I drove down to Pine Bluff to find my grandmother’s gravestone last week. She was buried next to my grandfather in the oldest cemetery in the city, wedged between civil war soldier’s and pioneers. It had been six years since I had been to the graveyard, six years I had roamed the country and world and this was my first trip back “home.”
I drove down Poplar Street before it passed the old Sears Building and the Little League baseball diamond and stopped in front of an old two room building. The white paint was chipped and peeling, the giant plate glass window was duct taped, and the lettering on the sign so faded it was hard to make out the name. But the candy stripe pole next to the padlocked door was the same. The Barber shop.
My grandfather had gone here for twenty years before the Barber got Parkinson’s and couldn’t cut hair anymore. He took my brother and I twice in the 70’s.
For those of you who don’t remember that decade, my mom was a hippie. Long hair, granola and peace man. She let our hair grow out. My grandfather hated it. So when I was seven he took us to the Barber Shop and we waited our turn.
The smell was dusty and antiseptic, a combination of cleaning alcohol he used on the combs and cheap deodorant the barber used. There were magazines from the 60’s and beyond scattered on two tables, and a four foot tall Coke machine that only served 6 ounce bottles. Papaw promised to buy us each a Coke if we were good, and so we were. Coke was a treat we didn’t often get.
The barber finished off a customer in his 60’s, pocketed the folded bill the man handed to him and ushered me into the chair. The cushion was leather and worn, soft from years of sliding in and out, the brown color faded to tan in the impression of derriere. He tossed the sheet around my neck and cinched it tight. I know he made jokes or asked about my plans, because that’s what older people do to young kids to make them feel more mature.
My hair was below my shoulders, parted down the middle and brushed back on both side. He grabbed a buzzing razor and in seconds took it down high and tight.
It was a perfect haircut for a youth from the 50’s. My Papaw loved it.
He sat me in the waiting room chair while I watched my five year old brother get scalped too. I kept staring in the mirror at the strange kid looking back at me, a pale skin of hairline etched around his head.
It was over in less than ten minutes for the two of us. We got our Cokes, the kind made with real sugar and the original formula that so many of us remember and still dream about. Papaw gave the barber two folded bills in a handshake, and two nickels for bottle deposits and we left.
My mom cried when she saw us.
She screamed at my grandfather.
We moved away to Birmingham a couple of months later. Looking back through the lens of time I can see it was punishment for the haircut, for taking the control out of her hands and maybe even a hippie act of rebellion against authority. We moved from there to Atlanta, then back to Pine Bluff again a few more months after that.
Maybe my mom just wanted us out of town until our hair grew back a little.
Funny how memories are sparked by a song, or smell or the sight of a dilapidated building on the side of the road. I dropped my car in gear and drove toward the cemetery.
Chris Lowry Books 