George Deaux
SUPERWORM
It
was an ordinary barbershop. Between a bar and a
health food store. Sign in the window says,
"If
your hair is unbecom–
ing .to you, you should Be Coming to Us." Beneath the sign, lined
up on a ledge along the bottom of the window, are the usual dusty
snake plants, dog-eared magazines, rusty cans of shoe polish, faded
cards advertising tonics and lotions. A bell attached by a spring to
the top of the door jangles when you walk in, and the first-chair
barber-owner bows slightly and greets you with an ordinary "Hiya
fella. Howya doin'?" The other barbers smile: tall thin man and
chunky young dude, dressed in white up to their chins, holding
delicately aloft the stainless steel tools of the trade. The mirrors front
and back are set at slight angles to record reflections into dim ex–
panses of distance. Cards of plastic combs. Boxes and cans of
powder. A limp brush standing on its handle like a sick palm tree.
The three swivel chairs -leather and steel and porcelain. The marble
counter. Pink sterilizer box. Brass spittoon. Shoeshine smells. The three
customers and one waiting, reclined, lounging in the mid-morning
comfort of, as only an executive or a salesman 'or a mad avenger can,
being free to leave the desk before lunchtime.
The professor in the third chair seems calm enough, as ordinary
a customer as the neatly combed executive at the window, the red–
faced salesman in the center, or the high-school pimple waiting his
tum among the magazines. In many ways he is an ordinary man, if
not today an ordinary customer: he is middle-aged, in good health,
a family man, a professional man, a property owner, a veteran, a
voter, even a concerned voter, a reader 'of books and magazines (he
carries a copy of the
New York Review of Books
in his coat pocket),
Copyright
©
1968 by George Deaux.
