William Gass - Eyes - Novellas and Stories

Hey, ask those chairs their opinion and they will tell you: your fortune depends on how you wear your hair, and what your shadow on the wall will say — those splotches where your heads rested…by the way, what did become of you?

Walter had the menu memorized. He would point imperiously to the faded poster on the wall while he chanted the shop’s selections, though no one ever challenged the availability of his hairstyles, so I had no handy measure for the truth of his boast. The safely tethered children remained mum and wide-eyed while Walter wore a grin broader than the local river. The other barbers would applaud with a rattle of spoons in their coffee mugs.

It was a friendly place, a little stuffy from piped-in warmth through the winter, but blossoming with habitués at all times of year because, as every person not cursed by baldness knows, hair in plenty grows, through droughts and blights and snows, but not in tidy rows. Not them. Not those. Walter told his clientele that they were presently enjoying his garden, not theirs, and that he harvested head hair, ear hair, nostrils, brows, sideburns, goatees, beards, while cultivating the colorful blooms of fingernails, sandaled toes, and inked eyes. At her table at the back of the shop, Millicent manicured the ladies, but she took a little trolley to the chairs to tend the men. There they held out a shy paw and, bashful about such primping, hid their vanity in a din of rough male sports talk, political opinion, scandal, and local news, all in a language meant to impress one another and intrigue Millicent, who was immune to shock.

Prince Paul claims that Millicent (I never heard her natal name) dresses like a whore — long, thickly painted nails, piled hair, bright cheeks, ample bosom (a sample showing), a tight short sheath, and heels that double her height — but how would he know if none of the rest of us knows? and none of the rest of us, I can assure you, knows. We know nothing about clothes, only a blink about hair, nothing much about bodies, and only a touch about mascara, a few pomades, and some rouge. That’s Prince Paul, though…he’s good at pretending.

Behind those big businesslike barber chairs, several shampoo sinks interrupt a narrow glass shelf. There numerous bottles mingle among the mirrors like guests at a ball, frisking between shears, brushes, whisks, and fist-sized piles of moist and steaming cloths. Oils, conditioners, rinses, talcums, tonics, lotions mill about while, for stability, a more disciplined row of antiseptic and restorative bottles stand at brilliantine attention against a wall. These are alleged to be good for baldness. I know them by their glints, their hums. Women, even more than men, will try anything to prevent hair loss. I was told the shelf resembled a bar but my only encounter with bars has been with wooden ones and these were burned by cigarettes or ringed by drinks and other ghosts of grief.

When fellows come to get their face shaved, their hair cut and hair oiled, they tend to sit in seats that represent their favorite speechifications. I am remembering one conk head named Harold who used to come in to have his fuzzed dome mowed for just a buck and who plunked himself down on Overly Neighborly to — Walter joked—“weight” his turn. He would sigh like a squeaking tire — Walter joked — and address those who were there — how many or how few did not restrain him—“So, did you know that one of the lost tribes of Israel was black?” This was greeted with the silence it deserved.

So much clutter…buttons…marbles…pins…Creatures called Human Beings by other members of mankind are turning the world into fuel, into furniture, into tools like my friends — utensils, kettles, cars — into towns built of wood, brick, and stone. Watch out…Those curling irons, holstered in a block of wood, can get hot…We hugely outnumber them now, this squanderous tribe of people who invented us, who use us, and will discard us in mounds set afire by our remains. Combs alone outnumber the heads they coif. Scissors are in the same situation, pens, coins, rings, buckles, guns. Most people have a couple. Even plants in pots or aunts in hoards can’t measure up to the miles of tools shelved in stores, the unseemly tons of junk heaped in yards, knick knacks scattered like rice at a wedding. The entire surface of the world will be stored in pantry bins and furnish parlor tables. Assorted spools of stuff, in multiples and variations, boxed and bagged and trucked hither and yon — wires, pipes — yon and hither — are being displayed or captured, buried, sold, or stolen. When they dig our civilization up, and with those shards try to guess the rest, we shall outnumber the bones of Human Beings in offering clues. Think of it: the leaves of books may beat the leaves of trees in turning. And there are fewer cats than summer clothes.

Everyone enjoyed the soft blue haze left by the customers’ cigarettes. The smokers were mostly men, though Millicent swallowed her menthols like someone in a sideshow. Chewers alone were frowned on. A wad in the cheek would dissolve in spit and soon the spit was oiling the floor. Which was made of squares of linoleum. Anyhow everyone enjoyed the haze left by lit cigarettes, smoky exhalations — they were thought — in a ghostly guise. The resulting communal breath seemed like a river of air that carried the fellowship of the shop from chair to chair. I know I never tired of our atmosphere: the smell of polish always pleased me, and the vigorous shine Archie would apply to some businessman’s shoes made a nice noise, the way the smell of coffee stirs you folks to ride forth in the morning, eager dogs baying at the rising sun.

Our customers were a mixture of races, unusual to be found, I understand, in this geography; but the reality is that the population mix was thin and came and went as the neighborhood did, slowly shrinking as the whites took to their heels and the street’s vacancies grew, swelling when poverty, like hunger, overtook its clientele. Serving such different heads was not easy. People born with hair bent like wire make a mistake to want it straight. Straights want swirls. Brunettes weep to be blond. Guys who have lots of it want their heads shaven and shiny. Learn, ladies, to be happy with the hue Our Great Maker gave you. Blacks who wanted to look white would come here on the assumption that white barbers would know better how to do it. As for my tribe of folding chairs — well, to us, asses differ only by weight. We ask two questions of our customers: how thin? how large? how small? how fat? how light? how heavy? That is that.

Every Front Room has a back room. That’s where the joint’s john flushes; where a restful rocker rocks; and an eight-place poker table swallows the central space. Barbers not on duty lazed there, playing solitaire, smoking one of the aforesaid cigarettes or reading the racing magazines. Walter took bets. On heralded occasions. For the Derby or the local track. And an evening game of poker took place, maybe once a week, sometimes twice, when a few friends dropped in and some chairs were enlisted to take care of the additional arrivals.

I understand and employ the word “herald,” because I was sometimes placed, for an evening, in the doorway of the shop as a signal to knowledgeable passersby that poker was “on” at 10:00 p.m. “Okay, old fellow, you can be our herald tonight,” Walter would say to me, though we both knew he was talking to himself. He likes to do that — be coy with a razor or angry with a comb. An occasional snarl would draw an expletive from him, followed by a small speech, all this for the amusement of the customer who was having his hair pulled.

Such outpost service is humiliating. You have been parked there, in the doorway, because no one will steal you, worn and rusty as you are, and there you must sit until the number of places for players has been fulfilled, whereupon you are removed from that spot to the poker room itself, your seat to be occupied by a nervous stranger from the street who has been brought to the shop by a friend and has, in any case, not come because of your ungainly presence. Regulars tend to be pros at poker and do not squirm in their seats like infants, though they may allow their eyes to wink and slide to one side, their nose to wrinkle and snort a swinish snort, their lips to grin or curl or smirk as if in commentary; and sometimes they like to release their grip on the cards for an expansive, apparently careless gesture, in order to mislead and deceive the other players. Meanwhile, I chatted with the chips in the pot. Boy, do they know a thing or two. As for me, I keep my lid on.