Price of the Haircut_Stories Read online

  Well, we had no idea, no idea how epidemic this problem was, no idea that there were so many men just like us, and it stunned us to be in such a large community of man. It made us mighty uncomfortable, to be true, and for several minutes we stood off a bit from the line, as if the line had nothing to do with us. Because we had for years thought ourselves as antagonistic to the larger community, whatever that larger community might be. Our haircuts had made us outsiders, rebels, if you will, which was the only good thing we could ever think to say about them. And so you can understand why we didn’t get in line right away. But that seemed silly, after a while: because we so obviously belonged in the line; our haircuts told everyone that we belonged in that line, and in this way our haircuts betrayed us again. And so we gave in and did apparently what one does when one finds oneself in a community of man: we got in line with the rest of the community and waited to get our cheap haircuts.

  It was a very tense wait. At first, no one spoke. At first, we all stared straight ahead at the badly cut back of the man’s head in front of us. Then, after a few minutes, David asked, meekly, if anyone knew anything about Gene. Someone said that he’d heard he had been a prison barber, that he was a white supremacist with Aryan tattoos. This was dismissed right away as mere rumor. Someone said that he, Gene, was continually aphoristic, and sometimes the aphorisms were racist and sometimes they weren’t. This fit in with our earlier impression of Gene as grandfatherly, and we were quiet again for a while as we thought again about our grandfathers, and our mixed feelings about them, too, and then Michael said something vague and generic about the riots, how he understood why the riots had happened and how he didn’t blame the rioters one bit. It was difficult to disagree with this, and we didn’t, and everyone murmured their assent, until Trent wondered out loud where all the black people were, wondered why they weren’t protesting and picketing the barbershop, chanting angry slogans, that kind of thing. All of us in line agreed that we found this absence somewhat curious. And then someone piped up and said he’d heard that there were large crowds of black people at the police headquarters downtown, picketing and protesting the white cops’ shooting of yet another black teenage boy in the back. This got everyone in a bit of a lather. Because hadn’t these protestors listened to the mayor’s news conference and the committee’s findings? And were they, too, guilty of not thinking outside the box? It seemed like they were guilty of this, and now that we thought about it, the riot itself hadn’t exactly been innovative, either. Because what earlier had seemed impressive, so momentous and important and life-changing, now seemed obvious and tired, with all the same old looted grocery stores and white people pulled from cars and beaten, etc. Now that we thought about it, we were ashamed of the riot, too, as it was pretty much the same old, same old. “That riot was a disgrace,” I said. “What were those black rioters thinking?”

  I didn’t stop there, either: no, I went on and gave voice to what had always disturbed us about the black people in our city, those black people who had rioted and who were now down at the police headquarters for absolutely no good reason; who never seemed to appreciate our right-minded, left-leaning, forward-thinking (albeit sometimes theoretical and moral as opposed to active) support of their struggle against oppression and who never responded to our friendly “yos” and “what ups” when we greeted them on the street; who never seemed to appreciate how uncomfortable these greetings made us, who never seemed to understand how fraudulent we felt saying “yo” and “what up,” but that we suffered it because we wanted them, the black people of our city, to know that we were on their side, rhetorically speaking, that we were willing to meet them on their linguistic turf. But they never seemed to appreciate the gesture, never responded in kind; or, if they responded at all, it was with glares, awful, withering glares, which made us wonder if there were something wrong with these black people, if they really knew who was on their side and who wasn’t and if they really wanted our help, if they wanted help at all, and for that matter if they even wanted to help themselves. And then there were their haircuts—the hair extensions and the high fades and the cornrows and the old-school pick-in-the-hair Afros—these haircuts that were so very expensive and yet, we thought, so very ugly, and yet they got these haircuts on purpose, unlike us, who had no choice, these people made a conscious decision to pay too much for their ugly haircuts, and not only that: they didn’t call them haircuts. Oh, no, one didn’t cut hair, one cut heads, which we found more than a little barbaric and which made us wonder—again, again—what was wrong with these black people, these black people who were now, with their intentionally expensive and hideous cut heads, protesting down at the police headquarters when they knew very well that the riots had nothing to do with the police and had everything to do with Gene, and so I spoke for all of us when I asked, at the top of my lungs, “What is wrong with these black people?”

  I immediately suspected that I’d said something inappropriate, because everyone started shuffling their feet nervously and even David, Michael, and Trent wouldn’t meet my eyes. I thought about apologizing for what I had said, was about to point out my haircut and how truly horrific it was and how it often made me say and do things I shouldn’t. It made me, for instance, often speak for the four us, for the collective we, instead of for myself alone: because it somehow seemed less lonely to speak for four men with bad, overpriced haircuts than just one; because it seemed less lonely to be four men against the world instead of just one. At first, we all liked it, me saying “we” instead of “I,” but then the more we thought about it, the more pathetic a coping device it was, and we all agreed that it was odd and awful that the thing that is supposed to make you less lonely ends up making you more so. And we also all agreed that I should stop referring to us as we and start referring to the distinct individuals we were. And I tried—we all knew I tried—but often I failed, often I slipped up and still spoke for the group, and I blamed that on my awful, overpriced haircut, too.

  But it turns out that I didn’t have to make excuses this time, because a man with an extraordinarily wide side part said, “It kind of makes you angry, the whole thing,” and then someone with a greasy, uneven brush cut went one step further and said he knew what it was like to get angrier and angrier until there was nothing to do with the anger but let it out. There was a more vocal assent to this, and a couple of men in line, men with the worst of the worst haircuts, gave each other high fives. One man who had large trapezoidal bare patches on the back of his head wondered out loud why the line wasn’t moving. “Has anyone gone into the barbershop, or come out?” he wanted to know. One person had gone in, it turned out, but hadn’t come out yet. So had anyone seen Gene’s work? No one had, and this made things even more tense. “What happens if his haircuts are worse than the ones we already have?” one man with nasty-looking razor cuts on his neck asked. “What happens if the mayor got it wrong, if the haircuts are more than eight dollars?” another man wanted to know. “They had fucking better not be more than eight dollars.” The man who said this smacked his meaty right hand into his left palm, and it was like a call to arms, and the whole line suddenly took up this call to arms and said we could not take it anymore, we had been pushed too far and, all of sudden, we were on the verge of our own riot. Because you can’t push people around for too long; you can’t treat them like second-class citizens forever. You can’t expect them to just sit by and take it. You can’t. You can’t.

  Then the door opened. Everyone got quiet, profoundly quiet, and then a cheer went up. Because we could see the guy who’d had his hair cut, and it wasn’t bad, not bad at all! It wasn’t perfect—there were stray hairs peeking out on the sides, and his receding hairline had been slightly accentuated instead of obscured—but all in all, it wasn’t a terrible haircut, and it gave us great hope: you could almost feel the crowd elevate a little, rise up at the sight of his haircut and in anticipation of the next question—not “Did Gene say anything racist?” but “Did it only cost you eight dollars?
”

  “It did,” the man said. “It really did! I gave him a ten, and I left him a dollar tip, and I still have a dollar left over!” Here, he waved the dollar bill at us, over his head, like his and our own little flag.

  And would you believe the world changed a little bit right then? It became a little brighter, a little more hopeful, and all of us in line changed a little bit, too, became a little brighter, a little more hopeful, and a little more generous, a little more empathetic. We would be better, happier people from there on out; we were all certain of it. We even felt more generous toward the black protestors, no matter how deeply buried they were in denial and self-deception and self-destruction. After all, who were we to judge? We were where we needed to be, and maybe they needed to be down at the police headquarters, and maybe at that very moment they, too, were massed in front of a door, waiting for their old bad helpless lives to die and their new selves to be born. Maybe, like us, they were watching that door swing open for the first time; maybe, like us, they were waiting patiently in line to cross that threshold, so happy to finally leave the question and enter the answer.

  The Grand Canyon

  My husband and I went to the Grand Canyon on our honeymoon, I don’t know why, it wasn’t close-by, neither of us liked the desert, or hiking, or canyons, it was as though we had made a deal with someone, our parents, God, some other only-somewhat-interested third party, that we would be allowed to get married only if this somewhat-interested third party were allowed to choose where we would go on our honeymoon, so anyway, here we were, at the Grand Canyon, making the best of it, I guess, and speaking of making the best of it, in high school I was good at painting, my art teacher had said so, he’d said, hey, you’re good at painting, you should take some art classes in college, and I’d always wanted to do that, take art classes in college, but my major, which was elementary education, didn’t give me enough time for that, which was fine, I loved teaching the kids, or at least I loved the idea of teaching the kids, but I also loved the idea of being a painter, the thing that my major, my chosen profession, had not allowed me to be, and as it turned out the Grand Canyon was very popular with painters, they were lined up easel-to-easel at the rim, the South Rim, the North Rim was too far away to see clearly, but presumably they were lined up there, too, but the painters were definitely out in full force at the South Rim, I couldn’t believe how many of them there were, I mean, you expect hikers at the Grand Canyon, backpackers, mule riders, rafters, just regular tourists who aren’t after anything in particular, and, yes, even honeymooners, I guess, but I never expected it to be so popular with painters, so popular that a kind of small industry had grown up there around them, and you could rent an easel and a canvas and a palette and a brush, and while they didn’t rent stools for you to sit on while you were painting, I had brought my own stool, a collapsible camping stool, and thinking of it now, that’s probably why we went on our honeymoon at the Grand Canyon, not because some somewhat interested third party had chosen it for us, but because you could camp there, which was of course much cheaper than staying in a nice hotel somewhere, but then it was also the Grand Canyon, and so it wasn’t as depressing going there for your honeymoon as it would have been if, say, you’d camped in Gravel Creek State Park in Donville, Ohio, which was the state park in our hometown and we had never camped there, but if we had camped there on our honeymoon it would have been much more depressing than camping at the Grand Canyon on our honeymoon, I guess, so anyway I’d brought my camping stool, which my husband had, along with all our camping gear, purchased at a steep discount at the sporting goods store, because he worked at the sporting goods store, but regardless, I’d brought the collapsible camping stool to sit on during my honeymoon at the Grand Canyon, and now I brought it even closer to the Grand Canyon, right up to the South Rim, and I remember, it was the third day of our honeymoon, our third day of five days, and where was my husband at that moment when I was about to start painting, I didn’t know, I supposed he was jerking off somewhere, because that’s what he’d threatened to do less than an hour before, when I told him I didn’t want to have sex, because we had had sex several times on the two previous days and nights, and because we’d had sex many times leading up to our honeymoon, because after all we had lived together for three years before we were married, and we had sex many times during those three years, and also during the two years of dating before that, and, wait, there was another reason I hadn’t wanted to have sex with my husband less than an hour before I had decided to follow my long-lost passion for painting, but what was the reason, oh yeah, I remember, it was because we were in a fucking tent, we had been having sex in a fucking tent for two days and I just didn’t want to have sex in a tent again, not for the third day, and when my husband asked what about days four and five and I said, “Probably not then, either,” and my husband said, “Fine, I’ll go jerk off somewhere,” which wasn’t really much of a threat, I mean go ahead and do that if that’s what you want, it’s all right by me, although come to think of it I hadn’t seen my husband since that moment, less than an hour earlier, when he had charged right out of the tent, and it’s not like I was going to wait around for him, no, so not long after he’d left, I’d picked up my camping stool and brought it to the South Rim and rented all my painting stuff and only now did I wonder where my husband had gone to, where he was, and if he was jerking off there, and if he was jerking off right into the Grand Canyon, and if so, and even if not, wow, I thought, I’d love to paint a painting of him doing that, but I wondered how difficult it would be, to get it exactly right, to do justice to the image of my husband jerking off into the Grand Canyon, because back in high school I was good with landscapes, I was very good painting landscapes, but I was not so good with the human form, and I wasn’t good with scale, either, and I thought how depressing it would be to have this fantastic image to paint, this image of my husband jerking off into the Grand Canyon, and not being able to do it justice, of making the figure of my husband jerking off into the canyon so small that you couldn’t see him or so big that he was as big, or bigger, than the canyon itself, yes, I could see it now, he would be a giant, I would screw up and make him into a giant, because I was so terrible at scale, and also so terrible at drawing the human form, and so I’d end up with a giant stick figure stroking his giant stick penis on the rim of a tiny Grand Canyon, and that’s not even taking the ejaculate into consideration, although I supposed I wouldn’t have to paint the ejaculate, the painting could be of any moment during the jerk-off but before ejaculation, which was a shame, because I thought I could at least paint ejaculate and have it be realistic, if I was even going to go for realism, and was I even going to go for realism, I hadn’t decided, maybe I would go for surrealism, and if I was going for surrealism, then maybe the giant stick figure of my husband, etc., would be appropriate, whereas if I was going for realism I probably wouldn’t be painting the giant stick figure of my husband or his ejaculate, no, if I was going for realism, then I would probably end up painting a painting of a tent next to the Grand Canyon, and in that tent would be my husband, sulking, not having jerked off anywhere, wondering where in the general Grand Canyon National Park I was, when I was coming back, would I have sex with him when I did, and I knew if I painted that realistic portrait I might end up getting divorced and if I ended up painting the other one, well, I might end up staying married, and which was better, marriage or divorce, I didn’t know, just like I didn’t know which was better, realism or surrealism, and while I was sitting there wondering all this, the woman (we were all women at the South Rim) sitting next to me on her own camping stool behind her own easel asked what I was thinking, and I told her, and when I was done telling her, she nodded empathetically, like she knew exactly what I was going through, and said, “You know, maybe you should start small, like just painting the canyon, and then see where things go from there,” and so that’s what I did.

  What Is the Cure for Meanness?

  The first gift that died
was the lilac bush. I gave it to my mother after Dad had left her and moved in with Julie from work. Because Mom was pretty depressed—not just about my father leaving her, but the way he’d left her, on her birthday, her fifty-second birthday, with the cake right there on the table, the vanilla cake with vanilla icing and blue HAPPY BIRTHDAY! lettering and pink flowers, the cake that my mother had made for herself, as always, the cake that my dad said was so crummy, even though he hadn’t eaten any of it yet, because, he said, he didn’t even have to eat any of this particular cake to know it was crummy, because the birthday cakes she had made over the years were always crummy, because my mother couldn’t bake her way out of a paper bag and how could she not know, at this late date, that she couldn’t bake her way out of a paper bag? After all, hadn’t he told her so? Hadn’t he told her many, many times that she couldn’t bake her way out of a paper bag, and hadn’t he also mentioned how she had let herself go over the years, that her arms were too skinny and her belly strangely big and protruding for someone with such skinny arms, and then there was her hair, which was too brittle and dry from the way she bleached it—which he had always insisted upon, because he liked her (liked her better? disliked her less?) as a blonde; he was a big enough man to admit that he had insisted upon her bleaching her hair and so the blame was partially his and he could shoulder it; but now her hair felt like straw, and could he be blamed for wanting to be with a woman whose hair felt like hair (Julie’s hair felt like hair, I assumed) and not like hay? And he didn’t like Mom’s personality much, either, and while he was on the subject, did she have to be such a life-killing, humorless hag who hadn’t even laughed when he called her birthday cake crummy? (“Get it?” he asked. “Cake? Crumbs? Crummy?”) All in all, Dad said, it was totally understandable that he, Dad, was leaving her for Julie, never to return, and for that matter, it had been kind of noble for him to have hung in there for as long as he had, and he hoped that she would think hard about how noble he had been before bad-mouthing him to any of their friends, assuming any of their friends would, now that he was leaving Mom for Julie, choose to be friends with her and not him. Which he highly doubted.