Price of the Haircut_Stories Read online

  Also by Brock Clarke

  The Happiest People in the World

  Exley

  An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

  Carrying the Torch

  What We Won’t Do

  The Ordinary White Boy

  The Price of the Haircut

  Stories by

  Brock Clarke

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2018

  For Michael Griffith,

  Keith Morris, and

  Trent Stewart

  Contents

  The Price of the Haircut

  The Grand Canyon

  What Is the Cure for Meanness?

  Concerning Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife

  Good Night

  Our Pointy Boots

  The Misunderstandings

  That Which We Will Not Give

  Cartoons

  Children Who Divorce

  The Pity Palace

  Acknowledgments

  The Price of the Haircut

  On Monday, an unarmed black teenage boy was shot in the back and killed by a white city policeman. On Tuesday, there was a race riot in our city, a good-sized one. On Wednesday, the mayor formed a committee to discover why there had been a race riot, and on Friday he held a news conference to announce the committee’s findings. The mayor told us (we were watching the news conference at David’s house, because David’s house had the biggest TV and was farthest away from where the riot had been) that the committee had initially believed the race riot had been caused by a white city policeman, who shot in the back and killed an unarmed black teenage boy—because there had been other unarmed black teenage boys shot in the back and killed by white city policemen, fifteen in the last five years to be exact, and because, of course, the riots had happened the day after the boy had been shot—but the mayor put the matter to us as he’d put it to the committee: that this was too familiar, too obvious; that riots had been caused by events like this too many times already; and that would-be rioters would be desensitized, bored, even, by such a thing, and would never, at this late date, riot for such a reason. The mayor had scolded the committee for their highly unimaginative findings, said that they should be ashamed of themselves for falling back on such a tired rationale and for not thinking outside the box (and we were a bit ashamed of ourselves, because we, too, had assumed that the riots had been caused by the shooting, and that meant we were stuck thinking inside the same box as the committee).

  Anyway, the mayor told the committee that its initial findings were no good and that they should go back and find something else. And so they did, and this time, the mayor told us, the committee had found the true cause of the riot: it had been caused by a barber named Gene who charged eight dollars for a haircut and who had said something racist while giving one of these eight-dollar haircuts, and the customer who had been getting the eight-dollar haircut had responded in kind and the word had gotten out, and one thing had led to another and to another until it finally led to the riot. The mayor brought out charts and graphs that showed, exactly, how one thing could lead to another, and he also brought out eyewitnesses and experts who testified that, yes, indeed, this barber was to blame for the race riot, and then they showed us an enlarged picture of Gene, who had a good head of white hair and a thick white mustache and large glasses with translucent plastic frames and who looked much like all our grandfathers, which made sense, since each of our grandfathers had also said not-a-few racist things in his time, and all in all the whole presentation was convincing in the extreme. The mayor concluded by saying that he was certain this revelation would help begin the difficult racial healing process and restore our confidence in our unjustly criticized police officers, and then the news conference was over.

  “Wow,” we said, turning off the television set. “Eight-dollar haircuts.”

  Because for years we’d been paying fifteen, seventeen, sometimes twenty plus dollars for haircuts, and the haircuts weren’t ever good, weren’t ever good enough to justify the amount of money we’d spent on them, and often, after we’d had our hair cut, we’d sit around telling each other that the haircuts didn’t look that bad, that maybe if we parted them differently they would look better, and that in any case the bad haircuts would eventually grow in, and it was embarrassing for us, grown men all, to have to sit around and lie like this to ourselves and to each other about our awful, expensive haircuts. It was emasculating, if you thought about it, and we did, all the time: we thought, for instance, about how we could never imagine our fathers sitting around telling lies about their haircuts, and how this was another way in which we’d failed to live up to their example, and how if we were to continue to get such bad haircuts, then our self-esteem would be totally and permanently in the crapper and if we were to continue to pay so much money for those bad haircuts, then our sons wouldn’t be able to go to the best colleges, either, and would end up like us, graduates of cheap state universities who had unfulfilling jobs and who sat around, fretting about our bad, overpriced haircuts.

  Because they really were bad haircuts, and we really had paid way too much for them. Trent had paid fifteen dollars to get a severe Roman centurion haircut that Mark Antony might have been jealous of; Michael had paid seventeen dollars to have his sideburns butchered so badly that one was gone entirely and the other had, somehow, gotten longer, thicker, more muttonchop-ish; David had paid twenty-five dollars to get a haircut that was all business in the front, all party in the back. Right after he got that haircut, David ran into his ex-wife on the street (all of our wives had left us, and although they, our now-ex-wives, never said as much, we all knew they had left us in large part because of our bad haircuts, and who could blame them, really: because who would want to be with a man with such an awful haircut, and who could respect a man who paid so much, time and time again, for such an awful haircut?), and she took one look at him and said, “Hey, nice haircut.”

  “Really?” David said.

  “No,” she said.

  “She actually said that,” David told us. “And then she laughed; it was a mean laugh.” David was wearing a baseball cap when he told us this story—he was, like the rest of us, over forty and too old to wear a baseball cap—but none of us called him on it, because of his truly horrific haircut and what his wife had said about it, and, believe me, our empathy for him was huge, especially mine: because I can’t even tell you how bad my haircut was and how much I had paid for it. Even now, it’s too difficult to talk about.

  But maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much to have such bad haircuts—we’d resigned ourselves to having bad haircuts; we’d known no other kind—if we didn’t have to pay so much for them. If we only had to pay eight dollars for our haircuts, then it wouldn’t be nearly as awful, nearly as humiliating. It would have been like we were getting a deal on our bad haircuts. That was our thinking.

  “But wait,” Trent said. “What about the riots? Are we really going to give this racist barber our business?”

  He had a point, and we spent a highly engaged few minutes discussing the matter. Because the riots really were horrible and life-changing for so many people—so many abandoned and not-quite-abandoned buildings set on fire; so many white motorists pulled out of cars and beaten; so many department stores ransacked and looted; so many black men harassed, beaten, shot at with rubber bullets, maced, and arrested by police in riot gear. So many restaurateurs and nightclub owners who had risked all by investing in the impoverished but architecturally significant part of town where the riot had taken place; so many of these brave pioneers who had gutted and refurbished these architecturally significant buildings and who had turned them into brewpubs and sushi bars tricked out with Italian marble and
complicated track lighting, who had made a successful go of it and had managed to convince, with their many off-duty police officers as security, white suburbanites that it was safe to come back into the city again, at least for a few hours on a Friday or Saturday night—these people were ruined, too, or at least their investments were, or at least their investments were until the city came through with the no-interest loans it was promising to these restaurant and nightclub pioneers. Yes, the riot really had been horrible, and were we, as right-minded, left-leaning, forward-thinking men of the world, were we really going to patronize the hateful barbershop that had caused all this misery and destruction in our city?

  Because we really were right-minded, left-leaning, forward-thinking men of the world. For instance, the day after the riot we had all leapt into action. David, who teaches history at one of the underperforming city high schools, sent his ninth graders to the school resource center to watch videos of civil disturbances from throughout our nation’s history. Trent, who works at the main branch of the city library, scrambled to set up a display of books by Malcolm X, Larry Neal, Maya Angelou, and other radical black writers, even though it wasn’t anywhere near African American History Month. Michael, who’s a waiter at a local steak house, began soliciting and accepting donations from his customers on behalf of the dead black teenager’s mother and father. Me, I work in a silk-screening shop, and we had all these T-shirts left over from the last riot—twelve or so years ago now—that read NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE, and I put them in boxes outside the shop, with a sign on the boxes that said the T-shirts were free to any socially conscious citizen who wanted them. But was all this enough? Wasn’t it also our duty to do something proactive and civic-minded in the wake of the riots, like not get our haircuts, no matter how cheap they were, at the racist barber who had caused the riot, as the mayor had so clearly demonstrated?

  But as David argued, that was easy for the mayor to say: because he had an excellent haircut, and no doubt he had an excellent haircut because he had the money to pay for it, and because it was easier to get an excellent haircut after already having had previous excellent haircuts, and you could only get those previous excellent haircuts if you had the money to get them in the first place. And then there were the four of us, who could not afford and had never been able to afford the kind of haircut the mayor had, who were permanently shut off from the world of excellent hair by virtue of our middling salaries and our long history of bad haircuts, and yet we were also doomed to pay too much for these bad haircuts, much like the black people who rioted were doomed to pay too much, for instance, for lousy foodstuffs at the understocked and overpriced neighborhood grocery store, the only grocery store they could go to, because it was the only one within walking distance and so few of the residents of the neighborhood could afford cars. Because when you thought about it, David said, we were helpless, just like the rioters were helpless; we were caught in a vicious cycle, just like the rioters were caught in a vicious cycle; we were desperate, just like the rioters were desperate, and desperate people do desperate things, things they probably shouldn’t. Yes, desperation made the rioters riot, and desperation would make us get eight-dollar haircuts at the racist barber, too.

  Well, it was a spectacular piece of logic all right, and we sat there quietly for a while, as if the logic were something beautiful in the room, something so very beautiful that it was the exact antithesis of our so very ugly haircuts. We sat there awhile, admiring the logic, contemplating it, not wanting to disturb it, until David, who owned the logic and had the right to decide how long we would sit there in silence admiring it, finally broke that silence and said, “Come on, let’s go.”

  We went. Went to get our haircuts at the eight-dollar racist barber who was responsible for the riot that had torn apart our city. But we didn’t go with a collectively light heart; don’t think that we did. No, rest assured that we were a very grave bunch as we piled into Trent’s station wagon and drove over to Gene’s to get our haircuts. We were somber all right, full of the enormity of what we were doing, the significance, the complexity, and in some way, we felt more human than we ever had before: because if, as someone once said, to be human is to be compromised, then we were feeling very human indeed. Because there was the half of us that wanted our cheap haircuts, that felt we deserved them, were owed them by someone—society maybe—but the other half of us knew that what we were doing was very wrong, and that we’d have to do something to make it a little less wrong, a little more forgivable, something that might enable us to explain away and justify our actions later on. Not that we had second thoughts about getting our cheap haircuts (we didn’t, and would not be deterred), but we all agreed that something had to be done to make it known that we were not just garden-variety bigots getting our hair cut for eight dollars at the racist barber. We needed to assure people—ourselves, too—that we were against what we were doing even as we were doing it. Trent, who is the most politically active of our group and who has spearheaded many a protest in our city and who owns his own bullhorn and who even, at that very moment, had generically worded protest placards in his car, suggested that, after we had actually gotten our haircuts, we should picket the barbershop to express our outrage, etc. It was an interesting idea all right, except that it might leave us a little too exposed as hypocrites, and we didn’t want that any more than we wanted to pay exorbitant prices for our bad haircuts. Michael, who, as mentioned, waits tables and is very much concerned with gratuities, suggested that we shouldn’t leave the barber a tip, but this didn’t seem a big enough gesture, especially since we never tipped any of our barbers and certainly had no intention of tipping this one. Finally, we decided to do the very least we could do: we would keep our ears open and our eyes peeled, so that we could explain later on how very awful it was at the racist barber, how we’d had no idea how severe the problem was and how horribly racist the barber actually was, but now we could easily understand how he had caused the riot, and now that we knew, we had no intention of ever, ever letting him cut our hair again, even if the haircut was incredibly cheap, only eight dollars, which was something of a miracle, if you considered it in the context of all the other pricier, albeit not racist, barbers.

  There was a big crowd milling around outside the barbershop when we pulled up. This was not unexpected. In fact, in the car we had discussed what we would say to the big crowd milling around outside the barbershop. We assumed that the crowd would be there to express their outrage at their barber and how he was responsible for the riot that had rocked our city, and we also assumed the crowd would largely be black, and since they were largely black they wouldn’t be able, right off, to understand the difference between us and the regular patrons of the barbershop, might even mistake us for the bigots who had caused the riot, etc. But that was far from the case, as we would make clear. Because even though the barbershop’s neighborhood was largely white, none of us lived in that neighborhood; the white people who lived in that neighborhood were called “Appalachian.” At least Trent, whose ex-wife worked for the city census bureau, said that was what they were called, officially, and this was what we called them in public and around people we didn’t know very well. When we were talking among ourselves, we called them white trash, and we would explain to the black protestors that we were as scared and distrustful of the people in the neighborhood as they were, and, aside from the color of our skin, we were as different from the regular patrons of the barbershop as they, the black protestors, were. And what if the black protestors then asked, as they no doubt would, why then, if we were so different from the bigots who normally frequented the barbershop, were we going to get our haircuts there? It was a good question, and we would admit this to them, right before we would hand over the figurative microphone to David, who would then put forth his theory about the vicious cycle of our bad, overpriced haircuts, and how this made us much like the rioters and maybe the protestors, too, who probably had their own variation on that vicious cycle, that vicious cycle wh
ich made us close kin, brothers, really, and as brothers, couldn’t they cut us a little slack? This would work; we were certain of it. Because, of course, the black protestors would be able to see our haircuts, which were, as you know, incredibly bad.

  There were two problems with this plan. One, the protestors outside the barbershop weren’t black; they were white. We found this troubling in the extreme. Where were they, the black people of our city? Had they had not watched and listened to the mayor’s televised press conference? Had they not heard the committee’s findings? Had they not scrutinized the very convincing charts and graphs? Had they not taken to heart the testimony of the experts and eyewitnesses? Had they not seen the picture of Gene? Did they not care that this racist barbershop was the cause of the riot that had rocked our city? Were the black people of our city this politically apathetic? Were they content to leave their civic and political and social well-being in the hands of these white protestors? Yes, it was a blow to all of us, because David’s theory had been so convincing and we had all begun to feel a special kinship with these black people, had begun to feel that their race and our hair were like an enormous door, and on one side of the door were the questions and on the other, the answers—the answers that had always been kept from us. But maybe, we thought, we could open the door together. Except the black protestors we’d expected weren’t here. Did they not want to open the door? It was mysterious all right, and we didn’t pretend to understand it, just as we didn’t pretend to understand why getting overcharged for awful haircuts made men like us so very unhappy.

  Speaking of men like us, that was the second problem with the white protestors: they weren’t protestors. We realized this after we’d piled out of Trent’s station wagon and gotten closer to the throng. These people had no signs or placards, were holding no megaphones or chanting any chants. No, they weren’t even a throng. They were merely waiting in line, quietly, to get into the barbershop. They were customers, would-be customers, and more than that, they weren’t the Appalachians from whom we were prepared to distinguish ourselves. No, they were middle-class white men wearing moderately expensive running sneakers and white ankle socks and khaki shorts and polo shirts, just like us, and just like us, they all had very, very bad haircuts.