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Stonewall: Stories of Gay Liberation 83

above and behind Robert’s ear. The downstroke scrape flourished
into a fast, thrilling swoop down his neck.
“I feel like my life is in your hands,” Robert said.
“It is,” Floyd said.
“I don’t know if I like that.” Robert hated the nervous laugh
in his own voice. “I only started back to barbers about two months
ago. Before that it was nearly five years, being a hippie and all, I had
hair down below my shoulders. Then something, nothing really,
happened, and this guy, this judge, made me cut it. When I was a
kid, barber shops always gave me a headache.
“So. Just a little scrape with the law,” Floyd, W. C. Fields, said.
He swooped his razor over and around Robert’s other ear.
“I never liked anybody fussing over me that much. Besides, this
barber shop my old man took me to had pin-up pictures of really
big girls and I wasn’t a very big boy. I mean now it wouldn’t matter.”
“The bigger the better, huh?” Floyd rinsed his razor. He knew
enough to humor his customers ambiguously. He met all kinds at
the corner of 18th and Castro. “Never kid a kidder,” he said.
“I kid you not,” Robert said.
For years Robert had been titanic cruising among icebergs of
females in his hometown. At the age of four, innocent of all need
for cover, in the driveway between their homes, he had compared
himself to the lower half of a giggling little Judy Esterbank. One
month later, a modern doctor, new to small-town practice, had sold
his mother an introductory twofer on the latest big-city hygiene and
had wheeled him through white double doors to pull out his tonsils
and slice off his foreskin.
He never really trusted her ever again.
At the age of ten, playing Lewis and Clark, he had tripped over a
tent peg catching the strapless halter of twelve-year-old Joyce Gillette.
One flawless white breast popped pert and eager into view. He stared
and she smiled. He stepped forward and she stepped back tucking
herself away as neatly as she packed her camping equipment. He
stared at the veil of her halter. She stepped to him and cupped his
groin in her hand. It felt good. “I ought to kill you,” she had said.
©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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