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Antigonish
Review # 146
| George
McWhirter |
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Cover
by ShirLee Adamson
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The Dark Barber
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Perhaps his
stance, damaged leg crooked in one's direction, knee nudging one's
thigh as he does the back-and-sides, turns his scissors into crissed
scimitars, and the Kurd into Saladin's confrere, not a proper
Point Grey, Vancouver barber. Perhaps his thundercloud hair and
prow of a jaw, eyes daring every male on the street in to the
hirsute fricassee of his scissors - which cut upward because of
his stature, or if down, always from tiptoe - deter others from
making my discovery.
"He's incredible," I say to his partner.
Other customers, seated and waiting for the partner, take it as
a promo for the impaired. But my hair is thicker. My UFO,
the balding disc of white skin that floats overhead, the tonsure
I bear like an inadvertent monk, shrinks under the blades.
"If you like him, it happen," says
his Libyan partner and the Kurd grins. But do others in need of
a cut and follicular fill-up and fillip notice? They secrete their
noses in their tabloid as if it has men's perfume in the print.
And so, for many moons, like little boys, fellow
agers squirm in the chairs, their unease undoing what the Kurd
conjures.
The Libyan partner explains the djinn. "You
like him, more hair. You not, bit maybe fall out."
I watch, visit after visit, to see if squirmers
lose more than they paid for; I talk to them, find out their barber-shop
schedule - the finer the fringe, the more balding, the sooner
the visit - but I can't tell normally receding hair from hexed.
No matter. Where a fairy ring of flesh-a holy
circle-shone, I have a bristly thatch, a bit of Brad Pitt, which
my wife deems an implant and promptly pores over the Visa bills
and medical statements from our extended coverage.
"Can't he tell people?" I ask the partner.
"Tell? They think he crazy. And piss off
customer coming." I think of the poppies I threw onto the
rubbish heap at the back of a rented house across the lane. How
soon they seeded. They are not the heroin bearing kind that fill
the fields in Turkey, but they get looked at on the heap, as if
they belong to a noxious grow-op. Sometimes, I put down my nose
to test for scent, but poppies have none. In the barber's when
the scissors come up for my nose hairs, appearing aimed there
for me to smell, I expect brimstone or ambrosia, but sniff only
a hint of antiseptic wash from the vase where he plants his scissors,
the lobes of its finger holes to gape like empty metal petals.
We are some forty now who know, a select group
of believers under the majority's bald scrutiny in these fearful
times. On his behalf we swear he would not harm a hair of one's
head; on the contrary, his scissors sow as they snip, and we bow
our heads to unbare witness to our peers in the Point Grey Barber
Shop.
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