Literary Barber Shop

It’s a literary barber shop, not a salon, so when I walk in the door, salt and pepper locks streaming half down my back, everyone turns to stare. For a moment the spiraling red and white barber pole stops spinning, as if missing a tooth in a gear, but after I sit and crack open a copy of Moby Dick, the gear reengages, the stripes continue their seemingly upward climb, two old men sitting in the corner turn back to their game of dominoes, and a buzz of conversation resumes.

There are three chairs in the place. Two have barbers at work behind them. One barber is short and squat, a smiling, gregarious fellow in jeans and a plaid shirt who snips away with a pair of scissors at the carrot red hair of a 30-something man in a navy suit. The other is tall and lean, a taciturn septuagenarian who wears a traditional white barber’s smock over dark dress slacks. The hum of his well-oiled clippers is almost inaudible as he trims the nape of a farmer’s neck. The third chair is empty, a placeholder for a wooden booster seat the barbers use when trimming the hair of children.

After the red-headed man pays and leaves, the short barber snaps his cutting cape to dislodge the last strands of stubborn carrot hair and announces, “Next.” I climb into his chair and he asks, facetiously:

A little off the top?

No. (I smile.) Hair okay. Me dry.

Writer’s block?

I look around the room and sadly nod.

Not a problem. Not a problem at all.

He reaches under my hair and feels for the latch at the back of my scalp, finds it and clicks it open.

Hmmm. I wouldn’t have guessed you for a foreign model.

He fumbles around a moment and then draws out the dipstick, wipes it clean with a towel, reinserts it, withdraws it again and carefully examines the blade. He offers it to me for a look: The well is almost bone dry.

I’m surprised you can talk. But don’t worry. We’ll fix you up. You’ll need about six volumes, though.

All right, I assure him. He walks to a storage room and returns toting six unabridged Oxford English dictionaries in his arms. The stack of books is well over his head. Back at the chair he drops them one by one into an oil press and extracts a shiny liquid the color and viscosity of wild honey. He pours the liquid into a receptacle at the back of my skull. Six tomes later, I feel garrulous. He lowers the top of my skull, carefully realigning my hairline, and snaps the clasp shut.

Good as new.

What do I owe you?

With the cost of the dictionaries, let’s call it $72,000.

I write him a check (an impossibility ten minutes earlier), adding a $12 tip. He feeds the check into a cash register and, after getting the green light go ahead from my bank, removes the cape from around my neck. A couple of loose verbs drop to the floor. I stand, stretch, and shake my head to dislodge an adjective from my hair. Pronoun slivers prickle the skin of my neck under my collar.

Those pesky pronouns. I never can keep all of them in the hopper.

The barber dusts my shoulders with a sable brush. I thank him and make my way out the door. A little bell jingles.

Outside the spring day is brisk and inviting, but there is a lot of pollen in the air. I sneeze. I feel verbose and want to go somewhere with a pencil and notebook and write something.

This was howled on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 7:19 pm and is part of the Uncategorized genus. You can follow responses to this howl through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.