Shorn Again
(Page 2 of 3)
November/December 1996
By Gregory McNamee, Troika
I explained that I wanted my hair cut back to a level that would disqualify me from further comparisons to the Savior, something not too short and reasonably stylish. I gestured to indicate the rough angles at which the barber should proceed, while he tapped his scissors against his wrist and tugged at his gray mustache, studying the problem intently.
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The barber, Tomaso, draped a worn cloth across my front, sighed, and set to work. "You have a jungle atop your head," he said, and I nodded in agreement. He was right. A few months before I had combed a dead honeybee out of my locks, it having been trapped there for who knows how long, unable to sting through the thick curls. Tomaso's scissors gnashed about my collar, freeing a mass of hair eight inches in length and, by the relaxed feel of my spine the next day, ten pounds in weight.
That was only the initial slash-and-burn clearing. An hour later, Tomaso was ready for work of finer scale. He was also exhausted and in evident foul humor.
"Aspett'." Wait, he said. "I need to rest. I need something to drink."
Tomaso retreated to the cavernous rear of the shop and returned with a huge bottle of black wine, encased in wicker. He poured out a large measure, drank it in one long draft, and refilled his glass. "Ecco." That's it. "Porca miseria." Piggy misery.
The shop began to fill with curious onlookers, for secrets are impossible in any small town in any part of the world, and the people of this ancient settlement reckoned it their right to know whatever happened within its limits. Tomaso brightened at the prospect of an audience. He drained another glass of wine and, lifting his shears, broke into song:
Eventually I recognized the source--"Pistol Packin' Mama," a hit during the Second World War. "I was a prisoner of the Americans," Tomaso explained, crossing his wrist in a symbol of confinement. I hoped he bore no grudge against his captors' progeny. He repeated the chorus in a cracked voice again and again, snipping away, while a deranged eel vendor danced a wild jig across the pavement. The next-door butcher and the chief village idiot clapped in time, and I added to the cacophony with the first few verses of "Streets of Laredo."
By this time the crowd had swelled to half the village and had packed itself into the barbershop so tightly that Tomaso could barely operate. Whenever he got a clear shot at my head--an increasingly rare opportunity, for the mob was busily jostling both of us--Tomaso leaned in for a quick snip, finally taking a bit of earlobe with him. When he did, I called for a mirror.
The assembled villagers fell silent as I inspected myself through the spider-webbed cracks in Tomaso's glass. Parts of the haircut weren't at all bad. The problem was that these parts were only roughly contiguous and not at all symmetrical. On the right, my hair curled neatly to just above my collar; on the left, it was shorn to a point half an inch below my ear, lending me a lopsided appearance that we would now call protopunk. Some of the top stuck up in seeming tribute to Eraserhead, while the rest went off in all directions of the wind.