The Barber

I sat in the swiveling chair of a barber today for a haircut. I had been to the same shop years earlier and gotten satisfactory results from a hair clipper named Randy but today I was in the hands of an older fellow named Earl. I listened to him talk college football for a few final minutes with another customer and relaxed a little bit - I can talk college football with ease knowing even the most intense of discussions on the subject really have nothing to do with me at all.

After taking the seat and having cloth drawn about my neck, conversation began easily enough about the weather. I can avoid arguing too passionately about the weather as well so everything was just fine - it was exactly what strangers expect in passing time pleasantly and stereotypically.

But one thing somehow led to another and he had to tell me about growing up in a segregated town in the South.

"Their half was just called 'Niggertown' and that's what everybody called it. The blacks there called it Niggertown too - and it wasn't anything... I mean they could have called it Negro or Negra or whatever they liked but it was just called Niggertown..."

I have no idea what compels these confessions or admissions out of people that they feel comfortable taking their peculiar variety of mental bowel movement on my head but it feels like I have dealt with this sort of ugliness my entire goddamn life.

I looked again at Earl's crosses and all his articles of faith in the one-true Jesus, his Norman Rockwell prints and I suppressed a sigh. Maybe it's lonely to think there was something good about dividing people according to skin color or that it wasn't as bad as it sounds or whatever. Honestly I do not care. If ever there was a species I do not mind seeing go extinct, it is the white Anglo Saxon racist. Please do not bother clipping flowers to serve in their memorial...

Years ago, I once met another man named James, who, within less than two hours of meeting me one late night, decided to test how I felt about the "nigger problem" in two towns I had mentioned to him I had lived in. James had a look of intent on his face colored with meth addiction that scared me, so I just juggled him away from me as fast and as politely as I could. He pressed the nigger problem a little further just for fun, I guess, and then finally left on his two hour drive back home. James pulled over along the way for a nap, crashing from speed, and awoke to the highway patrol tapping on the window of his pickup truck with guns drawn. As it turned out, James was wanted in Louisiana for murdering people - niggers, of course - the distinction will certainly be made by him. For what is a nigger to a drug-addled racist with a gun?

I guess the barber was hoping I would say something affirming or reinforcing the message of his story. I was silent and embarrassed instead. From then on, the rest of the haircut was conciliatory - he genuinely liked black people. In fact, he knew a black man who married a white woman after she had divorced a homosexual man. And everybody was happy...