Page 101 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

The Barber of 18th and Castro 89

and how they could make it sweeter, shaking their hair down, trying
out the sample brushes, teasing me, asking me how I thought they
looked. I tell you. More than once before I left, I had to comb my
teeth. It was murder. Door-to-door can kill you.”
“That so?” Floyd fielded like W. C. “I’m what you might say
interested in hair brushes too. Being a barber and all, it’s natural.”
“I bet you’ve heard everything too,” Robert, doing his best
Holden Caulfield, said. “At least twice.”
“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,

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