Page 105 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

The Barber of 18th and Castro 93

nobody wanted Princetons or flat-tops or, his favorite, crewcuts
anymore. He figured to ride out the long-hair fad. But here he was
forty-five, with a one-chair shop and a steady but small clientele
of older balding gentlemen of the sort people once kindly called
“born bachelors” as opposed to “eligible bachelors.” His trade kept
him comfortable. The brisk pace that had once been Friday’s and
Saturday’s had fallen off taking with it the strain from his eyes and
the pressure from his varicose veins.
“I been closed for four months, yeah.” Floyd said. “Just a
second and I’ll have all these wires tied up. Out for four months.
Back for three.”
“Vacation?” Robert asked. He was vaguely bored. The maga-
zines were nothing to write home about.
“Operation,” Floyd said. “Eyes. Yeah. Wouldn’t be able to see
today but for those two operations.”
He smiled with such a general gratitude for his health that
Robert, who in his own life was grateful for nothing, felt uncom-
fortable. Robert wished for another customer, preferably a mother
with a small boy who would have to be hoisted to a kid’s chair inside
the big one. With commotion like that he could easily slip one or
two of the crummy nudist magazines into the sleeve of his jacket.
“I always figured,” Robert said, “that little boys always under-
stand the world earlier and better than little girls.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because little boys get taken younger to barber shops. You
sit them up on that little chair. You wrap that big cloth around
them. All of a sudden they see what it’s like to be a disembodied
head caught between two mirrors. That’s why little boys cry at the
barber shop, because, all of a sudden, they’re scared. They’re face
to face with the secret how we’re all just curving off into infinity.”
“I like that myself,” Floyd said.
“Maybe that’s why you barber.”
“Could be.” Floyd looked up at a hundred mirrored images
of himself.

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