A-1 Barber (ROUND 4)

Let's workshop this piece about a down-and-out narrator who, thinking back to the barbershop he used to go to as a teen, contemplates masculinity and the bittersweet passage of time

scent of the day: Habit Rouge EDT, by Guerlain. A posh and powdery classic marked by refreshing citruses so baked into the backbone of woody leather that its opening impression of margarita-lemonade talcum remains for the life of this gem beloved by Keith Richards and Madonna alike, Habit Rouge EDT—an allusion to the hunting tradition of horseback aristocrats in red coats following their fox hounds—starts with a floral greenery (neroli, rosewood, basil) recessive compared to the combo of bitter tang (lemon, lime, bergamot) and sweet zest (orange, tangerine) that dims over time to reveal elements formerly hidden behind all the everything-is-awesome brightness of toothy smiles that would seem fake (even nightmarish) if allowed to go on unchecked: clove and cinnamon that adds spicey warmth, vanilla and almond that adds creamy depth, rose that preserves the acrid sourness of the lime, various dry woods (sandalwood, cedar) that preserve the throat-tickling dustiness, resinous leather that captures the horse saddle and helps the patchouli-oakmoss duo give muddy-boots body to what otherwise would seem too dainty and spacious to keep from blowing away in the breeze of a mere canter.

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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 the fixture (its teal display window locked, I now see, by tubular key), how could I be blamed for taking it for granted? I knew where I was, and where I was going. I had a clock to punch. But even at that time (nearly thirty years ago) there was that old-soul part of me, however kept in check (relegated merely to insights jotted down on the Beacon-Poughkeepsie Loop bus to work): that Thales-in-a-ditch part too heady for sustained immersion in the flow state of the status quo; that turn-on tune-in drop-out part later unleashed by lysergic acid and psilocybin; that out-to-lunch-and-not-coming-back part whose thousand-yard stare harbors intrusive musings regarding what Mohican or Mastodon bones might slumber just beneath the asphalt of the corporate parking lot; that off-the-grid part that has grown too large for the rat race. How farfetched would it be, in that case, to assume that, as I sat near it on lunch breaks or even jogged past it (weaving through fake potted plants and food-court tables) to clock-in on time, I registered its significance—its nostalgic potential—at least as chthonian ripples of preverbal intuition? It seems strange to think otherwise when now—my aura, straight ass reek (wafting up, with each shift in the chair, through thermals, jeans, and even the olfactory adaptation of my own safeguarding brain), overstaying its welcome in a public library of temporary warmth and YouTube—I find myself, not helping my cross-the-street-worthy weirdness one bit, fingering it—palpable electrostatic crackling—through a computer screen in the grace period of my time limit.

Only the anchor stores named (some, like Kmart, in their native logo font), the floorplan—a color-coded cross section imposed over an intergalactic theme of pixilated stars and inauthentic nebula clouds—delivered a bird’s-eye x-ray of the once bustling hub of Hudson Valley consumerism erected over who-knows-what wooden wigwam some Lenape man looked back upon with bittersweet longing (as I do now the very concrete structure that only added curbstomping insult to the injury of time): the long-gutted and even-longer-brain-dead South Hills Mall, its flickering tubes of 80s neon (pink, yellow, blue) lining the corridor crown molding well into the early 2000s. Had circumstances—my mood, my smell, even just the season—been otherwise, I might have entered one of the various other units tethering me to adolescence: Media Play, where I would buy Run-Run Shaw kung Fu VHSs for a sweaty handful of crumpled bills, 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 and our lives—well before fentanyl began petrifying diaphragms into wood—took fatally different courses. But mapping my typical routes into work, almost feeling the slide of Raekwon Wallabees (Smiff-N-Wesson Timbs, even with tongues reigned in behind not-too-oversized khakis, being in violation of dress code), my eye this winter morning draws me to a modest blue parcel just outside the food court. Its lot number (106? 196?) too blurry to make out, I scan the rectangle of names above the floorplan and see that the name I had in my head (Who’s Next?) was—despite nailing the spirit of the place better than the actual name—way off the mark for a place as important to me as this.

A-1 Barber belonged to the days of Avirex bomber jackets: leather colors (yellow, red) almost always as mating-bird ostentatious as the mega logo—something, even despite a brief foray myself with Redman Funkorama ski-goggles over a winter beanie, I never got behind (especially as my style started shifting more to the Middle-Earth tones of a pot-toking bohemian, an outsider modeled after Tom Bombadil). I would stop in at A-1, often it would be on my hour break, to get my signature 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 to standout in blowout contrast—a cut that barbers here in Texas, where I had moved for graduate school, could never get right (always fading high up the head, jarhead style). 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 reading Tolkien’s posthumous Silmarillion (which sat beside my glasses on his workstation) and my planned pursuit of an undergrad degree in either English or 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 the time in question. Like the particulars of Rafa (when was the last time I had thought of him, or of that mixtape he had given me?), it all comes back through the digitized schematic telling me “You Are Here.”

A handful of XXL and Source magazines strewn across the table of a single-seat waiting area; that requisite purple poster showcasing all the fades and tapers and design possibilities (ranging from MC-Hammer lines to lightning bolts)—all of it still seems visible. All of it still seems loud as a caricature, offering—with its bobblehead fabrications and zoomed-in exaggerations, its accentuating additions and tidying subtractions—access into the emotional reality that might have gone much more hidden through strict photorealism where stars never “technically” swell as large as in Van Gogh’s Starry Night (a postcard version of which it might be an utter fabrication, although not in spirit, to say Rafa had taped to the corner of his mirror). Most non-mirror portions of A-1’s walls 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 (only one that took Wu-Tang chessboxing to bloody extremes); Uptown Saturday Night, with its Ernie Barnes figures grinding at some “sugar shack” under a spotlight in flared pants from the blaxploitation-era (closer, how unbelievable, to them then than they are to me now)—an era from which Camp Lo appropriated their signature slang of seventies swagger visually encapsulated by the Harlem newsboy cap, a fashion piece that itself was then an homage to decades prior (nostalgia a common thread with us, 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 (blurry in the myopia of my astigmatism) 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 today, a dystopia whose prediction an unknown-to-me David Wallace had just put into print. The owner had cut me a few times when Rafa, seemingly beeperless and the only one bespectacled, was not around. As with the others renting his stations (most with that thin L-strip beard merely over the jawline like Jon B), the owner 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? Maybe when I put my book and glasses down on the countertop? For it seems impossible that its clinicality could have wafted to my nose in the chair, 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 mystery-spiced talcum 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 irregularly 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 then the clunks and clacks of feet and fingers to get it going), the music steered the flow—and also steered 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: was Palace of Hair one of the names? From the countertop boombox at the register, beneath a framed bill of an unknown dollar denomination and a Malcolm X headshot (the one where he has a single finger near the corner of his eye, his youthful egotism ringing to my ears much more loudly in that picture now that I have witnessed several wearying cycles of blooming and dying whose why no flower ever understands), 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 like Cyrus and Ra-Vee (or even a regular or 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, in particular, got memorably heated on one occasion. That occasion, for all I know, took place on what I likely did not know then would be the last time I set foot inside. It was a time, after all, of so many last times: last blunt-smoking cluster at the street drain named “Thug Life”; last mountain keg party with people I knew since grade school; last locker cleanout; last homeroom announcement; last walk home from a friend’s house past midnight; last graffiti tag of the Glenham trestle; last pickup basketball game at Green Street park; last lazy afternoon of daydreaming in my childhood bedroom; last time seeing my childhood Boosa, who died my first year away; last Dutchie bought with loose change from “Habib” along another no-plan night drive with my best friend as I try to duck, like so many times before, the harsh truth of Nas’s “a thug changes and love changes and best friends become strangers”—a time of so many last times clustered together given the transition to college, which itself was a time some fading part of me still frames as in the future even though for twenty years I have been listening to an album that I learned of only in college when all of this was behind me, one that now plays (as it does each time I come to the library) in loaner headphones while I stare at the directory photo: Squarepusher’s Feed Me Weird Things. “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 it’s the 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 face continues to fade, now well beyond just-beyond-my-grasp (no longer even appearing for moment before being filled in with Augustus Hill an perhaps a peppering of Clarence “High Top” Brown from Colors, a movie that then seemed like a million years ago). But that—the spirit—remains clear. His bodily composure, his tranquil aura, endured 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 alarming 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 hiow many guys been up in that? That’s how many dicks you suckin. Never in my life, Nigga. Shit gay even touching the clit. Nah, nah. Wait. Mahfuckas now know. It’s science. That shit’s a little penis—for real for real: like a baby penis.”

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 “tappin’ some skins.” As if by a tacit agreement not to interfere too much with Rafa’s more bookish tutelage they put the point much more obliquely (if at all) when Rafa was cutting me. But when Rafa was not there, it all came pouring out. “Man, you gotta fuck all you can. Can’t be all picky and shit. Cuz you’ll look back and them bitches you thought was busted gon look real good when you stuck with a fat bitch.” In a swath of focused silence one of the nonRafas would tilt my head to buzz the taper or sharpen the hairline or sculpt the mustache, prehuman piloerection rising on my neck and arms (and surely even on the neck and arms even of the most hardened). But then, inevitably, even he would make sure to follow up the go-get-em peptalk with what seemed wisdom hard earned: to “keep it wrapped up,” firm advice spoken in equal desperation (as if here too they were trying to shake their own younger shoulders)—the other stylists, immortalized in the mirror reflection, nodding in somber agreement as they focused on their own sculpting.

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