Chapter 12
But that’s how it is for us.
There’s a bucket up ahead spitting a big-ass plume of dirty white clouds. Cars ahead, cars behind, car across. Shit, you could start a squad — hoop, football, soccer (though we don’t play no soccer in these parts) — with the fools waiting for the shop clerk to flip the sign, and let us in, and scrawl our names on a list nobody but nobody but her can touch. Niggers ready to Olympic-joust for first in the chair. When the clippers are cold, sharp, precise, before a showing late can mean a whole afternoon on ice. Believe me when I tell you, fresh cuts are serious business, especially at The Cut Above, which is damn near an institution. Soon as the sign flips we (the we being me, KJ, and Canaan) surge across the street with the rest. The barbers in prep mode, zipping their smocks, oiling their clippers, tooling their stations. The clerk puts us down on the list and sends my bros searching for seats.
The shop meanwhile fills.
See you got your nappy-headed brothers with you, one barber says, the resident shop funnyman.
Damn, homie, I say. Hatetrocity at the crack of dawn? Let us live.
You know me, he says.
Yep, I say. Your hate runneth over.
My bad, he says, twisting the top off a bottled juice. But I wouldn’t have to say it if you brought them in here more often. Your bros be lookin like Nigerians by the head by the time you think they need a cut.
Gimme me six feet, I say, and ask Famous, the shop’s manager, to get a handle on his workers. Famous, by the way, is this type of guy: a being-caught-without-a-fresh-fade-is-a-crime type of guy. A man after my grooming heart.
Mr. Funnyman asks about his first client and the clerk says it’s baby bro.
C’mon, young Kunta. Hope you don’t break no teeth on my clippers.
The clerk unmutes the TV in the lounge and teases the shop with a commercial of kids singing. The rest of the lounge, a couple dudes haranguing who’s the best high school hooper in the state. Near them this tight-jawed quasi-mute, a dude they say got a bad habit of taking stuff that ain’t his. A handful of unmentionables. And it’s one of them (thought I was the only one who caught it) glimpses a white girl jogging past the shop. Look at that shit, he says. Got pork Prefontaine-ing in the hood now.
Big deal, someone says.
Damn right, dig deal, someone says. It’ll be marathons next. Million-man dog walk after that.
Why ya’ll mad? someone says. Make it easier to knock the pork.
Pork, what’s pork?
White meat, fool.
Who wants that?
All the smart niggers, that’s who. Trust the porkologist. You ain’t lived till you had a taste.
Man, you silly.
Sheeit. Knocking a white broad is a black man’s civil right. Even Malcolm approved.
Malcolm approved, my ass.
Real talk, boss. Check the history books.
The clerk stomps into the lounge. She’s the girth of an NFL lineman (a few pounds off, no more). She don’t need to do more than wrench her lips for fools to quiet right the fuck down.
It don’t matter why they’re here, they’re here, Famous says. You see them coffee shops and boutiques and bookstores down the block. Who you think they built them for?
Famous got his nickname cause someone said he lived life like a movie. Most people would say that’s extra, but I say, a life with no stories, what’s the point?
KJ’s ambivalent about his cut. Looks to me, with his shoulders hiked. My bro is always demurring, always deferring. But since it’s a 0.00 percent of reclaiming a vacated seat, it won’t be no assurance from intimate distance today. Give him a low one-lengther, I say from my perch. Dude’s averse to cuts, I say.
Averse? the barber says. Averse! There you go with those SAT words. Man, don’t you know the shop got rules against that smart boy vocab?
Funnyman’s got jokes, but maybe it ain’t knee-slap. How else to explain dude on the other side who used to go to grade school with me, who used to get teased something terrible about his droopy eye, who spent recesses befuddled by chapter books, needed extra time on tests, and slogged the halls past the last bell with low ambition pinned to his chest like a Cub Scout badge? How else to explain, how now, like most of us other frauds, he plays like he’s too tough for TV, a muthafuckin man of steel. But hold up before you knock it. That’s how it is for us. How they made it. How it must be if we are at all to be. Cause how it is where you’re from, who knows, but around here, you’re either a soldier or a sanguine sucker.
Check it, though, deep down in the place sealed off from the world, what I know is, no civilian should have to be that tough.
Someone mentions white broads again. Calls up a snicker.
I was just talkin to my grandmama about it, Famous says. She said it used to be nothing but white folks living here. Said we used to be out there by where Delta Park is. Then, after the flood, we moved on this side and white folks moved out. So really they’re just reclaiming the neighborhood. Don’t y’all watch the news? Didn’t ya’ll see the big story on gentrification?
Gentrifi-what? Famous. Not you too with SATs. We thought you was from the streets.
You fools can joke if you like, Famous says. But when ya’ll livin on the outskirts cause you can’t afford rent, see who’s haha’ing then.
Shit, send me to the burbs. That’s loose pork central.
You fools keep on, Famous says. And when they got Northeast under sovereign lock, watch how fast us niggers are extraterrestrials.
The bell sounds. A latecomer arrives. He gapes at the crush and walks right back out. Funnyman makes a show of snatching the cape off my brother.
The bell sounds. The hot-food-plate man strolls in and posts by the clerk’s desk. Good morning, my brothers, he says, and tips his brim. He reels off a menu: hash browns, grits, eggs, tuna melts, pancakes, French toast. Plates are five dollars, he says. But if you’re hungry and ain’t got it, get me back next go-round.
Damn, brotherman. You ain’t got no swine?
Now, now, now, my brother, he says. I do not encourage the black man’s consumption of the hog.
Brotherman scratches orders in a black pad and marches out to his truck. He whisks in with plates covered in foil and sweaty bottled juice. We appreciate the business, my brother, he says post every sale.
The clerk calls my turn for the chair. She stands up and stretches, and trust me, it’s a universe away from even a half-sexy sight. She calls my name for next in my barber’s chair, and I call KJ over to cover my seat.
What’s shaking with you, bro? says my barber.
Shit, I say.
Shit is right, he says, and swings me around. Look at that!
By that he means the girl in the threshold holding a little boy’s hand, the one dressed in spindly stilettos, a low-cut shirt, and jeans tight as a blood pressure cuff.
The off-duty stripper fit’s extra for my tastes, I say. But she might could on the late night.
True, true, he says.
He starts to prep. To say my barber works at his own speed would be a huge huge downplay. The homie’s slow as shit, but he’s also hella-skilled, which is mandate number one for me. Number two is, nothing I ever tell him gets retold.
Bro, I ain’t tryin to be in your business, he says, but I was ear-hustling and overheard some fools with your name in they mouth. And it wasn’t positive.
Forreal? I say.
Yeah, he says, somethin about you and a chick.
You catch a name? I say.
Nope, he says. Sure didn’t.
My barber used to live around the block from me when we lived in the house on Sixth. Back then he was cutting in his basement, shearing sharp-ass flattops in janky light. But I had to find a new barber for a sec when he moved. His people being one of the first in the neighborhood to sell off, to give up their place to white folks. This is why I mention to him my plan to buy the house.