Anthony V. Toscano, Writer
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Category: Story
Bald Man In A Barber Shop
On July 4, 2011 July 4, 2011 By Anthony V. ToscanoIn barber, barber shop, Brother, cop, Dad, Death, Dying, Family, Father, Main Menu, Railroad, Story, The Present Moment, Train, Trains, Writer, Writers, Writing2 Comments
Just Trim A Little Off The Sides
On a bright yellow morning in December of 1963 God taught me the reason a bald man needs a haircut, the fact that Jackie Kennedy didn't care who shot her husband, and that I was supposed to hate niggers because I looked like one.
I was sitting inside The Buzzcut Emporium — across the parking lot from Snoozie's Trattoria — smelling white powder puffing off the soft brush with a blond wood handle that Jimmie the barber was waving against the neck of the tall, skinny, bald man who sat in the swivel chair.
I didn't like the way Jimmie made loud speeches while holding a straight razor close to the wiry man's throat; and the bald man sneered and blew me a kiss. So I slumped, slouched and curled my body until I became invisible. Then I slid what was left of me back against the wall, and I leafed through a copy of Life Magazine.
I stared at the Abe Zapruder colored photos of JKF's assassination. I stopped breathing when I reached the frame where his wife Jackie held her man still and wide open to the shot that turned one side of the president's head into red mist.
"She was sad, but she was free," said God. "The secret service man who climbed onto the limousine's back bumper practiced his lines and moves ahead of time."
I considered asking God a question about Calvin's concept of Predestination, but the barber's voice distracted me.
"You want I should blend the sides with the fuzz around your ears. That right?" said Jimmie.
"Yeah, that and give it a proper washing, maybe even lighten it up some for the summer months," said the bald man. Then he pulled what at first looked like a squirmy guinea pig from the pocket of his permanent-press slacks and handed the creature to Jimmie.
Turns out the pig was his hair.
Pig, wig, what the fuck, I thought. This guy's an independent thinker like me, or he's a nut case like me; and in either event Johnnie Rebello was right to recommend that I write my next story about whatever might happen here on a Saturday morning.
I rubbed my hand through the mess of tight curls that sat on top of my brain, and I listened to the bell above the doorjamb jingle as a cop walked inside and approached Jimmie. That tinkling bell, I realized, appeared in far too many of the stories I wrote not to hold some mysterious significance inside my psyche. Something to do with arrival and departure.
The cop wore a hat. The kind the bread man wore in the early 1950s when I was too young by a slip to go to school. I think I was in love with the bread man. It was all about the way he smelled. Sweet and hopeful as lemon sunlight shining on baby-green grass.
The fact that the bread man's visits interrupted the beatings my mother gave me for being a weird child who was born inside her gut and could get back inside her head anytime he wanted to go there served to deepen my affection for him.
He would knock on the door, and my mother would drop her weapon, quick stop screaming, and growl at me to suck up my tears. Then she'd start singing and smiling like a television housewife who smelled like lavender perfume even after lusty sex.
I was only four or five years old at the time, but my daily travels inside my mother's mind led me to understand — in the vague but focused way that babies comprehend the complicated aspects of communication — the connection between the beatings and her intense sense of physical frustration. A few years later, when I learned how to make myself come, I realized what she'd been missing, and how the bread man's visits fit into the picture.
"Come on in," she'd say when she opened the door.
He was tall and handsome, and his fingernails were clean.
My dad was short and nondescript, and his hands were always dirty from working hard-labor jobs on the railroad. Pennsylvania Reading Seashore Line. Steam locomotives left over from World War II, dedicated to lugging tourists from Philadelphia to South Jersey and back again.
The bread man sported a fresh-pressed brown uniform and a snappy cap with a shiny black brim.
My dad wore grease-stained overalls and a pinstriped canvas hat that surrendered to his sweat.
The bread man filled the air with the aroma of sugar frosting and jelly doughnuts.
Dad stank of kerosene and coal tar.
And the cop carried no scent at all.
"Gotta stack of Wanted Dead or Alive posters here," he said. His voice squealed past the fine hairs inside his nostrils and came out sounding like a sax gone sour. "Mind if I tape one to your window?"
"You know me, Bernie. Semper a Member of the Chamber. Here, I'll hang one on the mirror, too. Who you lookin' for this time?"
"Thug named Harry Felton. Guy wrote a book a few years back, then made himself drunk forever when no one but old ladies wanted to read the damned thing. Couple of months ago, he snorted down the wrong kind of cocktail and totaled a Packard automobile. Almost killed his own fat ass, and crippled his queer passenger, then escaped the hospital with the help of his agent just after we pressed him with a DWI. We suspect he went looking for an old dame named Gloria Lakeland. Seems like he had a score to settle with her."
"Lakeland from down the road in Railsford? Did he find her?" said Jimmie.
"Yep, that's the broad. She showed up yesterday lying in her own bed, naked, embarrassed and two days beyond dead. Her neighbors smelled her remains and called us. A note, written in red lipstick, was tacked to the headboard. Just two words: Epilogue Forthcoming. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right."
"What's this world coming to, Bernie?"
"I can't answer that one. That kind of language is too twisted and high-falutin for me to want to understand."
The cop left, and the bell tinkled.
"You're next, kid," said Jimmie. At first I didn't know he was talking to me. I was too busy trying to stay invisible, and thinking about how much I hated Jackie Kennedy, to pay careful attention to the present moment.
And as far as present moments go, even back then I realized that time was a desperate concept we invented so we wouldn't feel too dizzy and start to fall down. Being physically and emotionally tortured makes some children wither inside and turns other ones into hyper-sensitive psychics. I was a damned smart kid. Intelligence was the only thing I knew for certain that I owned, although intelligence disappointed itself by telling me that I could never be the best or the most.
"What's wrong? Those big ears of yours not working today?" The tall bald man, who wasn't exactly bald anymore, punched me on my shoulder and pointed to Jimmie. "Man's talking to you, you bookworm faggot shrimp," he said.
His trimmed and copper-toned guinea pig was sitting on top of his head. It slipped a little bit to the left as he bent down toward me. But his thin-lipped mouth tilted off to the right side of the universe, so on balance I made sense of the view.
"Thank you, sir," I said. "I like your haircut." I kept my facial muscles tight when I spoke, so as to be sure that my expression added nothing to my words.
Of course, I was being a wise-ass motherfucker by saying I admired his orange pig wig, but I'd learned from my mother's beatings, and from the tough acting kids at school who spat on me and had wax inside their flat shiny ears, that given the choice between a subtly delivered wise-ass compliment and none at all, the insecure among us would always ignore the sarcasm and accept the compliment as a gift.
The tall, skinny man twitched his head from left to right, the way a spastic entertains an uncontrollable tic. He pushed his polyester shirt down deep into his permanent-press slacks, scratched his balls while he was down there, smelled the fingers he pulled out and turned toward the Buzzcut Emporium's door.
And by force of habit I listened to the doorjamb bell tinkle.
"Climb aboard, kid. Mind if I call you kid?" said Jimmie the barber. He placed a padded board across the swivel chair's arms. I shrugged my shoulders in answer to his question, wiggled my ass into position, and wished I wasn't short like my dad.
"Please. Can you give me a flat top? Leave it longer right up front?" I said.
"Flat tops are for real hair, not for what God gave you. You got nigger's wool. Only one way I can try to fix it," he said. Then he grabbed the electric razor and I listened to it hum like an attacking squadron of green-head houseflies.
"My dad told me I don't have to get a buzz cut this time." I heard the pleading whine inside my voice and hated myself for begging this bastard.
"Your dad's the little guy who works the switch house down the way, isn't he?"
"He works hard," I said.
"Not hard enough at controlling his wife. But look, kid, you don't want to go through this life looking like a woolly headed licorice baby, so just let me do my job. The only reason I took you in here was because Johnnie called me from over at the Trattoria and said you had potential in spite of your looks."
"You know Johnnie Rebello?" I said.
"Like a man knows his brother, cause that's what we are. I'm Jimmie Rebello, but most guys call me Jimmie The Razor. You're still a young punk, though, so just keep calling me sir."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Rebello," I said as I watched my nigger's wool fall to the black-and-white tile floor.
"Johnnie says you're an author. That the way it is?"
"I write stories, but so far no one wants to publish them."
"Well, what do you write about, kid?"
"Melancholy dead guys who live in Happyland. About them and about everything else."
I thought about how if I ever wrote this barber shop into a story I'd have to change all the characters' names, because no one would believe that they all ended with the same sound. Johnnie, Jimmie, Bernie, Harry. Then again, I thought, life was odd and so were my stories, so maybe I'd leave well enough alone.
"That might be your problem, kid. Trust me on this. Dead guys can be melancholy, but not here in Happyland."
"Your brother, Mr. Johnnie, told me the same thing."
"Must have heard it from me. We talk a lot. On the telephone, that is. I can't convince him he should leave his favorite corner booth, walk across the parking lot and visit me here. He tells me that exercise is for fools who think they'll live forever. Sometimes I think he's got a point."
"Mr. Johnnie is a wise man."
"So I eat free of charge at the Trattoria once a month, and in return I give him a haircut to match his restaurant's decor."
"Like I said, Mr. Johnnie is a –"
"Quit while you're ahead, kid. I don't need you to praise my brother." Jimmie swung me around in the chair. "You see the mug hanging on my mirror over there? Guy's name is Harry Felton. He's an author, too. Old, drunk and on the run from the law. He let a temporary need for love ruin his life. Happens to all you brooding artist types. I'd be careful if I was you."
I stared at Harry Felton's photograph, and then at my own reflection in the mirror. Harry had nigger's wool, too. Gray to my brown, but his curls were just as tight. True enough, he looked lonely and just about dead. But he held his head high and winked at me.
I climbed down off the board and out of the swivel chair. I pulled two quarters out my pants pocket and handed them to Jimmie.
"Glad I met you, Mr. Rebello, sir" I said. "But I don't need love. I need success. And the next time I want a haircut, I'll look for Harry Felton's barber."
I remember leaving the Buzzcut Emporium, but I can't be sure that the doorjamb bell tinkled on my way out.
On January 16, 2011 By Anthony V. ToscanoIn Atlantic City, Bay, Bays, Dad, Diner, Diners, Father, Friend, Friends, Friendship, Friendships, Loneliness, Lonely, Lonesome, Main Menu, Memoir, Memories, Memory, Ocean, Oceans, Story6 Comments
Down to the Olde Port Market
Written November 2009
I moved to this town many years ago, because the blue fog combined itself with the false impression of infinity that an ocean can provide if only an eye looks beyond the foaming coastline that signals a return to port.
For years before I came here, to this town of short-sleeved polyester shirts sitting proud around a boardroom table; this town of short walks to the Post Office or the sugary-pink bakery; this town of hello good mornings spoken to strangers; this town enveloped by a Sunday-morning, aromatic cloud of steam lifting off from crackling bacon and pan-fried onions; this town of inconsolable old fishermen and their exhausted wives. For years before I came to live with all of this, I vacationed in the next town over, just twelve miles away, but they were twelve miles that I never wanted to traverse.
Not until the morning I sat beside a wrinkled, fat and dusty man dressed in denim overalls, the two of us hunkered down over the diner's counter, dipping burnt bread into sunny-side egg yolk, scooping dollops of homemade corned beef hash onto the wet and buttered toast. Not until we began to speak to each other, or rather he began to speak to me.
"Good to have an old-fashioned diner here in town. Mike, the tall guy who owns this place, comes from Atlantic City," he said. His cheeks bulged with food as he spoke. His lips, full and chapped, looked slimy with the egg yolk he spilled there.
"Atlantic City? New Jersey?" I said.
"There isn't any other, not that I know about."
"My dad used to take me crabbing in Atlantic City."
"Yeah, well you still have the accent," he said. "I grew up there, too, along with Mike, though I expect that you and us came up at different times."
"Sometimes I miss the place," I said.
"There's lots of crab and fish in the next town over. Just a short stretch, and I'll be going there after breakfast if you want to come along. Won't be much sunshine there today. Never is," he said. "Want to come with me? Finish your meal, then."
We both let the weight we gained from our full breakfast pull us down from the diner's vinyl-covered stools.
His truck, rusty as a ripened crab trap, was parked around the corner. Along the way we walked past clean-shaven Christians holding hands with their pleated-skirt wives and pert college girls looking at their reflections in shop windows.
The truck door's hinges creaked as I pulled her open. I climbed the distance from sidewalk to worn-cloth upholstery, sat and stared through a dirt-streaked windshield; and once out of town I allowed my glance to follow the four-lane highway's painted lines.
My breakfast companion said nothing until we reached the exit that led to Our Town.
"Gotta drive down to the boat launch first, then we'll ride back again and meet the crabs I was talking about. You game?"
"I'm game. You own a boat?" I said.
"No. I clean the fish that others carry up to the sinks. Then I sell what I can for them down to the Olde Port Market. Rest I give away to friends. It's all part of the deal, the way I make my living now that I'm old. Once upon a time, though, I owned a side trawler. Many folks nowadays find it fashionable to condemn the man who trawls for the food they eat, but that's just the way it is."
"Is that why you gave it up? Because tree huggers criticized you?" I said.
"No. It's a long story you don't want to hear, but the short of it is that Manny, one of my Mexican crew, killed himself by being crushed in the winch's cable. Nothing any of us could do in spite of his screaming. Once you're caught, you're dead. There's a monument just the other side of town that makes mention of Manny and all the others lost to sea. Maybe someday you'll say a prayer while standing there."
I thought better than to ask the man any further questions. I figured that he needed time to think about Manny and then some more time to recoup his sense of purpose.
The boat launch felt like a lost and empty place, grey and filthy as the fog, constant rainbows of blood and guts flickering on the metal cutting boards beside the sinks. My breakfast companion worked fast and with the skill of a seasoned surgeon. I shuffled and humble-shifted my body around the several men working there, men who not once asked who I was, men who seemed so intent on completing their day's work that nothing outside of that sweat-soaked reality registered as being part of the world.
My companion loaded several coolers, each filled with fresh-cut fish covered in ice, into the bed of his pickup truck, then wiped his hands on a blood-soaked towel and climbed back into the driver's seat. I followed suit. We traveled less than a mile before he pushed his foot down hard on the brake pedal.
"There's the crab tubs. Get yourself down and out, and go to look at them," he said. "I'll be inside talking business with Giovanni."
To the left side of the Olde Port Market's front doors sat two metal tanks filled with live crabs. A filter ran a continual bubbling stream of water into the vats in order to keep the crabs alive. I stared and ran my thoughts backward to the times I and my dad went crabbing just outside of Atlantic City.
"They're beauties, ain't they now?" he said.
I jumped when I heard his voice come from behind me. I'd been lost in thought, and now I felt irritated because of his interruption.
"No. No, they aren't beautiful, friend. Matter of fact, they're downright ugly," I said.
"What's got you pissed?"
"The hair on the back of their shells. I never saw, much less ate, a crab who needed a haircut."
"This ain't Atlantic City, you know, but it's as close as you'll come out this far away."
"Maybe, then, just maybe I should turn around and make my way back home." I said.
"I like you better without all that make pretend shyness, kid. Hash and eggs, and catering to old men like me won't cure your disease, but –"
"Disease, what disease are you talking about?"
"Loneliness. Don't go back now to pretending, because a second act can't erase a first impression," he said.
"I'm not particularly lonely. No more than most who move from one shore to another," I said.
"Okay, whatever you say, but for what it's worth, I think you're right about crabs. You're not the only one who remembers the oily smell of mud around Atlantic City. But home you are. Right here and now. Manny was lonesome for home, too. But in fact of things insofar as I understand them he died at home, right there crushed to bits inside that winch's cable."
I never again saw my breakfast companion, and I never want to see him on a different day. But on blue-gray mornings such as this one I oftentimes visit the monument he talked about, and standing there I say a prayer for all of us.
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