A-1 Barber
Let's workshop this piece about a narrator who, thinking back to the barbershop he used to go to as a teen, contemplates the passage of time and masculinity
scent of the day: Epic Man, by Amouage. A woody-oriental fragrance that combines skanky spiciness with minty freshness (one might think of the equally-bone-dry One Man Show Oud Edition, albeit done with topnotch ingredients and care; one might even think of a spice-trading bedouin’s camel-panty-dropping version of Dolce and Gabbana’s The One), Epic Man—easily in my top five were it not for its polite projection—is a dark nougere done in an unapologetically Arabic style: the classic notes of lavender, geranium, and patchouli account (with the help of green notes like myrtle, and perhaps artemisia, anise, and wormwood) for the barbershop backbone, only one made scoliotic by the aromatic mélange of headshop incense, camel-saddley oud, and woods (cedarwood, sandalwood) as desiccated as the spices (mace, pink pepper, cardamom, cumin, saffron, nutmeg).
A-1 Barber
—for Rafa
The photo of the mall directory stopped my Facebook scroll of everyone doing well. In all the times I walked past it in real life (taking it for granted since I knew where I was and where I was going), did some nascent part of me—some off-the-grid part susceptible to being set free by acid and mushrooms, some dropout part that if too large makes it hard to hold a job even well beyond the rat race—sense that one day, my very aura pushing my welcome in a public library of temporary warmth and Wi-Fi, I would have to stop myself from stroking at it through a computer screen?
Only the anchor stores named (and in their logo font), the floorplan—imposed over a galactic theme of pixilated stars and nebula clouds—showed from bird’s x-ray eye (like the perspective of the mysterious sphere looking down on A. Square’s 2-d home in Flatland) the long-gutted and even-longer-dead South Hills Mall (its flickering tubes of 80s neon, pink and yellow and blue, lining the crown molding well into the early 2000s). If I had wanted, I could enter various stores anchoring my adolescence: Media Play, which sold Run-Run Shaw kung Fu VHSs for a handful of crumpled bills (and where I bought Abbot’s hardcover in a bargain bin), or Burlington Coat Factory, where I worked with my late cousin Randy (me in Baby Depot and Randy in Shoes) before I left the Hudson Valley for college in Long Island and our lives began their fatally different courses. And the list goes on, so many seeds of memory.
But my eye this winter morning, mapping my lunch-break walks in Wu-Tang Wallabees (Smiff-N-Wesson Timbs, even with tongues reigned in, were not allowed), draws me to a modest blue parcel just outside the food court. Its lot number (106? 196?) too blurry to make out, I scan through the names listed in a rectangle above the floorplan and see that the name I had in my head—Who’s Next?—was way off the mark for a place as important to me as this.
In the days of red-leather Avirex bomber jackets, A-1 Barber was an urban-catered barbershop where I would go to get my NY standard at the time and something that barbers here in Texas, where I had moved for graduate school, could never duplicate (always fading high up the head): a tight and low skin taper, three abrupt fade points—at the front of each ear and at the back of the neck—leaving the fluff of the rest of the head to standout in contrast. Unique among the other stylists (all of them slang heavy and thug fashionable), my go-to was Rafa: bird-boned and vegan, well-spoken and whisper-voiced in his encouragement of my planned pursuit of an undergrad degree in Philosophy—his thin dreads, like his gentle demeanor, tied back in the style of Augustus Hill from OZ, an HBO series that had started around that time. Like the particulars of Rafa (when was the last time I thought of him or yeah, that mixtape he gave me?), it all comes back through the digitized skeleton telling me “You Are Here.”
A handful of XXL and Source magazines strewn across the table of a single-seat waiting area; the requisite purple poster showcasing all the fades and tapers and design possibilities ranging from MC-Hammer lines to lightning bolts—all of it seems visible, loud as a caricature providing—with its fabrications and exaggerations, additions and subtractions—access into the emotional reality that might have gone more hidden through strict photorealism where stars never “technically” swell so large as they do in Starry Night. Any portion of wall not covered by mirror had blown-up album covers: Liquid Swords, with its comic-book-style warriors in hoodies swinging swords and chains at each other on a strategy-symbolizing chessboard that takes Wu-Tang chessboxing to bloody extremes; Uptown Saturday Night, with its Ernie Barnes figures dancing and grinding at some “sugar shack” under a spotlight in flared pants and other retro attire from the blaxploitation-era that played a big role in Camp Lo’s sound and slang of seventies swagger encapsulated by the Harlem newsboy cap—itself an homage to decades prior (nostalgia a common thread stitched perhaps though all sentient finitude).
The husky and light-skinned owner, jowly under a sharp beard of perpetual five-o-clock shadow—I see him in baggy pants (jeans, fatigues) pooled, even when court-summons khakis, over Timbs. I see him, reflected in Rafa’s mirror, stopping mid-cut—like the other stylists—to hold his beeper up at eyelevel with a quick burst of backlight green, then clipping it back into his pocket—a ritual of compulsion much too delicate to compare to the infinite-jest time erasure of our smartphone scroll. He had cut me a few times when Rafa, the only one bespectacled and seemingly beeperless, was not around. Like the others renting his stations (most with that Jon-B strip beard merely over the jawline), he always buzzed my already-meager mustache much too thin for my liking—the male-equivalent to the narrow, as if merely penciled-in, eyebrows on many females of the time (itself a throwback to the thirties).
Smells bleed back in the license of longing. The disinfectant bite of barbicide, that blue bath for combs and scissors—I can recall even that. But how? It seems impossible that its clinicality could have wafted to my nose from the countertop, let alone above the chaos of more predominant densities: the car-blunt-“cloaking” freshies of the time (Tommy, Nautica Classic); the minty lubrication spray turning hot clippers suddenly cold; the citrusy clove of bay rum sprayed with a slight sting on any areas shaved down to skin; the soft cloud of talcum powder brushed on the back of the neck and around the hairline under closed eyes better to smell with; the syrupy rain of oil sheen sprayed just before the smock came off (sweet floral over a powdery undertone)—all against a gourmand envelope of bourbon chicken, pleasant in itself but tainting the revery, from Dragon Express next door.
Sounds ring even clearer. Clipper guards snapping on and off like shiny threads woven in the fluffy wool of buzzing; aerosols hissing punctuations through the tight space, only much softer than the rare snip of scissors—such textures braced the shop-talk banter, wit and wisdom blurring in a bottleneck of hip hop and sports. Backbone of it all (the first and last pulse aside from the key-jangling ascent and descent of the security gate and the clicks of feet and fingers to get it going), the music steered the flow—in fact, steering away, no doubt more organically than intentionally (because money is money, at the end of the day), most potential clients, and even some of those who wanted in, back to Aquanet-heavy vanillas more their lane (Palace of Hair, say). From the countertop boombox at the register, beneath the framed first dollar made and a Malcolm X headshot (the one where he has a single finger near the corner of his eye), a pirate station (WVKR) out of the local college (Vassar) pumped out backspin-scribble-obsessed deejays like Vince and Ease (“Big-L rest in peace, riggity-riggity rig rig Big L rest in peace, ri ri ri ri-ri Big-L rest in peace, riggity-riggity rig rig Big L rest in peace”). If not that, then blend tapes—on sale at the counter, along with durags and shea butter and black soap and sheen spray—from the punch-in heavy likes of Clue and Dirty Harry but more so from local deejays (perhaps a regular or even one of the stylists). R&B acapellas, I can hear them, over the wintery austerity of the era’s boom bap: Sybil’s “Walk on by” over Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones part 2” (“Whe whe whe w-when you see me walking down the street and I start to cry . . .”); Jomanada’s “I like it” over Capone-N-Noreaga’s “Stick You” (“Boy you’re blow blow blow—Boy you’re blowing my mind with the things you say to me . . .”).
The debates were lively. Pussy, and its intricacies, commanded the most attention. Whether it is nasty or even homo to eat it, that topic got memorably heated. “It seem pretty damn gay to refuse to eat the box, Nigga. I can see if its your religion or whatever. But to be like its worst fuckin thing—that shit sound gay as fuck. Gay dudes, they’s the ones who think that shit the worst! Richard Simmon ain’t eatin no puss!” One of the good things about Rafa was that he was so unexcitable, so subdued. His bodily composure, his tranquil aura, remained even when he found himself pulled into one of the growing storms—pretty commendable when, in hindsight (and leaning upon gestalt intuition more than upon not-always-reliable stereotype), I reconsider his dainty femininity. With the others, their grip got more aggressive (sometimes as if they were on the verge of shoving my head aside, like an infant in a hoodrat fight, before making a lunge). The mounting of inner fire, palpable if only through the increasing frequency with which they kept cutting their clippers off to make their point with jabs into the air, I worried would have a negative impact on my fade. “Nah nigga, shit too submissive not to be faggot shit. And however many guys been up in that, that’s how much dicks you suckin. Never in my life, Nigga. Shit gay even touching the clit. Nah, nah. Wait. Mahfuckas know now: that shit’s just a little penis—for real for real: like a baby penis. Fuck outta here with that gay pedo shit.”
Despite being so young from my vantage now, all in their own way were father figures. Across the lines of color and age, they seemed eager to encourage me. Usually it was to be out there fucking pussy. In a swath of focused silence they would tilt my head to buzz the taper or sharpen the hairline or sculpt the mustache, ancient piloerection goosepimples rising on the neck and arms of the most hardened no doubt. But then, inevitably, they made sure to follow up the go-get-em peptalk with what seemed wisdom hard earned: to keep it wrapped up, firm advice spoken in near desperation (as if they were trying to reach back to their younger selves)—the other stylists, immortalized in the mirror reflection, nodding in synchronized agreement as they focused on their own sculpting.
