Johnny the barber used to cut my father’s hair

            On Saturday afternoons, twice a month

 

            When I was overbushy dad would drag me along

            This didn’t happen much

            But it was much more often than I liked

 

            We were always last

            A good way, my father said repeatedly,

            To start a Saturday night

 

            I kept my mouth shut

            It wasn’t worth arguing with dad

            About things like that

            Johnny must have been pretty good

            At what he did – for adults at least –

            Because my father always looked the same

            After he came out, only neater

 

            That’s the trick, dad told me more than once,

            Of a good haircut

 

            For me, however, it was cut rate all the way:

            I went from lots to little in the time it took

            For Johnny to clip one of his cigars

 

            Which he used to smoke all day long

            So that the barber shop from the outside

            Looked like a Turkish bath

            And inside smelled like a forest fire

            (At least what I imagined them to be –

            I hadn’t been to Turkey ever, and a forest only once,

            Which wasn’t burning)

 

            Sometimes we came a little early

            Because Johnny liked to talk –

            Politics, religion, sports, you name it,

            Which handicapped a two-way conversation

            No matter who was in the chair

 

            You see, Johnny was always

            Nudging a patron’s head this way and that

            With his knuckles so his comb and scissors

            Had the angle right to buzz and fly around

 

            Once I saw him nudge a little extra hard

            When someone tried to disagree with him

            About FDR, his hero

 

            He never had to worry about my father, though           

 

            Dad liked listening, especially when Johnny

            Talked Big Bands, and grunted a lot

            Because nodding would have interfered

            And it was hard to speak while

            Johnny had the razor out

            To trim the back and sides

 

            For some reason Johnny always puffed his chest up

            When they got to Harry James

 

            And no matter how excited he became

            He always kept an eye on me

            So that I never made it past the covers

            Of the magazines

 

            One grey afternoon he tapped my father’s shoulder

            With the comb, the signal he was done

 

            And then the puffs and voices started flurrying while they stood –

            Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and

            Harry too, of course, until they came to Bunny Berrigan

 

            That’s where things got weirder

            Johnny turned the ‘Open’ sign around to ‘Closed’

            Pulled down the blinds

            And disappeared into a backroom without bothering to

            Sweep up all the hair

 

            When he returned he had a trumpet

            And began to blow our ears off with things like

            ‘The Song of India’ and ‘Ciribiribin’

            (which I can’t hardly pronounce even now)

 

            My dad grinned and they started in again

            On Berrigan, and when Johnny paused

            After the intro to ‘I Can’t Get Started’

            I discovered that my father had a voice

 

            They must have sung and played the song

            A hundred times

 

            Outside it grew dark

 

            It was too late for my haircut when they stopped

            Too late for me to join my friends

            At the James Bond movie I’d been dying to see

            But didn’t seem so big a deal to miss

 

            When we got back home

            My mom was fuming over cold spaghetti

            While my father sacrificed his appetite

            To dust his records off

 

            In the to and fro between the two of them

            I helped myself to thirds and fourths

 

            Happy that I’d kept my hair for one more week at least

 

            And wondering what happens to a person

            Who grows up