The Barber of DeVille

The small barbershop was right out of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry (think Floyd)…..a red and white striped rotating pole, windows with painted words on them, the smell of talcum and disinfectant, wooden venetian blinds, a mirrored wall, glass containers filled with scissors and combs soaking in bright blue Barbicide, and two old fashioned red and silver barber chairs. When it was my turn, the old man put a fancy upholstered board across the armrests for me to sit on, a paper collar around my neck, and a cloth cape. When he was done he brushed me all over with talcum powder. A large framed print of the dogs playing poker and smoking cigars was the coolest art I had ever seen. The coke “machine” on the floor was an antique even for those days. Inside a metal lidded box, the 6 oz. bottles rested in cold circulating water with their necks trapped by a pair of metal rods that snaked back and forth. You slid a bottle around the track until it got to the end where it would let go for a nickel. The use of vending machines was not allowed in my family. But the best thing about a visit to the barbershop was the luxurious blessed cool air from the window unit. I could have sat in that room all day long. I think some of the old men did just that.

The shop closed a few years later so my mom drove me up Telephone Road and dropped me off with the motor running in the middle of a row of bars, dance halls, and strip joints with names like The Owl Lounge, The Four Aces, Roseland, etc. It sounds sketchy, and it was, but the truth is that it was on the same stretch as The Kolache Shop, Wieners (family clothes), the pony rides, and the Santa Rosa Theater. The crusty parking areas had an odd assortment of decrepit pick-ups, town and country family wagons, and Cadillac Coup de Villes that we would call pimped out in this century. My new barbershop was very dark inside. The walls were paneled with fake wood and hung with stuffed fish….real stuffed fish. The barbers and patrons were thirty-something to forty-ish, listened to country music, smoked, drank beer, and were pretty rough around the edges. The coffee table was piled with two kinds of magazines….fishing and detective stories. Some of them showed photos of murder victims at the scene…think of the photographer played by Jude Law in Road to Perdition. One day, I was astonished to discover a photo of my own maternal Grandfather in one of them! He had been the coroner of Jefferson County several years earlier. In those days it was not a medical job in small towns but one that was filled by whoever owned the local funeral parlor or a station wagon in which to transport the occasional corpse. I always wondered what the family of the coroner thought about that. The most fascinating thing was the shady graphic art on the covers of the pulp fiction magazines. They all had the same theme….women with pinup figures, flowing manes, wearing the tattered remains of clothing, tied to something, and being whipped by Nazis. Whaaaaa? Later in life I realized why it was always Nazis. If you are disgusting enough to print sexually violent images but you don't want the public to burn your door down, blame it on a Nazi. Everyone hated them already. It’s not the publisher’s fault, it’s that dang Nazi on the cover. One day I opened one and there was no story inside about Nazis. Thank goodness but still only a small favor for the woman on the cover.

Overall, I had no objections to that shop but forty years later I said, “Mom, we have to talk about your choice of barbershops.” Her explanation, “I just started driving, it was the first barbershop I came across, and no woman in her right mind would get out of the car on that stretch of Telephone Road.” “Ya think?”

I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing. - Johnny Carson

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. - Mark Twain