Fiction by Robert Morgan Fisher
Blaine’s father suggested they get a haircut together.
Blaine couldn’t believe it when they pulled up to a civilian shop. A haircut was something they usually did on base and cost about five bucks. This was a men’s salon, where hair was styled. All the rage in 1975, getting your hair styled. Blaine would’ve never expected his squared-away Air Force dad to go in for such an indulgence.
Nevertheless, there they were, in the dim, tacky, rococo red velvet sanctum of tonsorial decadence known as Le Man’s on the outskirts of Dover, Delaware. Blaine had been allowed to move away from the military buzzcuts of his youth. Base barbers did their best to accommodate the longer hair trend by offering exotic-sounding things like razor cuts and not laughing when Blaine asked to have his hair feathered back. Even his father, Lieutenant Colonel Abner Wilhite, now actually allowed his own hair to touch his ears.
Still, Blaine was shocked at the suggestion they get their hair styled. Shocked and pleased. The senior Wilhite had been referred to Le Man’s by a younger officer who said that Roy Deveaux was a pretty good barber and that it was really more like getting a haircut at your favorite watering hole. That Le Man’s featured a full, open bar for customers was all the Lieutenant Colonel needed to hear.
Roy Deveaux ran Le Man’s with Artie O’Shea, a hunched-over homunculus with white hair. Above Artie’s possum nose, a pair of pince-nez glasses—below, Kurt Vonnegut-style mustache. The two chain-smoked while they worked and moved with the glacial slowness of the terminally hungover. They probably should’ve posted a liquor license, but the fact that drinks were complimentary and only for adult customers seemed to constitute a legitimate loophole. No one complained. Blaine and his father walked in to find two boozehound barbers, still recovering from the night before, listening to an endless 8-track loop of The Mills Brothers Greatest Hits.
Roy was slim, swarthy with a bouffant brushed-back helmet of thick brown hair and mutton-chop sideburns. Bushy black eyebrows arched over squinting, tobacco-brown eyes. His sharp, straight nose gave him the look of a Volaré—as Blaine’s older sister Becky liked to describe Italian-American wise-guys who came off like Dean Martin singing that song. He wore short-sleeved shirts when he worked, so the heat was always turned up high in winter. On his right forearm, underneath the hair, a blurry tattoo of a bird with something in its talons, indecipherable writing above. He was classically handsome and cool in a retrograde way. Blaine assumed Roy had done time in prison.
The styling began with a shampoo. Blaine had never had another person (besides his mother when he was very young) shampoo his hair. He shut his eyes out of nervousness. When he lifted his right eyelid he saw an upside-down image of Roy smiling through a Benson & Hedges haze. Roy squinted while he massaged Blaine’s scalp. After a rinse and towel-off, the chair was cranked upright, swiveled and the actual cutting began.
I’d like it feathered back, said Blaine.
That was the latest look, feathered back and parted in the middle. Roy nodded, took a deep drag, rested the cigarette in a full ashtray, exhaling through his nose. Blaine’s father sat in a chair across the room, chatting volubly and sipping a martini while Artie O’Shea slowly nodded and trimmed.
What grade you in? mumbled Roy.
Ninth.
My daughter’s in ninth.
What’s her name?
Sailor.
Sailor Deveaux? I’ve heard about her! said Blaine.
In the mirror he saw Roy’s lips flatten into a straight line. Blaine was vaguely aware he had misspoken, that not only did his words come out all wrong, but they were not at all what he meant to say. Yet, he inexplicably dug the hole a little deeper with:
Everyone knows Sailor. And finally, the nosedive coup de grace: She gets around.
Blaine shifted awkwardly in his chair. Roy didn’t say anything, just kept cutting—albeit with a little more intensity than before. In the mirror, Dad wore a wounded look of embarrassed disbelief. Blaine averted his eyes.
On the drive home, Lt. Colonel Wilhite chewed his son out but good.
You never tell a man his daughter gets around for chrissake! He might’ve just heard this morning that she was knocked up or something.
Sorry, sir.
Blaine felt terrible. It was unlikely Sailor Deveaux was knocked up. She didn’t have a loose or wild reputation. She was very pretty and popular. What Blaine was trying to say (and failed spectacularly) was that Sailor Deveaux was totally out of his league. Blaine was completely infatuated with Sailor. Everyone was in love with Sailor Deveaux—that’s all Blaine was trying to communicate. The compliment, that he was among her legion of admirers, had caused him to bungle what were supposed to be earnest, benign words of praise.
Adding insult to injury: the haircut Roy gave Blaine was horrific.
Blaine looked like he was wearing a cabbage on his head.
His sister Becky laughingly described Blaine’s haircut: Albino Liza Minnelli—after sticking her head in a blender.
Serves you right, said his father. Serves you right.
At school, Blaine’s new haircut elicited howls of laughter in class, in the halls and at basketball practice.
He saw Sailor Deveaux in civics, but she looked right through him as usual. Sailor had Roy’s dark eyes, mulatto skin. Just the slightest hint of dusky peach fuzz extending down from where she looped long straight hair back over her ears—which she did with her thumbs every few minutes, a nervous habit. On a boy, that fuzz would be fully-developed sideburns; on Sailor it seductively hinted at the dark, soft prize nestled between her legs. Several times Sailor caught Blaine looking at her. She’d frown as he quickly pretended to look past, cheeks combusting into burning blush.
After a few weeks, people grew bored with making fun of Blaine’s hatchet job haircut. They gradually accepted it as a natural part of the freshman landscape, like a deformed tree.
Two months later Blaine’s father suggested they go back to Le Man’s for another styling. He wanted to get it right. But Blaine’s hair was once again hacked to pieces by Roy, who was so hungover his hands were shaking.
Blaine’s father put down his martini glass and suppressed a belch as he got up from his chair.
Say Roy—isn’t it a little … uneven?
He looked to Artie O’Shea for some kind of backup, but Artie was opening and slamming drawers, searching for a fresh pack of Kents.
Latest style, muttered Roy, squinting through the haze of a fresh cig’. Delaware Devil Cut.
This passed for an acceptable explanation.
On Monday, the renewed jeers of Blaine’s classmates.
Blaine learned a few things about his adversary: Roy was divorced, for one thing. Sailor’s mom was no longer in the picture. This was unusual, as the mother usually got custody. There was no telling what innate wildness in Roy’s ex-wife might have rendered her unfit for motherhood.
Whatever it was, Blaine knew that wildness was no doubt genetically encoded into Sailor. He could feel it, intuit it, just by looking at her. He fantasized about Sailor, gripping himself in the night. And when it came time for another haircut, he’d go back to Le Man’s just to have his scalp massaged by the very hands that had helped preserve the imagined wantonness of Sailor Deveaux’s unseen mother.
Every couple of months, like clockwork, the horrible haircuts continued.
Blaine actually had very nice hair—his mother’s: thick, raven-black, wire-straight, malleable. But you’d never know that from his freshman and sophomore yearbook photos. His parents pleaded with him to stop going to Le Man’s. The Lieutenant Colonel suggested, even ordered, that he try other places. But Blaine couldn’t be persuaded. Though he’d long passed the point of paying penance for his previous conversational gaffe, he kept going back.
In a way Blaine hoped, absurdly, Sailor Deveaux might one day pass him in the hallway and really see him. Your father made you and he made me. Blaine prayed Sailor might recognize her own flower in the imperfect, lopsided—sometimes jagged—spray of hair crowning Blaine’s head.
But she never did. Instead, the wildness germinating beneath the surface sprouted and blossomed into wicked rebellion.
Sailor began to let herself go, started smoking before and after school. Her breasts seemed to inflate overnight. Waist contracted, legs lengthened. Round cheeks disappeared, giving sharp definition to the woman within.
Older boys came calling. One of them a nineteen-year-old Army corporal who impregnated Sailor.
Details got murky; something about a shotgun wedding to avoid court martial and statutory rape charges. These were all second and third-hand stories—he didn’t dare ask Roy about it.
That was Blaine’s sophomore year. Next run-in with Roy resulted in a particularly bad mop-chop, so Blaine finally threw in the towel and stopped going to Le Man’s.
Within a year, Artie O’Shea keeled over of a heart attack in mid-snip. There was an obit in the paper. Blaine started going to Supercuts and whenever he thought of Sailor Deveaux, he’d also think about Roy and how lonely he must be down at Le Man’s all by himself.
Two years later, as Blaine was about to graduate, he came back to Le Man’s with a special request:
Shave it off. I joined the Marines.
Roy lit a fresh Benson & Hedges off the old.
You don’t wanna do that, he said.
What—join the jarheads?
No, the haircut. Don’t do that.
Why not? said Blaine. Thought I’d give you a task equal to your level of skill.
Blaine had grown defiant and cocky. It was either the Corps or become a punk rocker. He’d cultivated a truckload of anger and attitude. Roy Deveaux’s shitty haircuts were only a footnote on Blaine’s extended inventory of personal and societal grievances. Roy squinted and shook his head.
Ain’t gonna do it.
Why the hell not?
You’re gonna want them to cut it.
What do you know about it?
Was a Marine once.
No way.
I was.
Roy leaned against the shampoo sink, displayed his tattoo which Blaine now realized said Semper Fi. Roy was still thin as a whippet—no more than a twenty-six-inch waist. Blaine, however, had been working out for over a year, biceps like canned hams.
You were a jarhead?
Yeah, Korea.
Don’t look old enough.
I was young once, said Roy. Anyway, when you show up and they shear your head, it’s like a rite of passage. It’s important. If you show up bald, you’ll be sorry.
Blaine said, All right.
He started to leave.
Roy pushed him back down.
I’ll cut your hair. You’ll want to look presentable.
Blaine gave it some thought, then agreed.
Roy did the usual: shampoo and cut, didn’t say a word the whole time. He worked the lather in, almost tenderly. It was weird. Blaine was tempted to ask candid questions about Sailor, to maybe provoke Roy. Blaine had heard Roy’s daughter was now divorced. He wanted to know if Sailor was planning on returning to Dover to graduate. But now that Roy had talked him out of shaving his head, Blaine wasn’t sure what to say or do. He was just about to ask about Sailor when Roy spun him around to face the mirror and murmured, Voila.
This time Roy had given Blaine a real styling. It was the ultimate cut, feathered back and everything. Blaine looked like a brunette Robert Redford.
Wow, he said.
On the house.
It’ll be gone in two weeks.
Well then, enjoy it, said Roy. Put it to good use.
Whatever that meant. Roy wouldn’t even take a tip.
He shook Blaine’s hand and said, Death Before Dishonor.
Blaine was glad he didn’t step off the bus at Parris Island with a cue ball head. Roy was right about that. Recruits who showed up with their heads already shaved were treated differently—and not in a good way.
And, four years later, when Roy headed out to the base to welcome Blaine’s body back from Beirut, Sailor asked him where the hell he thought he was going. Roy said he was stepping out to get some cigarettes. Sailor started up a shrill harangue about how she had a date, and who’s gonna watch the kids, et cetera.
Roy told his daughter that what she didn’t know could fill a book.
Robert Morgan Fisher won the 2021 Montana Humor Prize, the 2018 Chester Himes Fiction Prize, was shortlisted for the 2019 John Steinbeck Award and was runner-up for the 2021 Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Prize. His fiction and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including The Saturday Evening Post, Upstreet, Pleiades, The Arkansas Review, Red Wheelbarrow, The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast, The Seattle Review, The Spry Literary Journal, 34th Parallel, The Journal of Microliterature, Spindrift, The Rumpus, and many other publications. He teaches creative writing at UCLA and Antioch University. (www.robertmorganfisher.com)