The Barbers of Seville (by request)

There will be some very disturbing content later in this entry. Relax for now, but be ready when the time comes.

When I went out for coffee today (see prior "Convenience" blog), I decided to go whole hog and treat myself to breakfast. Going out for breakfast is inherently stupid because almost all breakfast-type meals can be made pretty easily at home. You probably would have trouble creating the kind of fancy-ass dinner you can buy at a nice restaurant, but any dipshit -- even you and I -- can fry eggs and make pancakes at home that are at least as good as diner pancakes and eggs. But hey - live a little..

While eating breakfast (pancakes, eggs, really good coffee in a cracked, dirty cup, plates with windmills on them), I saw the town barber, who was just paying up and trying to leave. His name is Vince, of course, because most barbers are named Vince, and his partner in the shop is Nick, and all barbers who are not named Vince are named Nick. I swear this has been true in every barbershop I have been in since I was a young kid. All except for Skeeter, and we will get to Skeeter soon enough.

Vince is a great man, a great guy. He has been a barber for many, many years, and I am almost certain he fought in World War II, and I think World War II veterans should be saluted and have their asses kissed every moment of their lives. He's old but very agile, and he talks what could charitably be called a fucking blue streak. This is why I say he was "trying" to leave the diner. In sheer bulk, a daily transcript of his verbiage would make the OED look like a Zane Grey dime novel.

I have been to Vince's shop. It is basically a four-hour trip to go there on a busy day. He is a true artisan of the old school. Even though people who go to fru-fru hairstylists would scoff at his spartan scissor-cuts, he does a damned good job.

The problem is that blue streak I mentioned. Perhaps because he is about 80 years old, Vince has gotten well beyond the point of being able to cut hair and talk at the same time, so every time he has to say something he stops cutting, which means that even a low-impact haircut means 45 minutes, at the least, in his chair.

Going there, though, is great because it is a trip back in time, to use a cliche that I would probably cut out of a story that I was editing (reminder: I am a copy editor by trade). When you go in, he invites you to have a cup of coffee out of his plastic carafe. I like people who give you coffee. And then there are the doughnuts. Vince treats his customers to doughnuts. I am not talking lame-ass doughnuts here, like that soggy shit from Dunkin' Donuts or the puffy, airy crap from Krispy Kreme. These are real Doughnuts (capital D intended) from some obscure Italian bakery where they know that a doughnut is supposed to be a meal, and that after you eat one doughnut you are not supposed to eat again for six hours, or until your blood sugar has returned to only quadruple the normal number.

When you go to Vince's shop there are no people named Serge with tiny-ass glasses peering at your head with fingers up in a goalpost posture like some fucking indie film producer. There are no hairsprays "created" by Jean-Guy or Jean-Claude or some other phony name. You will get your neck shaved with hot lather, and afterward you will get your neck and ears rubbed down with Bay Rum, by God, the same Bay Rum that has been applied to men's necks since your long-dead grandfather was a boy, and you will not have some stinky shit sprayed on you that will make your hair stiffer than a high school senior's cock on prom night.

I have had a weird relationship with barbers all my life. My earliest memory of the barbershop is when I used to walk there when I was about six. My mother would give me a buck and tell me to tell the barber to keep the change. I am guessing the haircut was 50 or 75 cents. One day she must've given me a $5 bill and out of habit I told him to keep the change, and he did. I remember my mother, pissed off to beat the band, going there to demand the change back. There was hell to pay for him because he should have known that he was not going to get a $4.50 tip in 1959. Fortunately, I was held blameless.

We moved to the town I told you about in the Jersey Pine Barrens, and the barbershop there was a trip. Larry was the barber and he did an OK job, but he had a son named Skeeter who was just brutal with the clippers. Everyone at school knew when you'd gotten stuck getting a cut from Skeeter, because you had no hair and looked like a real asshole. His haircuts actually had a way of making your ears stand out from your head.

There was, incredibly, a thing worse than getting your hair cut by Skeeter, and this actually happened to a lot of the kids I went to school with. A lot of the kids were from farms and were very poor, and their mothers would cut their hair because they did not have the 75 cents it cost to pay Skeeter to make you look like a chump.

These kids got the dreaded home cuts with a salad bowl, and getting one was like asking to get the shit kicked out of you by the tough kids. We were poor when I was a kid - my parents actually became very successful after it was too late to benefit me, but when I was a kid we had next to nothing. But thank Christ we always had the money for a haircut, because having your hair cropped so close that the clippers skimmed your temporal lobe was far, far better than having a salad bowl cut, and believe me there was no mistaking the difference.

My dad did not like getting his hair cut by either of the local barbers, so he traveled 10 miles all the way to the big city, population 8,000, to get a real haircut from a "real" barber, who of course was named Vince and of course had a partner named Nick. I finally convinced mom and dad that I wanted to go there too, especially since there was a movie theater a block away. So a Saturday tradition was born: a haircut with Vince and then a double feature at the theater. It probably gave mom and dad a chance to have sex.

Speaking of which, now comes the disturbing content.

As I sat in the chair, virtually blind because my glasses were off, I always noticed the grown-up in the next chair was reading something, or at least looking at something and rapidly turning the pages. Eventually, being no dummy, I noticed that the publications they were reading were spirited out of Nick's drawer, the one under the one in which he kept his clippers and various other tools of his trade.

Eventually I figured out that they were looking at something that, chances are, I would soon be really interested in.

One day I tried the direct approach. I'd heard the guys in the next chair ask Nick for "something to read," and that seemed to be the cue to break out these mysterious publications, which I was sure included views of something I'd heard referred to as "tits" and, well, even more, but I do not want to go further than that. God gave you an imagination. so use it if you must, OK?

So after weeks of trying to get up the nerve, I sprouted a set of balls one week and asked the question:

"Can I have something to read?"

"Sure," Vince said. But he did not go into Nick's drawer. He went to the table next to one of the waiting chairs and got me a copy of Boys'Life, and I will be damned if I ever remember seeing anything called or resembling "tits" in there.

Now that I am done telling you that story, here comes the really disturbing part.

I have never told anyone this, and probably should not be telling you. There used to be an old guy who came in as a sub once in a while whose name was J----. He had white hair and a stupid little white moustache, and I guess he had some kind of deal in which he would sub for Nick or Vince when they wanted a day off.

One day, I wound up in J---'s chair. I don't know why i am protecting him; he has no doubt been dead for 15 or 20 years or more. And J---- kept leaning against me and leaning against me while he was cutting my hair. I was a very young and very naive kid, and the fact that Nick kept those magazines in his drawer and out of my clutches did very little to help me attain a degree of worldliness. But I knew one thing. J---- kept leaning against me, leaning against my arm, and there was no mistaking that there was something going on with him that would have been going on with me had I been given the opportunity to look at those magazines in Nick's second drawer.

I never said a word to anyone about this over the years, but as I got older I could not help but wonder how many kids had to put up with J---'s obvious excitement being pressed against their young bodies. While certainly I do not consider myself a victim in any sense of the word, who knows what else may have happened with some kid who was not smart enough to try to lean away when this guy was trying to jolly his pecker up with a little rub against a young fellow's body?

I hope this did not offend you, but I have wanted to tell this story for years. Whenever I took my sons to the barber, I sat with them the whole time, all because of J---.

Maybe a visit to Nick's second drawer would have straightened J--- out. I moved away long before I got a chance to get a peek at what was in that drawer, but if nothing else the mystery helped set up the thrill of the chase.