The barbershop is dazzling. Long slabs of yellow Formica jut out the length of one mirrored wall and the width of another like quick-lunch counters in a restaurant. It’s a beauty parlor here, bright as a plastic surgeon’s consulting room. Boxes of Kleenex, jewelers’ trays of combs, dop kits, big pink sponges, blue satin barber sheets, magnums of cologne, an assortment of brushes with tufts sleek as swatches of mink and chinchilla, a definitive collection of Band-Aids, eyebrow pencils like the city desk at Women’s Wear Daily. There are laquers, shallow dishes of tint, a stand of Q-Tips upright in a clear box like a forest above the snowline. There are nests of wig, surgical adhesive, pots of mascara, blushers, eyelash curlers set on their sides and curving into each other like spoons in a service for eight. There are logjams of emery board, hot stringents and cold creams, fingernail clippers like tools in a surgery. Triple strands of fluorescent tube marquee the mirrors. I am excited here: I wish I could smell the lotions and shampoos and suddenly I lift a Max Factor pan stick and lick it with my tongue as if it were a kid’s push-up ice cream.
Avila sits amused and content in a barber chair and a woman in white slacks makes a few passes at him with her scissors and comb. As she steps back to appraise him, I accuse him of his handsomeness; I tell him that his bone structure is his fate.
“What? No. I am very nondescript.”
I see myself caromed off the mirrors, fractured in space like a break shot in pool. I see the checkered reflection of my checkered jacket. It is expensive, even new, but it is gross. I have no taste, only hunger. I have never been fashionable, and it’s astonishing to me that so much has happened in the world. The changes I perceive leave me breathless. I am more astonished by what remains to happen. I have erratic, sudden premonitions of new packaging techniques — breakfast cereal in spray cans, insulated boxes of frozen beer, egg yolk in squeezable tubes. Avila’s barber sheet could be a shroud. I can’t stand looking at myself, so I pop into an empty chair at Avila’s side.
A barber sets his newspaper aside. He approaches me. “Haircut?”
“Leave me be,” I say too loudly. “Can we talk here?” I ask Avila.
“Of course we can,” he tells me mildly.
“ ‘Of course we can.’ Counselor, counselor, what a style you have! Yes, I like it. Niggerizing the neighborhood, spilling confidence like soup.” Going on the offensive shakes off a little of my passivity. “What a professional ethic you got there! ‘Can we talk?’ ‘Of course. What, is it a public library that we should lower our voices?’ Right. Smell that fart? I claim that. That came out of Alexander’s ragtime asshole, Main’s brown bellows. Why should I deny the obvious? No two men’s farts smell alike in the entire universe. Like snowflakes and fingerprints. Learned counsel’s point is well taken. We can talk here.”
“What are you on about?”
“Yes, well, we never did business till now, or you’d know my thoroughness, my eye for detail, my fastidious methods. I take more pains than aspirin. Tomorrow is April first, lest we forget.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Withers is to appear in court.” I raise my voice so that everyone in the shop can hear. “That’s Withers, the banker. Eugene Withers who could not make good on his alimony payments of twenty-five hundred dollars a month and who was thirty thousand dollars in arrears when our paths crossed in the courts. Eugene Withers, the president of Ohio First Federal Savings Bank, lest we forget. Incidentally, if any of you barbers, manicurists or shoeshine guys do business with him I would suggest a small run on his bank. Pass it on. Withers.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Avila says. “Where do you think you are?”
“He’s not in town.”
“Well, he’s probably upstate on business. Why don’t you wait for me in my office?”
“You know this for fact that he’s upstate on business? I’m not his ex-wife. I have no fond memories of President Withers in bed to tide me over while the arrears pile up. I call and call his bank. ‘Not here,’ they say, ‘we’ll take a message.’ Where upstate is he? I’ll put in a little person-to-person.”
“Charleen, call the guard, please,” Avila tells his barber. “I want this man out of here.”
“The guard? Call the guard? Charleen, dear, guards are my bread and butter. From baby sitters to electrocutioners, they’re all in my pocket, Charleen. Andy Frain stood up at my wedding. Call, call him, we’re old friends. Now, lawyer, the man’s trial is tomorrow. I want to be there to meet his train, his boat, his private plane. If he doesn’t show, I’ll look him up. See my gun? You want me to make him an April Fool?”
“You’d better leave, I think.”
“You give me a number where I can reach him.”
“I’ll see to it that your license is revoked.”
“My license? How are you going to do that? How are you going to revoke carte blanche? You think the system’s an Indian giver? Listen, LL.D., you could be disbarred easier. Poor Withers. Twenty-five hundred a month. Some lawyer. Twenty-five hundred a month for a broad who went down on every depositor in Ohio First Federal Savings. She gave it away to every guy who opened an account. In all the branches. Or are you talking about my license for the gun? I got papers on it like a naturalized citizen or the warrantee on your toaster. I got instruments for it like General Eisenhower’s honorable discharge.”
The man stares at me; he’s never seen such a performance in all his fancy practice. But suddenly I have run out of steam. I finish lamely. “Make sure he’s around. See to Withers.”
In the lobby I wait for each of the elevators to appear. I promise myself that should the old man be in one of them I will buy his trick, but the man is gone.
Back on the street. He’s tired. He’s made very little money for a Monday. It’s late, but not late enough to call the desk sergeants. When is the best time to call? Midnight when they’ve closed the books? Too late. The others will have skimmed the cream. The only sure thing would be to buy all the desk sergeants, but that would be prohibitive. Best to make it almost a social call, work it that way. Too much money shouldn’t change hands. If bondsmen had a trade journal I’d write a paper on it. This afternoon in Covington they voted to cooperate. Threats were made in my absence. My little leverage is leaking.
The street has changed. Not so much money here, not as much taste, but even more style. The shops burst with an egoism of the present tense, the bright letters of the bright wood signs molded in a sausage calligraphy like those quick, clever strokes that leg and backbone animals in balloon-blowing acts. Or black, no capitals, a svelte, spare geometry of case. He remembers these shops, could tell you stories, recalls like a perfect witness their former, failed incarnations. The woman’s shoe store, Bootique, was once Kefauver’s campaign headquarters, then a bookie joint with empty cigar boxes and tire irons half-heartedly showing form’s flag in a casual, lip-service hypocrisy in the front window. After that nothing at all for a time — though once, initially, Tyson’s Liquors, as he still thinks of it, really. Most of the shops won’t last the year. But never till now, the witness thinks, so uniform, locked into style’s faddish contagion, a terminal domino theory. What discrepancies he perceives between will and doom, these tenants’ signs like life’s campaign buttons. He looks for reasons but sees only the irrational, a self-conscious hedonism. The signs, these shops, this business and that enterprise, this landscape, seasonal as the pictures on one of his calendars, are all jokes. The toy shop, with its expensive Creative Playthings and Chinese boxes and big stuffed animals and folk dolls and folk tops and folk sticks and folk hoops and folk balls and miniature green and black boilers of real steam engines for curator kids who never existed, is called — in rainbow letters, yes, it is the rainbow sequence: yellow catching green, green blue and so on, on the glass—“Kinder Garden.” And the butcher shop, sawdust on the floor like cereal and the butchers in boaters, and skinned, unrefrigerated rabbits, plucked chickens and carcasses upside down on hooks that could hold coats, is “The Meating House.” A fabric shop: “Knits and Bolts.” An Italian restaurant: “Pizza Resistance.” “Sole Food”: a fish ’n chips. “Diaspora Travel.” A head shop: “Headquarters.” A cinema: “The Last Picture Show.” “Save Face”: a beauty parlor. A health food store: “Mother Nature’s.” “The Basic Premise”: a realtor. A carry-out chicken place: “Marcho Polio.” “Rock ’n Roll”: a lapidary and bakery. A tie shop: “Get Knotted.” A rug store: “Underfoot.” “Captain’s Courageous”: a men’s hat shop. A watch repairman’s: “Time Out.” “Howard Johnson’s.” (How the hell did that get there?) Even a small moving company: “Gutenberg’s Movable Types.”