by Chris Lynch
I forgot how long this takes.
The step-backs get less frequent, the clippings more so, and something like progress is happening when the bell over the door clinks and I see the men swagger in.
They are a type. Junie always hated it when I saw things this way, so I stopped talking about it mostly, although I never quite stopped thinking it. Types. A type. All three men are big guys, two big-bigs and a short big, and all have suits on. Middle aged. Slicked hair, big rings, neck and wrist chains. Cologne. Dear lord, the cologne. Colognes. It’s the cologne wars as the guys’ scents fight it out for the air space as they take up three wall seats next to Malcolm, and then the colognes join forces to defeat all the old-timey barber aromas, and pretty much wipe out the beach smells entirely.
“Whew,” Santo says to the guys, pausing just to make the Phew wave in front of his nose with his scissors hand. “What’d you boys, swim here through a sea of Avon ladies?”
“Harrr-hahahahaha,” the boys all howl. Good-time boys. They like to laugh. They love a laugh and they love to be the subjects of a good gag that doesn’t cut too close but doesn’t miss their specialness either. A type. Junie would kill me. Malcolm laughs, long and loud. He’s a different type.
The three men talk in loud voices, about what they read in the day-old newspapers and month-old magazines they pick up off the seats. Like the long line of Santo barbers, these guys have been here and have been doing this for forever. They rarely get haircuts, occasionally shaves, but their presence is as much a part of the place as the swirling barber pole out front.
Malcolm waves at me in the mirror, shakes his head and rolls his eyes at the men. I wave back, raising my hand under the big nylon bib, causing the whole thing to tent up and send hairs sliding away to the floor. Santo slaps my hand back down. Malcolm laughs.
Suddenly the whole thing feels so melancholy, I don’t know what I’ll do. It comes over me in a wave, and really, I’m so blindsided by it, I don’t have a response for it, for me.
It’s Junie, of course. It’s her. And everything. What am I doing here, in the barbershop of my whole life? What am I grooming for? I’m supposed to be high-diving into big life right about now, but I’m . . .
I’m what? I don’t even know that?
But I do know that if I let what wants to happen happen and I start getting all misty-faced here, I will be skinned like a fish by the crowd, by the old pal, and by the barber himself. When I cried once in this chair, I was certain from the look that Santo was going to beat me up. And I was four.
I look to my right, out the window, out past the thrilling crashing waves and the infinite potential sea. This, this is better.
Santo whips me by the chin tip back in the direction of the mirror with such force that my eyes don’t focus again for three or four seconds. When they do, I see Malcolm laughing again. Santo squints and resumes intensely sculpting me back to respectability. As he finishes the right side of my head and works his way around back, I gradually let myself rotate in the direction of the beach again. The place that’s always there for me. All the elements combine just so to re-right me when I breathe it in, take it in.
Only, something’s in the way.
Ronny Blue is standing there, all wide-boy wide stance, wide grin as he stares in the window and into me.
“Ronny Blue, Blue Ronny!” comes the triumphant call of the masses as Ronny comes through the door.
“Hello there, boys,” Ronny says as he swaggers in. He stands there, in front of the row of chairs, as the men all burble greetings and gentle ass-kisses. Malcolm—my Malcolm—actually rises to his feet, goes to shake the great man’s hand.
“Are you kidding me?” I blurt as Malcolm anxiously waves me off.
“Hey, why ain’t we out playing tennis, a day like this?” Ronny bellows as if Malcolm were in another barbershop two towns away.
“I don’t know, Ronny. Why aren’t we?” he answers.
Malcolm stands there, stupid, as if he expected a real answer, and is left to look as foolish as he deserves when Ronny just walks away to come and greet Santo.
“Santo, my brother, how are we doin’ today?” Ronny says, slapping my well-armed haircutter firmly on the shoulder of his clipping hand.
“Ouch,” I snap, feeling at the spot behind my ear that isn’t bleeding on the outside but might as well be.
“Santo,” Ronny says, mock-scolding, “be careful. You gotta go extra easy on these delicate rich boys. They ain’t like you and me.”
Sigh. It’s going to be like this.
“What are you doing here in my neighborhood, in my shop, anyway?” Ronny says as he leans right into my face with a polished fun-house smile bearing down on me.
His neighborhood, his shop.
The town is shaped roughly like a backward capital letter N, with an additional line drawn straight across the top. That additional line across the top would be the beach boulevard and, obviously, the beach. The right-hand leg of the backward N would basically be my section of town, with the left-hand leg being Junie’s. The diagonal connecting them is a gradually progressing gradation of tone from their harder-edged neighborhood to my, I suppose, more affluent one. A color chart from Blue to me.
The beach is nobody’s. It’s everybody’s. It’s practically the one thing that everyone understands.
Everyone except Ronny Blue, apparently. But there are lots of things that he doesn’t understand.
“Funny, Ronny,” I say, “I always thought this place belonged to Santo.”
Ronny straightens up, turns his backside to me in the rudest manner imaginable, and then addresses me in the mirror. He taps an index finger to the side of his nose, indicating his knowing hush-hush insiderism and Shut up, Junior warning. God, do I hate that gesture.
Santo says nothing. Goes back to clipping me.
Ronny throws himself roughly into the one remaining observation chair, the one closest to the door.
“Imagine,” he says, folding his hands, all piety and admiration. “The likes of him, coming all the way down here to drop his hairs on our floor. Hey, maybe we can collect them up and sell them to tourists. Or maybe give them to the local poor, like, what do them people do again, sell them like holy water or Mary’s tears or pieces of that cross thing, huh? The upper classes, man, do they ever stop giving?”
“I’m not upper anything,” I say weakly.
This is so uncomfortable. There cannot have ever been a less relaxing haircut in the history of scissors. And I look up, realize that Santo, working at the speed of Santo, is still less than half-done with me. Ronny glares, grins, and scowls all at once and makes sure there is no doubt he is staring bullets into my eyes and has every intention of continuing to do so.
“What about tomorrow, Ronny?” Malcolm asks, and I could personally give him a free all-over baldy haircut right now. What is it about low-level criminality that makes certain posh boys want to roll in it like a dog with a dead thing?
“Maybe,” Ronny says flatly without releasing me from his stare.
It’s killing me, and I’m pretty sure he knows it.
I turn to my ally, the ocean. Santo whips my head back. The sudden loss of eye focus is actually rather pleasant. The bite of the pinched nerve in my neck, less so.
You cannot let this happen. If you let the bully bully, then you’d better learn to love the bullying. You’ve got to give it something.
I stare as hard as my watery eyes will allow, right back into him.
“Junie back from her vacation yet?”
Momentarily, deliciously, he looks startled. Then he comes back, leaning hard and mean into the task.
“What vacation?” he says, hands outstretched, looking down the line of sycophants, playing to the mob.
Through gritted teeth I venture further into what already looks like an unfortunate dialogue.
“The vacation she was on when I came to your house.”
“What?” he says, all cartoon surprise. “You was at my house?
Jeez, I gotta get a dog.”
His fans don’t let him down, and the place rocks with enough rumbling laughter that Santo has to pause for the tremor to pass.
Ronny’s stupid, but he’s winning.
“Did she come home yet, Ronny?” I snap.
“What, home? She was never away.” He looks to the flunkies again. “She was there all the time, just didn’t want to see this schmuck.”
They are falling all over one another. I look at my pal Malcolm, to see him very diplomatically giving me sympathy eyes and a shrug through his own complicit laughter.
I’m boiling now. I see my face in the mirror like an angry red sunset. “Liar,” I say.
It’s all going so well for him, he’s not even insulted.
“All too true, I’m afraid, sonny. She was right down the hall, in her room. But she had a bunch of guys in there and a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door.”
“Shut up, Ronny.”
“I think it was a basketball team. They were tall, anyway.”
“That’s your daughter, you animal.”
“Hey, how do you think I feel? I thought you were bad, but it’s just gotten worse and worse. She doesn’t have any quality control at all at this point. You were the beginning of the end, I think.”
Getting louder didn’t help me, so despite his rollicking crowd support, I decide to go for quieter.
“You have no shame, Ronny Blue, you know that?”
“What? Haven’t you been listening? I got plenty of shame. I’m rotten with shame. I got shame comin’ out the wazoo. I mean, if she did even this guy, how low could she go?”
It’s all swim now. I don’t need to look out to the ocean for help, because the ocean has come right in here to do the job. It feels like the shop has filled right up to the ceiling, with rich, salty, sting-y seawater and we are all floating in it. I stare, squint, lean in the direction of Malcolm’s cloudy, distant reflection, and can only half-hear him over the din, or through the water, as he says slowly, “No, no, no, no,” his lips mouthing, “No, no, no, no,” and he looks like a damn fish.
“Where is sheeeeee?” I scream, out of my mind, giving Ronny Blue exactly the gift he’s been snuffling for, giving his fans just the performance they paid for.
“She’s at work, you idiot,” he snarls.
I leap out of the chair, out of astonished Santo’s grasp. I tear off the bib, stick some bills into his hand.
“There he goes, giving to the poor again,” Ronny says.
I dash for the door, and just as I get there, the big man himself is on his feet, blocking my way. My nose comes just about to Ronny’s lips.
True venal wickedness has a smell all its own.
After he has held me, wordlessly, effortlessly, right there for his chosen number of seconds, he sits back down. Malcolm comes up behind me as I open the door, until Ronny puts out a hand. “We need to talk about tennis,” he says to Malcolm, and like that, I am running on my own.
• • •
If you closed your eyes while making the journey from my house to Junie’s, or mine to the beach to Junie’s, you would know at every step where you were. The air is different. The beach, of course, is all the things the beach is supposed to be—salt and sand and fried clams and sugar and Coppertone and crabs opened belly-up on the pasted low-tide mudflats. But you could also smell the difference between mine and Junie’s. Drier down my way, greener, pine jostling with honeysuckle and roses. Junie’s you can smell as you cross that invisible line, between here and there, between this and that. There is a moisture there that we don’t seem to have, rich oils, spice, air that is heavier than what hangs around my house.
I am sweating and breathing heavily as I reach the corner shop where she works. That is due to the exertion of getting myself here without wasting a single second more, but I’d be sweating and hyperventilating even if somebody’d hauled me in a rickshaw.
I really need to see her.
I burst through the big glass door with all the gusto of an armed robber.
“Dammit hell, O!” Junie shouts when she realizes she is not being robbed.
“Well, dammit hello to you, too,” I say, and I know I am being maybe a tad too wise guy for the level of her actual fright, but I cannot contain myself. I would bet my heart is pounding two-to-one against hers, I am so ridiculously pumped to see her.
There is nobody else in the small shop at the moment, and it feels very much like old times as I walk up to the counter and reach over to put my hand on her hand.
It is very much new times when she says flatly, “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you,” I say helpfully.
“But why would . . . ,” she says, then switches directions as she scans up at my current look. “What’s going on with your head?” she says, bursting out laughing.
I reach up to the spot she appears to be focused on, the side of my head that just got groomed.
“Oh,” I say, “I was just at Santo’s.”
“I guess nobody ever told Santo not to run with those scissors, because he appears to have put one of his eyes out.”
“Ha. Jeez, I missed you. Where you been?”
“Are you telling me that’s an actual haircut? My god, what did I do to you when I dumped you?”
I am so easily wounded. I hate, damn, hate that I am so easily wounded.
“Don’t say that, huh, Junie?”
“Sorry, O.” She pauses, looking at me apprehensively. “You mean about the dumping, or the stupid haircut?”
“Ah, the dumping.”
“Cool. So, what about the hair?”
“The hair is because I jumped right out of Santo’s chair when I heard you were here. Couldn’t even wait to get finished—”
“I hear he takes a long time.”
“Cripes, it’s endless. So I couldn’t wait once I heard.”
“What’s the big deal? This is where I work. I’m here a lot.”
“Well, your father told me that—”
“That scuzzbag.”
“Indeed, that scuzzbag.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you were here.”
“Okay. Once again, not headline news, O.”
“Well, it was after all the other stuff he said.”
She waits, but not long.
“Okay, Oliver? I don’t know which is bothering me more right now, that haircut or the maddening way you are telling me details, but one way or another I am going to take a pair of scissors to your head if you don’t get to it.”
I take a deep breath. I’m sure, subconsciously, I was talking so roundabout because I didn’t really want to repeat what the scuzz was saying, as I am ordinarily fairly straightforward. I exhale.
“He said you were having sex with a basketball team.”
She stares at me, completely coldly.
“Did he say which team?”
I stare at her, completely coldly.
“Don’t be a numbnuts, O.”
I nod frantically. “Right, right, sorry.” I try to be all cool now. “So, that means you didn’t, right?”
She stops even looking at me. She walks around from behind the counter, goes to a hanging display, a panel on the wall that holds an array of household items like nail clippers and sewing stuff, the kind of things you would always buy at a big normal store unless you had an emergency, in which case you get them at a place like this. She pulls down a pair of grooming shears and rips the package right open.
“Right, you,” she says, and she presses the point of the shears into my cheek with a surprising amount of push. It hurts. She never does anything lightly, Junie Blue.
She grabs me by the shirt and tugs me around to the other side of the counter, stuffs me roughly down onto the stool she was sitting on, and commences improving me.
Just like ever.
She clips, she leans, she looks, she clips, she knows. Junie is the anti-Santo, sure and deliberate, confident enough in what she
’s doing that I don’t need a mirror to feel handsome in her hands.
“Do you love me?” I ask. She loves me when I’m provocative.
“Do you love your eyes?” she asks, poised to gouge. I love her menacing.
And yes, I love my eyes. Love them more sometimes than others. Love them more right now than ever. Her reddish brown hair hangs straight to her shoulders, bangs draping almost to her fair, clearly touched-up eyebrows. She’s got on that orange lipstick I adore—Creamsicle, not orange—and her puffy lips look more pillowy than ever. I often asked her why she bothered with makeup, and she replied that that is why I would never see her without makeup. We only dated the last year-plus of school, but I cannot recall a time before I felt about her the way I feel about her right this minute.
“I want you to cut my hair all the time.”
“No.”
“Where were you this weekend?”
“None of your business.”
“I heard something about you and Malcolm.”
“Yeah, well, I heard you were bangin’ my sister.”
“What? Where did you ever—”
“That’s the rumor mill for ya, O. Live by it, die by it. What kind of haircut do you want in the end here, the kind powered by rumors or the good kind?”
“Good, please,” I say, and she smiles softly, returning to the clipping. A pair of elderly women come in. One picks up a basket, and they begin working their way around the shop. June keeps one eye on my hair and the other—
“Is your eye swollen?” I say abruptly, because I realize it is, and with a bit of uncommon fluid redness in the outside corner.
“No, it isn’t, but how would you like your eye—”
“Knock it off, Junie. Not this time. What happened to your eye?”
She calmly goes on clipping, surely nearing the end now.
“I have two answers for you, O. Nothing. And none of your business.”
The ladies come to the counter, start piling up their groceries. Canned vegetables and boxed soups, two green bananas, a half gallon of strawberry ice cream from a dairy I thought folded when I was in grade school, and a TV Guide magazine.
Junie hands me the scissors. “Here, finish yourself off,” she says slyly.
