Woke up late again today. Seems to me that my mind must be making up for all the sleep I’ve lost working 2 full time jobs since July. The last thing I remember, after coming home from Chicago, is seeing the fireworks’ heavy explosions over the Charles River. Memorial Drive jammed with people. Youth gangs smashing bikes. The silence and the smoke fingers lingering in the sky. Then the crowds crushing up Massachusetts Avenue… I got my second job the next day and had been working solid through December since that night. But now I’m in the clear.
I’m in the clear so its okay to sleep past noon two or even three days in a row, my body in the crack between my mattress and the wall. On top of the heater, snoring. Thats fine now. When I did finally roll out this afternoon I took one look in the bathroom mirror and the desire to get a haircut overwelmed me. In less than three minutes my sneakers (black Converse Weapons) were laced around my ankles & toes. I was out the door. After stopping for coffee (Green Mountain large) at Store 24, I noticed the irritation of one long toenail brushing up against the interior materiel of one sneaker.
Drank a cigarette and smoked my large coffee down to Central Square to Magazine street, to the usual place I’ve been getting my hair cut recently. I do not know the name of this place, but I do know that the name is vaguely Nubian. Perhaps its “Nubian Cutz”, but I remember it as “J’ai L’ai” or something like that. Inside the door and I collapsed on the black leather couch, which bore a strong resemblence to the backseat of a car. The Peoples Court was on TV, but I read the Herald.
My man Marlon was definitely not working… standing over his barber chair was a different black man, over six feet tall & young. He reminded me of the tall, young, semi-professional basketball player named Will from Florida who tried to steal my boy’s weed in Chicago. I made a point then of kicking Will out of my apartment. Looked him in the eye and told him that he could never come back. And after that I never again talked to him.
The main man barber who I believe owns Nubian Cutz has a regular clientele and works strictly off appointments so I didn’t bother queuing up for him. Marlon was not there, as I’ve already mentioned. So, after five or ten minutes of reading the Herald and eyeing over this six foot tall young black man I was emboldened to ask, “Hey, are you cutting?” He stammered back yeah. The main man barber scolded him for not speaking up sooner. But my very sensitive nature detected no racism at work; the tall boy was simply oblivious to me sitting there reading the paper.
I sat down in his chair and he put paper around the back of my neck, draped me in the barber bib. I believe he actually started using clippers on my head before asking how I wanted it cut. The precise point in time that the clippers hit my head is when I spoke up. Hey man, just do the edges okay? is what I said. He met my eyes in the mirror. Edges, he repeated. Then he came back in with the clippers. The Peoples Court carried on.
I remember one case in which a man put a deposit down on a boat that had been advertised as a 1994 but turned out to be a 1996. He got his deposit back. I remember one woman who worked as a model claimed her neighbors dog bit her “a few inches to the side of my sphincter” and had lost wages because she couldn’t model. She got money. The rest of the time I was staring at this bottle of hair grease for black hair, which was amazing to me because it claimed it “conditioned, added volume, shine, moisture…” and billed itself as “medicine for hair.” The tall boy clipped on.
As court case followed court case and the afternoon dragged on, I became less oblivious of time. Became worried actually, about being late for work. Every once in a while the young man would stop cutting my hair to answer his Nextel. The beautiful thing about Nextel is that, unlike cellphones, innocent people standing by have to listen to BOTH sides of the talking. And the ringtone.
I gathered from the conversation that my haircutter’s friend was going over his house to try to pick something up. His friend Nextelled to ask the address, then to confirm the address, then to ask his ma’s number, then to ask where the thing was, where the thing was, where the thing was. By the third time he Nextelled to ask where the thing was, I was ready to answer it myself. “He put it by the window! By the F#$king WINDOW!!!! LOOK AROUND THE WINDOW!!!!!”
Then his boy called back and said he got the thing. And he wanted his hair cut. “Come by the shop,” said the tall boy cutting my hair. How he cut my hair! The man never put a drop of water on my head, so every pass with clippers or clip around with the scissors was unusually painful! By my sensitive nature I tried to playdown the race issues at work. It was possible this young man had never cut white hair before. At least he wasn’t lighting my hair on fire with charcoal.
One eccentricism my haircutter did have was cleaning the clippers with a toothbrush. After every other pass around my head he would pause to brush at the clippers with the toothbrush. Perhaps he thought that the reason my hair was unusually hard to cut with clippers was because the clippers were clogged with hair. But it was actually because I’m white! I didn’t tell him this. The only time I mentioned the tooth brush was the first time he used it. He brought it up first. “Kind of ridiculous,” he said to me, cleaning the clipper head with the toothbrush. Clippers have teeth, I said with a shrug.
Eventually I realized that the haircut might never end. Certainly Peoples Court was playing a twenty four hour marathon. So the next time he got to Nextelling I asked him what time it was. When he told me I only had twenty or so minutes before I had to be at work a sense of urgency kicked in. Without really checking my hair, now mostly gone although I had only requested, “The edges,” I told him that I had to get going to work. He finished me up. I paid and tipped 100% for the holidays and asked him his name. “G.”
