High & Tight
Note: This story contains some adult language. It may not be suitable for younger readers.
I needed a haircut, and I was not particular about who cut it.
I wore my hair short, so whoever did me the service every six weeks was essentially just shaving my scalp. So skill level was not critical to me. But price was.
"Mr. Blue will give you a cut for six bucks," my friend said.
"That's good. Very good. Very cheap."
"Yes, yes it is," he agreed.
"Does that include gratuity?" I asked.
"Of course not, you ass. Six plus tip."
"Still good."
"But there is the issue of where Mr. Blue works...And the time."
"Where does he work?"
"His chair is off the main waiting room in the downtown bus station. You know, where the Greyhound buses arrive and depart." My friend sounded almost apologetic.
And he kept going, becoming almost philosophical. "The bus station always has bugged me. It's kinda like an airport -- terminals and gates and food stands and plasticky seats. But, God, the bus station is so frayed and depressing. That's what the bus station is. It's the ugly sister of the airport. It's like an airport for the sweaty, smelly, and damned."
I tried to meet his poorly-veiled condemnation of the poor with denial. "Doesn't bother me." (Although it did.) "I'm there for hair care, not to catch a ride. Now why did you want to warm me about Mr. Blue’s ‘time’?"
"Mr. Blue – and don't ever think of calling him anything else, ever -- works every night, and I mean seven damn nights a week, from midnight to seven a.m. So, getting the haircut means going to the bus station in the middle of the night. Do you have a problem with that?"
"How long have you been going to him?" I asked.
"Three years. I will not go to anyone else. Mr. Blue has changed my life. What he’s done. What he’s said. Going to him for a haircut has changed my life."
This sounded ridiculous and cultish, but – unlike me – my friend cared about his hair. He claimed that women had allowed him to have sex with them simply because of the power of his hair. So I suppose if Mr. Blue’s skill helped my friend get laid more often, then perhaps he wasn’t overstating things too much.
"If Mr. Blue is good enough for you, he’s good enough for me. If you aren't afraid, then there is no way I'll let you think I am."
"Done," he said, as if we had just signed some sort of major business merger. "Do you want me to take you along Wednesday? That’s the next time I go. You know, I can show you exactly where Mr. Blue is, and I can give you a proper introduction?"
"No," I said. "I will go alone."
***
By the time I entered the bus station one person had asked me for bus fare, another two had requested that I buy them a hamburger, and one other person had asked me about sex.
The barber shop was along the back wall of the waiting room, nestled in between a Donkey Kong video game – which seemed original – and a vending machine dispensing, among other things, Wheat Thins, tampons, and condoms.
The barber shop was identified simply by a sign that read "Barber Shop" and a barber's cane that hadn't spun since Eisenhower. I entered without hesitation. It was after one in the morning.
Apparently, I represented the end of a rush of hair care customers. The room was crammed. There were two high school guys, an old black man, and me.
Something innate within me told me not to make eye contact with the other patrons. Although I didn't know whether the impulse came from God, the Devil, or merely some Darwinian sense of self-preservation, I obeyed it. I sat in an old dining room chair under a starving artist's rendition of Pocahontas embracing her English lover. I studied my knuckles and waited.
To the left of my chair, on a table within the small area I allowed my eyes to explore, I saw a box containing an assortment of 8-track tapes. I could make out the names Creedence Clearwater Revival and Marilyn McCoo. Underneath the box, stacked in a neat pile, were magazines – Field & Stream, back issues of Playboy (likely so old they did not yet regularly show genitalia), and National Geographic.
I chose an issue of Reader's Digest, read the joke page underneath the light of a spent Jim Beam bottle transformed into a table lamp, and listened to a Robert Mitchum movie playing from a TV somewhere above my head. I waited. Time passed, no one else entered, and eventually I was alone with the stylist, a man I presumed was Mr. Blue.
"You want a cut, Son," he asked. Mr. Blue wore a shirt plaided with variations of a color that looked like puke green. Around his neck hung an amulet depicting a screaming gargoyle. The beast luxuriated in a curly nest of stark silver chest hair bushing out of the top of his shirt and surrounding the amulet. Mr. Blue wore thick, black Buddy Holly glasses.
He was bald. Although my mind knew this was a deficiency of his genes and not of his skill with hair, I feared baldness was a bad omen when it came to barbers.
I told him that I wanted him to cut my hair.
"Well, damn," said Mr. Blue. "If you've got the money, I've got the scissors, and we've got ourselves a mutually agreeable arrangement. Now put down the skin rag, sit your sweet ass in my special chair, and let's commence to cutting!"
I took my seat before him. I told Mr. Blue I’d heard he was good. He told me that this was true and congratulated me on wanting a taste of his magic bad enough to brave the mean streets of the inner city after dark.
I tried to make conversation as he slung the cape around my shoulders and I pocketed my eyeglasses. "What kind of clientele do you get in here, in the bus station, in the middle of the night?"
"What? Fuck, Son, you looking to invest? You want me to dig up my business plan too?" Struck by his wit, Mr. Blue chuckled and coughed before continuing.
"Just screwing with you...But, to answer your question with dignity, I get lots of guys from the public university up the road that runs into the ghetto. I get lots of guys from the private college down the road that runs toward the nice houses and the parks. Sometimes a college dude will come in a little drunk with a date – a girl, if that matters to you – and both of 'em will get their hair cut one after the other. I guess it's kinda an 'extreme experience' for them, or some such bullshit as that... Let's see. I also get some old black guys. Don’t get many Mexicans. Get some high school guys. Austin High. Central High. Reagan. Dulles. Schools like that."
“I once dated a girl from Reagan High School.”
Mr. Blue cut me off. "Good for you. Your parents must have been very pleased to find out you weren't gay... Now how you want me to work your hair?"
Sitting in the chair at that very moment, as I looked into the mirror and realized my hair had gotten shaggy, I decided to shake things up.
"OK. Let's see,” I said. “Let's layer the hair from the sideburns to the top of the scalp. Then let's blend in the layers on the sides and on the back of my head. And...and, how about we keep the sideburns at the same length and thickness as the hair immediately above them?"
Mr. Blue fingered the gargoyle hanging around his neck and was silent for a moment.
"Hmmm. Hmmm," he said. "What is this 'let's' and 'we' stuff? I am the one cutting hair. ‘Me’ and not ‘we’, Son. And I am thinking you have been, are now, and always will be a 'High & Tight' man."
"What's a 'High & Tight'?" I asked.
"It's when I use my clippers to shave your head near as clean and soft as a baby's ass. Now that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not too much."
I hadn’t realized until that moment that I’d begun to like my sideburns but, despite that, Mr. Blue was right. Deep down I was a high and tight man. I said a silent goodbye to my hair.
The issue resolved, Mr. Blue turned his back to me and leaned over a little sink that now, because of his bulk, was obscured from my view. Unable to see what he was doing, I listened for clues. All I heard was a squirting sound coming from the sink and a soft fart coming from Mr. Blue.
When he turned to face me his right palm was filled with white foam. How could he be ready to mousse style my hair; he hadn't even cut it yet. I told Mr. Blue this, and he just laughed. His laugh was a breathy and slippery noise. It sounded like "hueck...hueck...hueck."
Mr. Blue slapped the hot, white foam on my bare neck and started to mush it around. He even forced it up behind my ears. Then he turned back to the sink. I heard the sound of running water and, a few moments later, a slapping sound.
When Mr. Blue spun back to face me his right hand was free of foam and now held a straight razor. The blade caught the light from the room and converted it into glints of menace. I swallowed hard and thought back to a community theater production of Sweeney Todd I'd acted in a few years ago. I’d died at the hands of the title character.
I also experienced a disconnect between my mind and my gut. I knew in my head Mr. Blue was not intending to slit my throat. Not even his business plan could be so bad as to pursue the murder of clients. But my gut didn't care about such indisputable observations.
My gut cried out other, primal – but no less rational – things. It told me that Mr. Blue probably couldn't sign his name without shaking. It told me that this hard neurological truth had likely been in effect since Reagan was only the name of a president and not yet the name of a high school whose student I had dated. My gut told me without a hint of doubt that I wouldn’t even be willing to play the board game Operation with Mr. Blue because of how often I'd have to listen to the buzzer rattle and drone.
Now this man was about to touch me with a straight razor the length of a grade school ruler. I boiled my gut’s valid protestations into what I hoped was a single, innocuous question, a question that would give Mr. Blue pause and help me wiggle out of what was coming next.
"You ever cut people doing that?"
Mr. Blue, with great drama, raised the razor high above his head like Arthur brandishing Excalibur or Luke Skywalker his light saber and said, "Only every once in a long while. And only when someone's got a pimple. Don't you worry, Son. Unclench them butt cheeks and let your panties fly free. I've been doing this since 1960, since back before your momma and poppy were playing grab ass in the back of your gran daddy's Chevy."
He shaved my neck. He missed my pimples. His hand was steady as stone.
***
A few minutes later an elderly black man entered the shop. Mr. Blue saluted him with his clippers and hailed the newcomer as Leroy. Leroy nodded to Mr. Blue and then aimed his attention toward the television.
The Robert Mitchum movie had been replaced by a talk show. The subject of the show seemed to be women who had been married more than six times. The woman speaking at that moment was extolling the stability and boiling passion she had discovered with her eighth husband.
After we'd all been silent for a few minutes listening to the woman's tale and the mechanical drone of Mr. Blue’s hair clippers, Leroy spoke. "Blue, that bitch on the TV is up a spouse on you. Eat it, Blue! Eat it."
Leroy laughed, turned to the doorway, and left the room. That was all he said. He’d performed his task, and now he was gone.
Mr. Blue didn't pause his cutting. But in the mirror I could see him shaking his head and smiling. "Leroy, Leroy, Leroy," he said over and over again as I did the math in my head. The apparent fact that Mr. Blue had been married more than half a dozen times surprised me, and yet it came as almost no surprise at all.
It was as if Mr. Blue read my mind. "Hell yes, son. Six different women have been my wife in the past, and a seventh woman is my wife right now as we speak. All good women in their own ways. And, in a certain way, for a certain time, I have loved them all.
“But then, in regards to those first six, eventually it was over. Perhaps it will be that way again with my seventh. I don't know. What I do know is that I will not be owned, no matter what a god or a judge may say. And I never got mixed up in all that joint stuff. No joint names or accounts or investments. I got my cash money, and they got theirs. I got my life and my stuff, and they got theirs...That reminds me."
Mr. Blue walked around the left side of the barber's chair and lifted the receiver of an old, banana yellow rotary phone perched on a table beside a cash register covered in dust. He stuck out the middle finger on his left hand and used it to dial. After a few moments Mr. Blue spoke in a voice far softer and higher than I had yet heard him use.
"Hey, Sugar. This is Baby Blue...No, no, don't worry. Everything's fine. It's all quiet. Just hair goin' on ‘round here tonight...How you?....Good, good...Now do me a kindness. Here in about an hour, before you go on into work, can you bring me up my gun? I left it on the table...Yeah, it's in the holster...Thanks. Love. Bye." Mr. Blue hung up the receiver and returned to cutting my hair as if there had been no intermission.
Mr. Blue also didn't say anything to me for a long while. He seemed to be deep in thought. Then things became quieter still. He shut off his clippers and dusted my shoulders, but he left the cloak on me.
Instead of removing the cloak and shooing me out into the night, Mr. Blue stepped between me and the mirror. He looked at me with great intensity. Then he grabbed one of the waiting room chairs and pulled it across the floor until it was right in front of me. He sat in the chair; this put us on eye level with one another.
Mr. Blue gazed at me. I met his eyes, but I didn't know what to make of them or with the moment or with the sudden change of emotional atmosphere I sensed in the room.
"Son, I'm gonna confide in you. I sense deep in my soul that it’s the right thing to do. I sense that God wants you to know what I know. I sense you can act on the information and prepare yourself for what is to come."
My lack of response was born of awkward shock. Mr. Blue appeared to interpret it as agreement.
"I have indeed been married seven times, but not all the woman have been the same to me, equal in my heart. My number three has always been my heart's love.
“Now, don’t misunderstand me. When the time came, I sent her on too. That's also dead, straight true. Not even she could own me. Still, she was more than all the rest combined. Alone among all my wives, number three and me we had us a child, a daughter like no other.
"I met Number Three in the land between New Orleans and the sea. It is land that even then – though we didn't know it – was being eatin' away bite by bite. We were feeding her to the Gulf of Mexico. First by moving the Great River, and then by sucking the oil from the ground like a fat kid makin' love to a milkshake.
"I was making my dollars cutting the hair of the oil grunts. Number three was waiting on them, serving up their morning eggs before they went to the great pumps and refineries that burned against the sky.
"We met cute, as they say. I wandered into the restaurant, and she gave me some eggs. We talked about hair. She had eleven sisters, of which she was the oldest by a few years. Number three told me that once she became old enough her momma had her cut all the family’s hair.
“Now her momma was a good woman in ways not necessary for a woman saddled with great poverty and greater responsibility. She told number three that she would be payin' X amount of dollars per cut at a boutique, and since number three was doing the work instead of the boutique, Momma'd pay her eldest a little to do this valuable service.
“Number three said, ‘Yes,’ to her momma’s offer. And, as you might guess, she became a pretty good hair stylist over the years. That’s a lot of hair. Eventually number three travelled to Paris on her proceeds.
"So that mornin’ in the diner we talked of hair. I told her of my local practice and she smiled and nodded, and then we bid adieu. The next day – a Saturday – number three paid me the greatest compliment anyone has ever laid upon me.
"She walked into the humble place where I plied my trade and sat right down before me in the special chair. Then she said to me, ‘Blue, God told me to trust you. On top of that, I think I love you. So, here I am. Study my hair. Then cut it however you will.’
“And I did. I took her fine yellow hair in my hands and I studied and I prayed as I never had before. And I cut. And there was a lightness in my comb and a wisdom in my scissors that was beyond the explanations of the workaday, material world. And it was glorious.
"After it was over number three invited me out to eat – her treat. She drove me way down the road to the only big grocery store in our sorry little region. Then, as number three put it, we grazed. We moved through the aisles eating freebies, snackin’ samples.
“We ate curled turkey on sticks and cheese cubes and little pastry pockets stuffed with goop and a mysterious, unknown meat. We drank thimbles full of sweet tea and whatever new concoction Coca Cola was issuing as ongoing penance for the nearly forgotten sin of New Coke.
"Again and again we circled through the samples, pretending each time that we were there for the first time. We circled through again and again and met the disdainful smiles and head-shakes of the people who clued into our game.
"With each cycle my embarrassment faded a little more, and I realized that grazing was exactly the kind of thing that I would think of. It was exactly the kind of thing I would've thought of but not had the balls to actually do. At least not before I met number three.
"Back in the car after it was over I played ashamed and asked her what all that was about. I accused her. How could she ask me out and then make me beg for my food?
"She cut me off. 'No. No. No, Blue. No. No. No. Did we eat, Blue? Did we feed? Fuck yeah, we ate. We ate awesome. And now we have all the money we need to buy some bourbon, kick back, and see what circumstance and fantasy will have us do to one another. Blue,’ she said, ‘here is something true. Sometimes you feed off someone’s cash. And sometimes you feed off someone’s wisdom. And this was the latter. You fed off my wisdom, Blue.’
"I loved her. Right then I loved her, if not before. We were soon married. Seven months after me and number three had met, our daughter came. That daughter was always an odd presence from the time she was in the crib on forward. Can’t tell you how many times that little girl gave me the heebies. Can’t tell you how many times she made my chest hair stand on end.
“But through it all I heard God speaking. Now maybe it wasn't God. Maybe it was another voice that mimics the tone of the Lord, but issues all its words with the intent of tearing down all that Heaven builds up. I don't know, but in two years I will know once and for all. So will you.”
Then Mr. Blue told me one tale to illustrate. He said that when the daughter was young he and her and number three were living out in the swamps on a broad parcel of wet land dripping with Spanish moss but bereft of people. It was lonely land.
Mr. Blue said it was late one afternoon, the sun was setting, and he couldn't find the little girl. So he looked, called, and worried as he walked the borders of the land. Then Mr. Blue rounded a corner and saw the girl.
She was lying on the ground, her head resting on the midsection of an alligator. The gator, who stretched four full yards from one end to the other. The beast slept peacefully, the tip of its tail twitching every once in a while, each spasm seeming to punctuate some critical moment in a reptilian dream.
Mr. Blue should have been terrified by the gator’s presence so close to him and so close to the child, but he was not. He was sure the girl had tamed the gator. She had always been able to alter moods and spirits beyond her own.
Mr. Blue was unafraid but hopeful he hadn’t been detected since he was behind a long row of bushes. He’d come up on the girl’s position from behind and slowly snuck around to watch her from the side. Beyond his dumb luck, the daughter seemed occupied, absorbed in some sort of meditation.
She was gazing up into a clouded sky that was dominated by a mountain range of statuesque cumulonimbi. Periodically the little girl lifted her right hand from the earth and swirled it meaningfully between her body and the sky. Mr. Blue was sure she was blinking rarely, if at all.
From his vantage point, watching the girl lying in the grass waving her hand purposefully at the sky gave Mr. Blue the sensation of descending upon the conductor of an orchestra.
The daughter's left hand had other duties. It stroked the base of the gator's tail and, from time to time, patted the beast's left flank like a lover absentmindedly tousling the hair of her beloved. The alligator continued to sleep and dream.
Then Mr. Blue's daughter spoke to him. He had been detected, after all. Looking back, it was ridiculous to think he would not be.
"Blue," she said, "I am directing the clouds. They know me and respond to me. In fifteen years everyone will know me as the clouds do. And they will respond to me. All of them will."
Mr. Blue, returned to the bus station from his reverie. He shook his gaze free from the past. "Son," Mr. Blue said. "Son, it's been thirteen years, give or take a month or so. In two years everything will be different. She will emerge. And we will all either become that gator or those clouds. Mark my words."
That was the last thing Mr. Blue said to me before I rose from the barber's chair, handed him his payment, and walked into the early morning darkness. Since then, without fail, I have returned every three weeks to see him. Since then I’ve also crossed off each day on a wall calendar beside my bed.
Two years is not a lot of time. I need to be prepared.
I’ve also found myself telling my friends about Mr. Blue, working him into conversations, inviting the people closest to me to take a risk and visit the bus station in the dead of the night.
I wore my hair short, so whoever did me the service every six weeks was essentially just shaving my scalp. So skill level was not critical to me. But price was.
"Mr. Blue will give you a cut for six bucks," my friend said.
"That's good. Very good. Very cheap."
"Yes, yes it is," he agreed.
"Does that include gratuity?" I asked.
"Of course not, you ass. Six plus tip."
"Still good."
"But there is the issue of where Mr. Blue works...And the time."
"Where does he work?"
"His chair is off the main waiting room in the downtown bus station. You know, where the Greyhound buses arrive and depart." My friend sounded almost apologetic.
And he kept going, becoming almost philosophical. "The bus station always has bugged me. It's kinda like an airport -- terminals and gates and food stands and plasticky seats. But, God, the bus station is so frayed and depressing. That's what the bus station is. It's the ugly sister of the airport. It's like an airport for the sweaty, smelly, and damned."
I tried to meet his poorly-veiled condemnation of the poor with denial. "Doesn't bother me." (Although it did.) "I'm there for hair care, not to catch a ride. Now why did you want to warm me about Mr. Blue’s ‘time’?"
"Mr. Blue – and don't ever think of calling him anything else, ever -- works every night, and I mean seven damn nights a week, from midnight to seven a.m. So, getting the haircut means going to the bus station in the middle of the night. Do you have a problem with that?"
"How long have you been going to him?" I asked.
"Three years. I will not go to anyone else. Mr. Blue has changed my life. What he’s done. What he’s said. Going to him for a haircut has changed my life."
This sounded ridiculous and cultish, but – unlike me – my friend cared about his hair. He claimed that women had allowed him to have sex with them simply because of the power of his hair. So I suppose if Mr. Blue’s skill helped my friend get laid more often, then perhaps he wasn’t overstating things too much.
"If Mr. Blue is good enough for you, he’s good enough for me. If you aren't afraid, then there is no way I'll let you think I am."
"Done," he said, as if we had just signed some sort of major business merger. "Do you want me to take you along Wednesday? That’s the next time I go. You know, I can show you exactly where Mr. Blue is, and I can give you a proper introduction?"
"No," I said. "I will go alone."
***
By the time I entered the bus station one person had asked me for bus fare, another two had requested that I buy them a hamburger, and one other person had asked me about sex.
The barber shop was along the back wall of the waiting room, nestled in between a Donkey Kong video game – which seemed original – and a vending machine dispensing, among other things, Wheat Thins, tampons, and condoms.
The barber shop was identified simply by a sign that read "Barber Shop" and a barber's cane that hadn't spun since Eisenhower. I entered without hesitation. It was after one in the morning.
Apparently, I represented the end of a rush of hair care customers. The room was crammed. There were two high school guys, an old black man, and me.
Something innate within me told me not to make eye contact with the other patrons. Although I didn't know whether the impulse came from God, the Devil, or merely some Darwinian sense of self-preservation, I obeyed it. I sat in an old dining room chair under a starving artist's rendition of Pocahontas embracing her English lover. I studied my knuckles and waited.
To the left of my chair, on a table within the small area I allowed my eyes to explore, I saw a box containing an assortment of 8-track tapes. I could make out the names Creedence Clearwater Revival and Marilyn McCoo. Underneath the box, stacked in a neat pile, were magazines – Field & Stream, back issues of Playboy (likely so old they did not yet regularly show genitalia), and National Geographic.
I chose an issue of Reader's Digest, read the joke page underneath the light of a spent Jim Beam bottle transformed into a table lamp, and listened to a Robert Mitchum movie playing from a TV somewhere above my head. I waited. Time passed, no one else entered, and eventually I was alone with the stylist, a man I presumed was Mr. Blue.
"You want a cut, Son," he asked. Mr. Blue wore a shirt plaided with variations of a color that looked like puke green. Around his neck hung an amulet depicting a screaming gargoyle. The beast luxuriated in a curly nest of stark silver chest hair bushing out of the top of his shirt and surrounding the amulet. Mr. Blue wore thick, black Buddy Holly glasses.
He was bald. Although my mind knew this was a deficiency of his genes and not of his skill with hair, I feared baldness was a bad omen when it came to barbers.
I told him that I wanted him to cut my hair.
"Well, damn," said Mr. Blue. "If you've got the money, I've got the scissors, and we've got ourselves a mutually agreeable arrangement. Now put down the skin rag, sit your sweet ass in my special chair, and let's commence to cutting!"
I took my seat before him. I told Mr. Blue I’d heard he was good. He told me that this was true and congratulated me on wanting a taste of his magic bad enough to brave the mean streets of the inner city after dark.
I tried to make conversation as he slung the cape around my shoulders and I pocketed my eyeglasses. "What kind of clientele do you get in here, in the bus station, in the middle of the night?"
"What? Fuck, Son, you looking to invest? You want me to dig up my business plan too?" Struck by his wit, Mr. Blue chuckled and coughed before continuing.
"Just screwing with you...But, to answer your question with dignity, I get lots of guys from the public university up the road that runs into the ghetto. I get lots of guys from the private college down the road that runs toward the nice houses and the parks. Sometimes a college dude will come in a little drunk with a date – a girl, if that matters to you – and both of 'em will get their hair cut one after the other. I guess it's kinda an 'extreme experience' for them, or some such bullshit as that... Let's see. I also get some old black guys. Don’t get many Mexicans. Get some high school guys. Austin High. Central High. Reagan. Dulles. Schools like that."
“I once dated a girl from Reagan High School.”
Mr. Blue cut me off. "Good for you. Your parents must have been very pleased to find out you weren't gay... Now how you want me to work your hair?"
Sitting in the chair at that very moment, as I looked into the mirror and realized my hair had gotten shaggy, I decided to shake things up.
"OK. Let's see,” I said. “Let's layer the hair from the sideburns to the top of the scalp. Then let's blend in the layers on the sides and on the back of my head. And...and, how about we keep the sideburns at the same length and thickness as the hair immediately above them?"
Mr. Blue fingered the gargoyle hanging around his neck and was silent for a moment.
"Hmmm. Hmmm," he said. "What is this 'let's' and 'we' stuff? I am the one cutting hair. ‘Me’ and not ‘we’, Son. And I am thinking you have been, are now, and always will be a 'High & Tight' man."
"What's a 'High & Tight'?" I asked.
"It's when I use my clippers to shave your head near as clean and soft as a baby's ass. Now that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not too much."
I hadn’t realized until that moment that I’d begun to like my sideburns but, despite that, Mr. Blue was right. Deep down I was a high and tight man. I said a silent goodbye to my hair.
The issue resolved, Mr. Blue turned his back to me and leaned over a little sink that now, because of his bulk, was obscured from my view. Unable to see what he was doing, I listened for clues. All I heard was a squirting sound coming from the sink and a soft fart coming from Mr. Blue.
When he turned to face me his right palm was filled with white foam. How could he be ready to mousse style my hair; he hadn't even cut it yet. I told Mr. Blue this, and he just laughed. His laugh was a breathy and slippery noise. It sounded like "hueck...hueck...hueck."
Mr. Blue slapped the hot, white foam on my bare neck and started to mush it around. He even forced it up behind my ears. Then he turned back to the sink. I heard the sound of running water and, a few moments later, a slapping sound.
When Mr. Blue spun back to face me his right hand was free of foam and now held a straight razor. The blade caught the light from the room and converted it into glints of menace. I swallowed hard and thought back to a community theater production of Sweeney Todd I'd acted in a few years ago. I’d died at the hands of the title character.
I also experienced a disconnect between my mind and my gut. I knew in my head Mr. Blue was not intending to slit my throat. Not even his business plan could be so bad as to pursue the murder of clients. But my gut didn't care about such indisputable observations.
My gut cried out other, primal – but no less rational – things. It told me that Mr. Blue probably couldn't sign his name without shaking. It told me that this hard neurological truth had likely been in effect since Reagan was only the name of a president and not yet the name of a high school whose student I had dated. My gut told me without a hint of doubt that I wouldn’t even be willing to play the board game Operation with Mr. Blue because of how often I'd have to listen to the buzzer rattle and drone.
Now this man was about to touch me with a straight razor the length of a grade school ruler. I boiled my gut’s valid protestations into what I hoped was a single, innocuous question, a question that would give Mr. Blue pause and help me wiggle out of what was coming next.
"You ever cut people doing that?"
Mr. Blue, with great drama, raised the razor high above his head like Arthur brandishing Excalibur or Luke Skywalker his light saber and said, "Only every once in a long while. And only when someone's got a pimple. Don't you worry, Son. Unclench them butt cheeks and let your panties fly free. I've been doing this since 1960, since back before your momma and poppy were playing grab ass in the back of your gran daddy's Chevy."
He shaved my neck. He missed my pimples. His hand was steady as stone.
***
A few minutes later an elderly black man entered the shop. Mr. Blue saluted him with his clippers and hailed the newcomer as Leroy. Leroy nodded to Mr. Blue and then aimed his attention toward the television.
The Robert Mitchum movie had been replaced by a talk show. The subject of the show seemed to be women who had been married more than six times. The woman speaking at that moment was extolling the stability and boiling passion she had discovered with her eighth husband.
After we'd all been silent for a few minutes listening to the woman's tale and the mechanical drone of Mr. Blue’s hair clippers, Leroy spoke. "Blue, that bitch on the TV is up a spouse on you. Eat it, Blue! Eat it."
Leroy laughed, turned to the doorway, and left the room. That was all he said. He’d performed his task, and now he was gone.
Mr. Blue didn't pause his cutting. But in the mirror I could see him shaking his head and smiling. "Leroy, Leroy, Leroy," he said over and over again as I did the math in my head. The apparent fact that Mr. Blue had been married more than half a dozen times surprised me, and yet it came as almost no surprise at all.
It was as if Mr. Blue read my mind. "Hell yes, son. Six different women have been my wife in the past, and a seventh woman is my wife right now as we speak. All good women in their own ways. And, in a certain way, for a certain time, I have loved them all.
“But then, in regards to those first six, eventually it was over. Perhaps it will be that way again with my seventh. I don't know. What I do know is that I will not be owned, no matter what a god or a judge may say. And I never got mixed up in all that joint stuff. No joint names or accounts or investments. I got my cash money, and they got theirs. I got my life and my stuff, and they got theirs...That reminds me."
Mr. Blue walked around the left side of the barber's chair and lifted the receiver of an old, banana yellow rotary phone perched on a table beside a cash register covered in dust. He stuck out the middle finger on his left hand and used it to dial. After a few moments Mr. Blue spoke in a voice far softer and higher than I had yet heard him use.
"Hey, Sugar. This is Baby Blue...No, no, don't worry. Everything's fine. It's all quiet. Just hair goin' on ‘round here tonight...How you?....Good, good...Now do me a kindness. Here in about an hour, before you go on into work, can you bring me up my gun? I left it on the table...Yeah, it's in the holster...Thanks. Love. Bye." Mr. Blue hung up the receiver and returned to cutting my hair as if there had been no intermission.
Mr. Blue also didn't say anything to me for a long while. He seemed to be deep in thought. Then things became quieter still. He shut off his clippers and dusted my shoulders, but he left the cloak on me.
Instead of removing the cloak and shooing me out into the night, Mr. Blue stepped between me and the mirror. He looked at me with great intensity. Then he grabbed one of the waiting room chairs and pulled it across the floor until it was right in front of me. He sat in the chair; this put us on eye level with one another.
Mr. Blue gazed at me. I met his eyes, but I didn't know what to make of them or with the moment or with the sudden change of emotional atmosphere I sensed in the room.
"Son, I'm gonna confide in you. I sense deep in my soul that it’s the right thing to do. I sense that God wants you to know what I know. I sense you can act on the information and prepare yourself for what is to come."
My lack of response was born of awkward shock. Mr. Blue appeared to interpret it as agreement.
"I have indeed been married seven times, but not all the woman have been the same to me, equal in my heart. My number three has always been my heart's love.
“Now, don’t misunderstand me. When the time came, I sent her on too. That's also dead, straight true. Not even she could own me. Still, she was more than all the rest combined. Alone among all my wives, number three and me we had us a child, a daughter like no other.
"I met Number Three in the land between New Orleans and the sea. It is land that even then – though we didn't know it – was being eatin' away bite by bite. We were feeding her to the Gulf of Mexico. First by moving the Great River, and then by sucking the oil from the ground like a fat kid makin' love to a milkshake.
"I was making my dollars cutting the hair of the oil grunts. Number three was waiting on them, serving up their morning eggs before they went to the great pumps and refineries that burned against the sky.
"We met cute, as they say. I wandered into the restaurant, and she gave me some eggs. We talked about hair. She had eleven sisters, of which she was the oldest by a few years. Number three told me that once she became old enough her momma had her cut all the family’s hair.
“Now her momma was a good woman in ways not necessary for a woman saddled with great poverty and greater responsibility. She told number three that she would be payin' X amount of dollars per cut at a boutique, and since number three was doing the work instead of the boutique, Momma'd pay her eldest a little to do this valuable service.
“Number three said, ‘Yes,’ to her momma’s offer. And, as you might guess, she became a pretty good hair stylist over the years. That’s a lot of hair. Eventually number three travelled to Paris on her proceeds.
"So that mornin’ in the diner we talked of hair. I told her of my local practice and she smiled and nodded, and then we bid adieu. The next day – a Saturday – number three paid me the greatest compliment anyone has ever laid upon me.
"She walked into the humble place where I plied my trade and sat right down before me in the special chair. Then she said to me, ‘Blue, God told me to trust you. On top of that, I think I love you. So, here I am. Study my hair. Then cut it however you will.’
“And I did. I took her fine yellow hair in my hands and I studied and I prayed as I never had before. And I cut. And there was a lightness in my comb and a wisdom in my scissors that was beyond the explanations of the workaday, material world. And it was glorious.
"After it was over number three invited me out to eat – her treat. She drove me way down the road to the only big grocery store in our sorry little region. Then, as number three put it, we grazed. We moved through the aisles eating freebies, snackin’ samples.
“We ate curled turkey on sticks and cheese cubes and little pastry pockets stuffed with goop and a mysterious, unknown meat. We drank thimbles full of sweet tea and whatever new concoction Coca Cola was issuing as ongoing penance for the nearly forgotten sin of New Coke.
"Again and again we circled through the samples, pretending each time that we were there for the first time. We circled through again and again and met the disdainful smiles and head-shakes of the people who clued into our game.
"With each cycle my embarrassment faded a little more, and I realized that grazing was exactly the kind of thing that I would think of. It was exactly the kind of thing I would've thought of but not had the balls to actually do. At least not before I met number three.
"Back in the car after it was over I played ashamed and asked her what all that was about. I accused her. How could she ask me out and then make me beg for my food?
"She cut me off. 'No. No. No, Blue. No. No. No. Did we eat, Blue? Did we feed? Fuck yeah, we ate. We ate awesome. And now we have all the money we need to buy some bourbon, kick back, and see what circumstance and fantasy will have us do to one another. Blue,’ she said, ‘here is something true. Sometimes you feed off someone’s cash. And sometimes you feed off someone’s wisdom. And this was the latter. You fed off my wisdom, Blue.’
"I loved her. Right then I loved her, if not before. We were soon married. Seven months after me and number three had met, our daughter came. That daughter was always an odd presence from the time she was in the crib on forward. Can’t tell you how many times that little girl gave me the heebies. Can’t tell you how many times she made my chest hair stand on end.
“But through it all I heard God speaking. Now maybe it wasn't God. Maybe it was another voice that mimics the tone of the Lord, but issues all its words with the intent of tearing down all that Heaven builds up. I don't know, but in two years I will know once and for all. So will you.”
Then Mr. Blue told me one tale to illustrate. He said that when the daughter was young he and her and number three were living out in the swamps on a broad parcel of wet land dripping with Spanish moss but bereft of people. It was lonely land.
Mr. Blue said it was late one afternoon, the sun was setting, and he couldn't find the little girl. So he looked, called, and worried as he walked the borders of the land. Then Mr. Blue rounded a corner and saw the girl.
She was lying on the ground, her head resting on the midsection of an alligator. The gator, who stretched four full yards from one end to the other. The beast slept peacefully, the tip of its tail twitching every once in a while, each spasm seeming to punctuate some critical moment in a reptilian dream.
Mr. Blue should have been terrified by the gator’s presence so close to him and so close to the child, but he was not. He was sure the girl had tamed the gator. She had always been able to alter moods and spirits beyond her own.
Mr. Blue was unafraid but hopeful he hadn’t been detected since he was behind a long row of bushes. He’d come up on the girl’s position from behind and slowly snuck around to watch her from the side. Beyond his dumb luck, the daughter seemed occupied, absorbed in some sort of meditation.
She was gazing up into a clouded sky that was dominated by a mountain range of statuesque cumulonimbi. Periodically the little girl lifted her right hand from the earth and swirled it meaningfully between her body and the sky. Mr. Blue was sure she was blinking rarely, if at all.
From his vantage point, watching the girl lying in the grass waving her hand purposefully at the sky gave Mr. Blue the sensation of descending upon the conductor of an orchestra.
The daughter's left hand had other duties. It stroked the base of the gator's tail and, from time to time, patted the beast's left flank like a lover absentmindedly tousling the hair of her beloved. The alligator continued to sleep and dream.
Then Mr. Blue's daughter spoke to him. He had been detected, after all. Looking back, it was ridiculous to think he would not be.
"Blue," she said, "I am directing the clouds. They know me and respond to me. In fifteen years everyone will know me as the clouds do. And they will respond to me. All of them will."
Mr. Blue, returned to the bus station from his reverie. He shook his gaze free from the past. "Son," Mr. Blue said. "Son, it's been thirteen years, give or take a month or so. In two years everything will be different. She will emerge. And we will all either become that gator or those clouds. Mark my words."
That was the last thing Mr. Blue said to me before I rose from the barber's chair, handed him his payment, and walked into the early morning darkness. Since then, without fail, I have returned every three weeks to see him. Since then I’ve also crossed off each day on a wall calendar beside my bed.
Two years is not a lot of time. I need to be prepared.
I’ve also found myself telling my friends about Mr. Blue, working him into conversations, inviting the people closest to me to take a risk and visit the bus station in the dead of the night.