SUPERWORM
183
"Kid can't take a crap without he's smoking a cigarette. And him
just a kid."
Claude nods in dismay. The rain falls. Itching in the black
underwear, ready to turn and leap for freedom, for justice, he undo
the first button.
The
Times
chuckles because, he says, he can't wait to tell them
at the office, the guys got that account, how a shoeshine boy cannot
perform, he say, "a natural function" without he's smoking a Marl–
boro.
There is always this thick scent of violence about a barbershop.
Blood and gauze. Stale air and cigar smoke, cheap perfumes, lavender
soaps, the sharp stickiness of pine-oil floorwashes and disinfectants:
the smell of the slaughterhouse. Rape and pillage and war and foot–
ball. Every lynching begins in a barbershop. Every bombing raid.
No, no, man. It's in your head only. It's an ordinary barbershop, dig?
Isn't it? Isn't it ordinary? Yes, but all the
ordinary,
the heaps of
ordinary. That's just it. All this ordinary....
"Lookit here," the high-school boy says, emerging from the
pink magazine. "It says here Stalin's alive out there in Elay causing
all them riots."
Undo another button there, slip in a finger under the broad–
cloth shirt, and feel, yes, the spade,
spadu.
If
they even suspected,
they would mend their ways.
The salesman in the next chair closes his eyes, leans back with
his head cradled in the fat folds of his neck, while the barber mas–
sages his head with an electric vibrator. Someone hums "Take Me
Out to the Ball Game," scissors click, traffic noises intrude. And
Claude sits hunched in his liberal waspish disguise, pretending to be
white and pr-otestant and middle class. Feeling the despair of being
of the dominant class but despising its values. Of automatically en–
joying privileges before all men possess them. Of being alienated with
no clear personal reason for his alienation. As a young man his secret
fantasy had been to imagine himself a Jew. Later he had come to
think of himself as a white Negro. One of the despised. One whose
suffering was
real,
transcending ego: suffering that demands justice,
not sympathy. One who could suffer 'without being offered aspirin
and psychotherapy. One who could suffer purely.
So
he had finally decided to change things. He wrote letters and
