The Barber

The Barber

It’s a hard and harried world when you’ve got any sort of Midas touch. There is no monkey’s paw without its curse and you’d be hard-pressed to find even a single fair-dealing jin within a three day’s ride of the court of Harun al-Rashid. From Adam to Faust, everybody wants to be so damn special until the are.

Some buy lottery tickets; the fortunate majority lose and retain their dreams of surfeit. A few win, though. Poor bastards. We’ve all heard about what happens to them: near bankrupt and selling the double-wide they bought their momma out from under her to make their monthly hair plug installments; waylaid by brigand med school students who surgically flense their newly-installed 22-karat skeleton before melting it down to piratical doubloons stamped with the staff of Asclepius; drawn and quartered in the gorilla enclosure they built in their suburban backyard for trying to intervene in a romantic dispute between two silverbacks, Klaus and Hildebrand, over their mutually intended lady-love Brunhilda.

Some petition the gods for luck at cards while others do their gambling in the dice halls of love, the cockpit of fame. A lot of people manage to go an entire lifetime wanting nothing more or better than a great big pile of money. I remember this story (I think I read about it in The Atlantic in an article titled Business Diogenes though it might just as likely have been a dream I had once) about a mad iron magnate. He lived in the sewers across the street from the eighty-story glass and steel office tower with his name on it. He lived on the scraps of catering trays left over from meetings, drank nothing but breakroom coffee, and cut his own hair until he was arrested for smashing a department store window for a new suit in the middle of the afternoon on a busy street. He probably could have paid off the cops with a fraction of a pittance of his vast wealth but would rather have died in the asylum where he would soon be sent than pay a bribe.

The truly unfortunate, though, are those who are marked out for fortune by malign destiny, who stumble into terrible gifts witlessly and at no fault of their own. This is one of their stories.

-

David was a barber. He had been a barber for a long time but had worked almost every job at least once. One Saturday, he sat down with a notepad and tried to list every job he had ever worked. After an hour of jotting and pursing his brow, he had thirty-eight items on his list: warehouses, deli counters, construction sites, paying gigs. He had driven a courier van, sold knives door to door, handed out samples of Oreos in a hairnet. But he was a barber now.

He liked his work and most of the people he met. He liked the way they all different from the way everyone else talked. He liked the conversations that repeated several times a day every day and the ones that were so bizarre he filed them away in the back of his mind so he could repeat them to his wife or bandmates later. He liked the way his hands and mind could work so separately from each other through the meandering hours of an average day of human heads. He even kind of liked the assholes or didn’t mind them much at least. The difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut is about two weeks. Between a good customer and a bad customer, he figured, it’s only about twenty minutes. Why worry?

David had been cutting hair all day. It had been a tolerable day in that it had passed entirely without event. He was giving his last haircut of the day to a regular who came in every couple of weeks for a trim. They had talked for a few minutes about their weekend plans before lapsing into a familiar quiet. David paused for a moment, set his scissors aside, and took a look out of the window at the setting sun and fast-moving clouds. In a moment of languid pareidolia, he scanned the clouds and saw one, lit gold from the bottom, that looked like a pair of Lamassu, as fine and whole as the day they were carved, sailing through the sky, through time and sky, straight from Assyria and into his heavy eyes. An uncanny feeling came over him and he shuddered a little. He tapped his phone, switched to the next song on his CUTTIN HAIR playlist, and finished up the trim.

While he was shaking the fine coating of hair off of the barber’s cape and onto the floor, David noticed his client was looking intently at the new haircut.

“Damn, David. This is a good haircut.”

“Thanks, man! I try not to do a really shitty job every tenth cut and I guess today was just your lucky day.”

“I’m serious. This is really good. I look like a movie start.”

“Oh, you were real purdy when you walked in, I can’t take credit for that.”

“Well, anyway, I owe you one.”

“Ok Tiger, good luck, take ‘er easy, see you in a few weeks.”

The customer tipped him a twenty and left the shop trippingly. David swept up smiling but with a slightly ponderous, suspicious tilt at the corner of his mouth.

The next morning, David was opening up the shop. It was slow for the first few hours. He put on An American Werewolf in London and managed to watch most of it. Everyone that came in and sat in his chair marveled at his work when he was done, though, and gave him astounding tips.

Around noon, David got a text from the regular he’d cut the hair of the day before. “Dude, I met this person at a bar last night and they demanded I tell you that the haircut you gave me got me laid.” “Nice! You should leave a review.”

David spent the rest of the day awash in free-flowing plaudits and fistfuls of cash tips. Even a blind pig finds an acorn, he thought as he left the shop at the end of his shift to ride home on his single speed and pet his cat. It would be his last sweetly normal evening.

He was scheduled to close the next day and, when he arrived on that cloudless, bright blue afternoon, he found that there was a long line outside the door of the shop. As he U-locked his bike to the usual light pole, he could hear the restless crowd stir and whisper, “there he is” and “it’s him.”

He didn’t, couldn’t know that every person he had given a haircut to the day before had had sex with at least one person immediately after. Word spread fast. As David walked up, one of the other barbers that worked in the shop was leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette. With a curious smile, his coworker informed David that they were all there for him. He flicked the ash off his cigarette and wished David luck.

You don’t take walk-in customers for long when you’re a more powerful fertility god than Priapus. First, you get an offer from the best salon in town. Before you know it, you’re shuttling from New York to LA cutting hair in the homes of the rich and famous, then the richer and famouser until, finally you’re only bookable by the truly powerful whose faces you’ll never see on TV and whose names you can’t Google. It wasn’t long before all of this stopped being cool to David. More and more, he found himself in too-bright rooms where no music played and big men with Kalashnikovs stood on either side of the door. More and more, he found himself looking over his shoulder for the desperate, the ruined, the obsessed who loved him, hated him, envied him, longed for his touch, wanted him dead as idol or idolater. He became hideous in his wife’s eyes – a conjurer, a freak – and she left him. He drank too much and fell asleep on his priceless couch in front of his wafer-thin TV as it vomited reruns of old sitcoms and black and white movies. He’d stopped watching anything else since he’d seen his own face on the tabloid news. That seemed like a long time ago now, though. Now his hands shook. Sometimes they shook too much to hold a comb. But he cut on. He didn’t look in the mirror anymore. He didn’t bother measuring sideburns. What could it possibly matter?

How does this story end? You really want to know? Reader, get ahold of yourself. You’re not really mean or perverse. Don’t stare into the sun, you know it’s not good for you. You know this can’t end well. The gods don’t take their gifts back. Avert your eyes as Icarus plunges into the sea. Kill ambition in its crib or

suffer, like Daedalus in the heart of the labyrinth, more years than you could count or want.