Remember Your Stories

The Last Appointment

The boy was just two years old in 1969. I was 10 and sweeping hair down the middle of the black and white tile floor wearing my roller skates when he came into the barbershop dressed like he was going to church, both his parents holding him between them like they were pylons across a broad river and he was the bridge strung between them.

The mother looked awkward in her Sunday dress, but I knew by then that most women felt uncomfortable in this man-space. Her eyes seemed red, at least from what I could tell. The little boy was the last appointment of the day–Daddy always did first haircuts last because you could never tell how long it might take and he wanted it to be memorable for the family. He understood the importance of the day like he understood being at my piano recitals, even when it meant closing the shop early.

“Melvin,” the father said a little too loudly, “here’s our son, Norman Jr., ready for his first haircut!” Then he pointed to his Brownie camera, which I noticed he forgot to use until Daddy reminded him while shearing the boy. Later that day when Norman Sr. went to get the film developed, he would realize he had forgotten to load the camera.

My father understood the significance of the day for the mom, especially. Smiling his slightly crooked smile, he walked over to the little boy, leaned down, and shook his tiny hand. “What a big boy you are, Junior! Let’s get you into my chair and see what your mom wants me to do with all this curly hair!”

I stopped sweeping beside the red and black shoe polishing machine that had replaced Mr. Tince when he was too old to shine anymore. I was content to stand with the broad broom, a pile of straight brown and grey and black hair just ahead of it, to watch Junior’s haircut.

I spent my afternoons in elementary school sweeping the hair that fell around each barber chair and noticed it was always straight and rarely red like my hair. I would only realize later it was all straight because men wore their hair so short then; there was no space or time for a curl to develop, except for that first cut.

Would he cry and scream like other little boys? Would he be able to understand his mother’s anxiety and be proudly quiet as he became a little man just like his father? There was pain in that thought for her, too, not just because her little boy was growing up, but because Norman Sr. was a mean drunk. My daddy knew this–everyone in town knew this, but his wife thought it was their secret, bless her heart.

I watched the whole thing, start to finish, as Daddy lifted Norman Jr. into his leather and porcelain chair on a wooden block he had made for kids to sit taller in the chair. He put warm shaving cream on the boy’s face and pretended to shave him after draping him in one of those white and grey striped capes I loved so much. They were so worn, so washed, so comforting to wear, hiding the fact that I was a girl embedded in a man’s world when the top was snapped tight around my neck.

I watched while he piled a warm towel around Norman Jr.’s face–a comfort I had felt many times–getting him nice and soft for the big moment when that first curly tendril fell to the floor. I skated slowly over and picked it up, sticking half of it in a #10 envelope for the mother to take home and put in his baby book, and pushing the other half quickly into my pocket without her seeing. I don’t know why I did that, but I still have that curl, 53 years later. The mother started weeping when I handed her the envelope and I didn’t know what to do, so I rolled away, back to my broom and pile of hair; my father tried to comfort her, but her husband didn’t.

Norman Jr. had come in looking like a cherub from the full-color Bible storybook I had read as a child but left as a little man, indistinguishable from all the other little men my father had created over the years with the silver barber shears that now hang in my office near my desk. Norman Sr. tried to pay Daddy the usual $2.25 he charged for a haircut, forgetting that Daddy never charged for first haircuts; he walked out with his family, after slurring a thank you to Daddy.

A few years later when Norman Jr. turned 10 and could smell for himself the beer on his daddy’s breath, Daddy didn’t wake up at 5am to open the barbershop for men who needed a cut before work. His funeral was standing room only a few days later, pews at Calvary Baptist Church full of men with neat, similar hair, some with beer on their breath and some not, just two blocks from Modern Barbershop where hair would never fall again, where the last first haircut had been ceremoniously given but not photographed, and where a used junk store is now open for business. My mother forbade me from wearing my skates to the funeral, but Daddy would have let me.