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Stonewall: Stories of Gay Liberation 71

“Frankly, I never hear the half of it. In one ear. Out the other.
I’d go crazy if I really listened. We’re all maniacs except when we’re
not. I must confess music’s my mania.”
“Is that right?”
“Right as rain.”
“What kind of music? Grateful Dead? Judy Collins? Lawrence
Welk? What?”
“Piano. I play the piano. But not with these hands. These are the
hands of a barber. I always play piano with my feet.” He surveyed
Robert’s puzzled face and grinned. “I catch me a rube everytime with
that,” he said. “Player piano, of course.”
“I knew that,” Robert said.
Floyd gestured to the plaster-of-paris busts sitting awry on a shelf
over Robert’s head. He had saved and bought each one of them from
Silvestri’s statuary compa ny in South San Francisco. “There you see
them.” He pointed with his screwdriver. “Bach. Mozart. Schubert.
Beethoven. Liszt.”
“A whole shooting gallery.” Robert stared straight at the barber.
Floyd was a man dragging age forty-five like it was sixty. He combed
his graying hair into the stiff part and pomp he had learned as a boy
thirty years before. His glasses were as thick as binoculars. Robert
liked that. He liked the way some older men and older women kept
on with the styles they got locked into when they were young, like
they were fixed in some time warp, instead of changing with the
fashions and looking ridiculous in clothes that were too young for
them, or too modern, or too ugly, like the new uniform for the old,
polyester leisure suits for the men and polyester pant suits for the
ladies, topped off with a frizzy reddish short perm, or worse, one of
those Dynel wigs that catch the sun like orange copper wire. If he
got old, which he doubted, that’s what he planned to do. Sort of stay
just like he was. Not change a thing.
“Turn around and look,” Floyd said. “Bach and Liszt. I like
them best.”
Robert panned his head to the figurines. They were each ten

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