Uncle Jay's Barber Shop

Dad wasn't bald, but he never had much hair. I don't know where he got his hair cut regularly, but I remember that a trip to Cedar Grove, just down the pike a ways, was rare, which I thought--even when I was just a kid--just a little odd. Uncle Jay had a little barber shop on Main, fifteen minutes away--one chair--no waiting, or so it seemed to me, but we didn't go all that often.

He'd put a plank across the arms of the barber chair and set me down there when I was a little shyster. He had an electric razor or two, but I don't remember the buzz as much as the patterned swish his scissors made when he'd pull a hank of my hair to shorten it. By the time I cared how my hair looked, I don't remember going to Uncle Jay's, but I have no reason to believe that he did anything less than a stellar job. But he worked slowly--that I remember because he loved telling stories.

Uncle Jay was more portly than Dad and had more hair. He wore it plastered down like Capone, but nothing about him made me uneasy or fearful. Whether I was in the chair or awaiting my turn, the two of them would talk. In fact, I don't remember him ever talking to me.

But Uncle Jay was a story-teller. At family reunions, he could own the living room because once he got going, it was story after story of the Schaap family at one church or another (Grandpa was a preacher). He'd recite shenanigans in such detail they made me nervous, little stories of naughty boys, my Dad among 'em. The relatives loved it. Once you got him going, Uncle Jay was the beloved highlight. Maybe a few hymns too, and some good, solid spiritual talk. But if we could get him to talk, Uncle Jay was the main course.

Dad didn't pull that storytelling chain when we were in Uncle Jay's barber chair, but one story I remember. I was in the chair, maybe eighth grade or so, old enough to feel the push and pull of some inward yearning I couldn't quite yet identify. It was something that had happened right there, in the shop, when an Asian woman, Korean, I'm guessing, because some local boys had come back from service with Korean wives. She'd brought her little boy in for a haircut, Jay said, first time he'd seen either of them.

The kid didn't wasn't wild about the barber, but, like photographers, barbers have tricks to keep their itty-bitty customers from bawling. That Uncle Jay wouldn't have developed a repetoire wouldn't surprise me. The only customers I'd ever seen in the chair, other than the Oostburg Schaaps, were silver-haired.

Anyway, this boy, not liking his first haircut, cried and cried some more. Uncle Jay looked at my dad to make sure he was listening. Mom got up from the worn chair and spoke her own magic words to her little boy, in Korean, of course, but mom's soothsaying had no immediate effect. 

I'm sitting there in Uncle Jay's chair, a kid myself back then, but at the age when forces far beyond my power were at work, sharpened in me, I can't help but think, by a Calvinist culture that loved singing  seven whole senses' worth of "Be careful little eyes what you see."

So I'm getting a haircut, in the chair, and my Uncle Jay, as he does frequently, stops what he's doing, looks into the wall-size mirror behind him and speaks to the image of my dad. This time, what he says gets my attention.

This Korean mom, he claims, comes up to her little boy, "stands right here beside him while I'm still cutting his hair," he says. She opens her shirt or blouse and pulls out one breast, pulls it right out and slaps her nipple into that little jigger's mouth. In the mirror, I can see him mimic the sucking. Honestly.

The little boy stops crying, Uncle Jay says. In the mirror he's saying all of this. I can't see Dad. Thank goodness he can't see me. 

Uncle Jay is giggling himself. He's at his finest. 

I don't know where to look. I don't know that a female breast had ever been referred to or spoken of before. With my friends, sure, but not with my Dad and my uncle. It blew me away to think my dad was sitting right there and seeing a woman's breast in his mind was almost beyond the pale. 

Uncle Jay was already in road gear. See, it wasn't just that bare naked breast that got aired, but there was this matter of clean up. The little boy's cut hair come to rest right there on that white breast. He had a whisk broom he often used, he said, but it seemed wrong to some stiff brush. Dad was giggling, both of them obligious to an adolescent boy sitting there, hearing the whole lurid tale.

Uncle Jay decided he'd just blow off the hair off that bared breast. So down he goes, mimicking. He purses his lips and blows lightly--"puff, puff." My dad was in full guffaw now, and I was totally abashed, thankful for that mirror. I was flat-out embarrassed to hear my dad and my uncle talk about boobs. I was too young and too much of a Calvinist kid to laugh, and I was shocked they did.

We didn't go to Uncle Jay for haircuts very often. Just once in a while we'd go, when Dad decided it was time again to visit his older brother. I don't know why he didn't make it a practice, but he didn't.

And me? I'll never forget the day I sat there in the chair and would have, if I could have, quietly just slipped out beneath Jay's story and Dad's guffaws, to go find someplace to sit and think about the story I'd just heard, about that woman pulling out her breast right there in front of my uncle Jay.

My word. 

There's more this story.