After we move from Brooklyn to Lynbrook, when I am eight, I get my haircuts at Danny’s Barber Shop, a stand-alone cottage. I see Danny giving haircuts as I walk past the shop on my way home from school each day, except when the Closed Wednesdays sign hangs in the curtained window.
I mark the passing of time through Danny: seeing him cutting hair means another school day has passed; if the window is curtained, another week is gone but I am as far from the next weekend as I am from the previous one; if I am in Danny’s chair, three weeks have elapsed.
Danny shoots the breeze with grown-up customers about high school sports. I imagine someday tossing looping curveballs and Danny saying, “That kid had them falling on their backsides yesterday. Yeah, he comes in here.”
Danny molds a pompadour using a gluey hair cream called School, which he says will “train” my hair. I don’t want to train my hair like that, but my mother buys a bottle from him. I only use School at home for my groundbreaking—for 1958—Elvis impersonation, which also features my father’s old stringless F-hole guitar and sideburns fashioned from my sister’s mascara.
After a few years, Danny’s son starts appearing. A gangly young man with a trained pompadour, he sits in the newly-installed second barber chair and watches his father. One day, when I arrive, Danny’s son, wearing a pale green smock just like Danny’s, is cutting someone’s hair in the second chair.
As Danny clips away at my hair, he talks high school basketball with one of the men hanging out. Danny’s son interjects, “That kid sure can rebound,” as Danny rubs School into my hair.
In September of 1965, I leave for college with a fresh haircut from Danny—but no School treatment—and don’t get it cut during my Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, although my mother keeps saying, “Take a haircut while you’re home.” During January intersession, I cross the street as I near Danny’s shop so they won’t see me and my long hair. When I finally do get a haircut that spring, I go to a new shop in the next town with a sign in the window: We respect long hair.
A few years after college, I pass by Danny’s and am strangely startled to see Danny and son giving haircuts—to think that during all those days, months, and years while my life was radically changing and the country was going into and out of convulsions, this father and son were giving haircuts every day except for Wednesdays and Sundays in the little cottage a few yards from their front door.
I assume that through it all my brother (sixteen years younger than I), has been going to Danny’s. I ask my mother whether Danny or Danny’s son cuts my brother’s hair and if they have come to respect long hair.
My mother tells me that my brother no longer goes to Danny’s because one day she overheard Danny make a remark about Jews, which she won’t repeat. She paid Danny, told him she was Jewish and was deeply offended, and announced she would never bring her son there again. Danny said he was sorry, that he had thought she was Irish.
Ten years later, visiting my family, I stop in the luncheonette on Danny’s corner to pick up a newspaper. Danny’s son, now middle-aged but still looking boyish, is sipping coffee at the counter. As I thumb through magazines, I watch Danny’s son put some coins on the counter. “See you tomorrow, Bill,” he says and ambles out, the proud part-owner of a small piece of a small town.
I trail him the half-block to Danny’s. Danny’s son opens the door, puts on his pale green smock, and is soon waving a kid into the first chair. I think about his life giving haircuts, talking high school sports, perhaps even spouting nonsense about Jews when no Jews seem to be present. What a day of pride and loss it must have been when he took over that first chair. I wonder if he lives in the house behind the shop with Danny, or if Danny is even alive. I have a flash of Danny sipping vodka on an ocean cruise. I wonder if there is a Mrs. Danny’s Son or a Danny Grandson. I have no Mrs. and I have no son, but I have been to lots of places and done lots of things.
I run my fingers through my hair—lightly glazed with mousse—and realize it is almost as short as it was after Danny got his scissors into it for the last time.
Thank you for this post -- which, like so many of yours, reveals an extraordinary memory for detail and the ability to weave the details into a narrative. In my high school and college years in Washington Heights (just two blocks shy of Inwood), more than once I was in conversation with an older stranger who suddenly made a comment about the Jews. Usually it was either that they controlled Wall Street or the Communist Party in Moscow, or both, though the two named entities were mortal enemies. I was surprised, because I always thought I looked Jewish. But who knows? When a cab driver in Paris asked me if I was from England, I took it as a compliment, as their view of Americans is that none of us can speak a word of French. For what it's worth, I have had a series of wonderful Italian barbers in the last twenty years -- born there I mean. The place I go to now, three men are from Italy, and on a day when I got some good news, about a year ago, I started singing "Volare" as I exited and they all joined in. Knew all the words, too. Nel blu dipinto di blu, / Felice di stare lassù. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | April 03, 2015 at 12:13 AM