feel as settled into their haircuts of the future. Never. That’s the stature you could look forward to one day, son—I’m not saying you will, but it’s something to aim for. Now this unfortunate gentleman—” he spread his hand out on top of the next customer’s mixed-bag crown, turning the head just a hair so that the man faced Ward with a starved, sour look—“hair’s way too fine for a Newman—to get a real Newman, it needs to start curling in at least three-quarters of an inch. Witch hazel should produce results in less than three months. An old barber’s trick. A natural or a line? There is no hairline on this particular neck. See? The hair from the back keeps going. Brush it back. That broad of a forehead cries out for a widow’s peak. But however you choose, stick to your decision, even over objections. Talking is fine. Learn to develop a spiel. Well-crafted banter will set most men at ease. But if the customer isn’t talking back, can it. And if the talking affects your judgment, or your style with these old buzz-clippers, then—I think we can all agree—a friendly silence is best.”
*
“You’ll need to be careful with the small machinery of those heads. Ordinary people imagine them round, but any half-decent barber knows that the human skull consists of numerous slightly concave, scale-shaped planes touching and sometimes overlapping. The phrenologists of the nineteenth century had the right idea, only they got the names wrong. Lododox! Symbol of the short-fused. How do you like that?”
The fourth customer was a tall black man, but while Frank didn’t take the same easy liberties he did with the white ones—the borderline unprofessional violations and manipulations of their space—he didn’t allow the customer to interrupt his spiel or influence its direction either. The man was a source of ugly fascination to Ward. He was tall and very thin, and well dressed in a sense—formally dressed, but in a cheap suit-and-tie affair that looked and smelled like it had been worn days, even slept in, right down to the damp pinkish-white shirt with the gaudy lapel—to the underwear, no doubt. He stood very erect—established himself in the chair as if he were the hinged and lever-ready thing—but erect in a way that was the opposite of dignified, like somebody poking his middle finger into your third eye. How could you live and let live like that?
“Listen up, son. Potent depressives, the Jonahs of the world, reveal themselves by the circumferences of their misericordia pumps, near the left nodule of corti. Always listen to your fingers. Begin at the back, always with the back left corner. Left side, right side, top, bangs. Break up the order if you get bored…but always take the bottom left first. And make sure the bangs go last. See, it’s all about putting things into proportion…like the answer to whatever’s eating you, you got to do the calculations first.”
He’d been a high-school superstar: in the same league as superstars, at any rate. Instead, life surprised Ward with this fuming, hapless, heavy flesh, for which nothing had worked out—disappointment in duds, cowboy hat and overpressed size-45 denim.
“Yep, you’re a big one,” said Frank Reed, as he met his charge at the bus stop. He leaned over and opened the wagon’s passenger door. “Swell, swell. Just put your stuff in the back. So good to see you. Let’s take a gander with that thing off you. What do you say?”
Frank Reed had to work to keep his smile from skipping town. Its welcome so wide he could smell his own teeth. The thing attached to the boy’s head was a Red Rock West incarnation of Elton John, shaved military-short on both sides with the panel of center-flipped hair, very girlish, running down the back of Ward’s thick, sweaty neck.
Both of them felt constrained by the other cars on the Parkway, Frank still reeling from his encounter with a Midwest mullet in upstate’s safe conservatory. But he girded himself for the mentoring role he’d requested. And when Ward began to classify the different lowlifes he’d encountered in the institution he’d been calling home, Frank was able to reply, “I can take you back right now, if you like,” without skipping a beat. “If you can’t learn to talk like a normal person.” The boy blushed in confusion.
Frank made an impromptu detour to Pat Mitchell’s—“best ice cream in the county!” he exclaimed, feeling windy and apologetic.
“You don’t mind if I call you Billy?” he asked, as they compared flavors in the cemetery down the street, the brown waters of the Susquehanna bending west to east to south. “There’s this song by Petula Clark about a young man with that name. My wife used to love it.”
*
That was how it started: Ward knew why Frank Reed had taken him on. He’d go over the reasons, one by one, taking his own sweet time.
First for the state money, just as Ward had suspected.
Second to get good with the cops (very useful for a barber) by “taking a chance” on a troubled boy who’d been in the system as long as Ward.
Third, he got somebody who’d have to listen to him, day in, day out…
Fourth, as intimidating presence: an implicit threat to Frank’s “unruly” customers, ridiculous as that sounded.
More like anybody who might disagree while the barber was holding court, five.
The sixth reason would retain its mystery a little while longer.
Ward had no hope as a haircutter (even as a “butcher,” he wasn’t primitive enough), but Frank did see enormous potential related to reasons four and five.
“People say the word comes from the Scandinavian, banga—meaning to hammer, when in fact it’s a horse’s tail. Cows and horses. It’s interesting how often barnyard animals and their backsides put in an appearance. Cowlicks, ducktails, pigtails, bangs, ponytails. The list goes on. Words, like hairs, can have interesting derivations. You’d be surprised how many start with something womanish. Speaking of which—avoid the straight-line across no matter how tempting. It’s fine for young ladies, but you’ll lose more regulars with that than any other—find the natural part and comb it out at least six times—one, two, three, up to six, in fast sweeps.”
The shop was a modest affair, a discrete door-and-half-window storefront with no awning facing the Vestal Plaza’s back lot. The only Plaza business that did face this direction, in fact. Behind the lot, the hillside created an enormous amphitheater, its upper slope scalped to an ugly scree. Club House Road circuited it, winding up to the Jewish Community Center, where the children of Harpur’s professors would learn the language that unlocked the secrets of the original Testament. Many had become Frank’s regular clients, he claimed. He loved kids, loved getting at people’s heads, knowing their strands as early as possible. Shady colonnades alternated with square planters open to the sun—ficus, fern, American Smoketree under arbitrary pockets of light. Frank had the idea of placing torpedo-sized barber poles strategically along the Plaza’s pitchfork of galleries, with a pair near the pizza parlor painted with Venetian gondolas from the life, directing one to a blind alley then out to the parking lot’s amphitheater. The same number of cars (more or less) huddled into the same small quadrant in the lot’s wide acreage, directly in front of Frank’s shop. Every seat in what Frank Reed dubbed his “worker’s paradise” filled with impatient, unhappy men.
“If he’s keeping them long, try squirting mist on the forelocks. To do it right, you’ll want to keep the part as thin as a razor blade. Look at Burt’s circa Hustle or the very early Alda—the half-ear with sideburns and the long hair part company. Many people have more than one part, of course. The average is three for men. With a little bit of coaxing and a dab of grippy or holding gel, they can be set into even layers no matter how he chooses to part it as it starts growing back—although there are deviations you can’t fix. There was this one guy—a two-monther—who had eighteen separate cowlicks, wings and swirls total. Claimed he’d had a great head of hair up until his mid-twenties, when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, and when the hair grew back, it got messed up somehow. Remember that, Sam? Good-luck Chuck. But no matter how cockeyed things look—there’s always the one dominant part. Work the top layer out with a mind to the two ears. Are they level? Because most ears aren’t. Typically, the left or right lifts a few milli- or even centimeters higher, corresponding to what-handed you are. Everything’s connected—like in that embarrassing Candy Mitchum song my wife used to listen to, a watch ticks, a man dies, the thatch, the taper, how it hangs around the ears, the bangs, the length all over.”
*
Ward unlocked the mystery reason the one time he went up with the old man on a Ferris wheel.
Fear was the key.
The amusement park had been set up in Johnson City to celebrate the latest revelation in indoor shopping, the Oakdale Mall. “This year’s pet rock,” the barber predicted, but he took his mentee with him to check it out.
The trip turned out very frightening when they got trapped at the top. The bar swung down across their laps. The gondola tipped back with the weight of the two of them. Ward, who was taking up more than his share of the seat, was squeezing the metal, his knuckles white, and as the enormous axle began to turn, his terror began to communicate itself to his hapless mentor, hair by hair, by slow but lethal osmosis. Their feet swept out into space, over the hearthstones of the valley.
They were lifted and pulled backwards, above the salaaming green and the dirty dishwater of the pilot lake. There were the different colored lights of the arcades, with the lights of pit stops and parkways and various cartons of industry shoved off to the side.
As his terror grew, Ward suddenly realized that Frank Reed was still talking. Over the dismay of his surprise, he realized this guy was talking because he had to. He was afraid of what would happen when he stopped.
“This is one time you’ll have to use the mirror,” Frank Reed was advising him, “but don’t let them catch you! And pray—whenever you’re sneaking a look—you don’t lock glances by accident. There’s the boredom. Of course there’s boredom. Years of dead time and grinding molars—times when your customer’s behavior or personal odor is so bad you want to clip the nub off the bottom of his ear.”
*
“It’s about proportion, balance, cause, effect. Soon enough you’ll get so the figuring is sure and automatic. See? Three snips. For thatching, use the first and middle fingers to lever out the locks, then start snipping from left to right, unless you’re working with a Jew or Italian, in which case backwards is okay I guess. Italian cutters are the showiest—but for true masters you’ll want to watch the Poles. There was a Lou Dembrowski—a magical Pole I learned from in secret, many years back. He had this talent for disrupting the part. But even he couldn’t compete with a blowfly cowlick. Now don’t cut across the entire wedge. Leave about an eighth of an inch, to hold your place. Comb it out three times when you’re finished—forwards, backwards and forwards again. By this point, you should be done.
“No surprises. And no more than five more strokes with your instruments. Two is okay. No strokes is best. End with a brace of tonic, tap on some powder, slap the cuff with a clean towel, hold up the hand mirror. Voila! Sure—it’s okay to say it. The big moment. Watch in the wall-wide mirror as the expression changes. Delight? Disappointment? Fair shape? Or a slander? Those who cut hair for a living are lucky. On a busy day, we get dozens of defining moments. ‘What would my father say if he could see me now?’ In how many professions do you find a man handed that question on a routine basis? Truth or failure sits there in front of you, in the round.
And then it walks out into the world. Appearances count—first ones the most. As my old teacher used to tell me over and over again, there are seven clues to a man’s character, all as plain as the nose on his face—choose any stranger. His haircut. His handshake. The shiftiness of his eyes. The clothes he wears. The presence or absence of dirt under his nails. The nose on his face. His smell.”
