"I make you very handsome."

In the West Village there is man whose armpits smell like hard salami. His name is Roberto, if that is his real name, and I think you should meet him. He claims to be Italian, but from listening to him speak to the hangers on down at the barber shop on 7^th Avenue, he would seem to be of a Germanic or Slavic background.

            I noticed the barber shop during one of my numerous jaunts to nowhere in particular. The neon lights of a blue and red barber pole reached out, but what really grabbed me was the sign that said hot towel shaves for 14 dollars. The place was about to close. I read through the cuttings from magazines that were pasted in the window and realized that this barber shop and I had something in common. We both saw Anderson Cooper as a god. Me for the reporting he did after a big flood in New Orleans and the barber shop because he told the magazine that he got his hair cut there every two weeks.

            The hard rain of the next day forced me inside. It was a portal into a world of broken buzzers and creams and powders and sounds that were not English. Sit. I don’t know who said it. Maybe the walls? I picked a Playboy from the shelf and was tethered back to the decade we were in for the magazine was only eight years old and they were doing an expose on blondes having more fun—from Marlene Dietrich to Pamela Anderson.

            “Okay,” a fat man said, motioning to the swivel seat in front of him.

            I set down the Playboy and let the man wrap a cape around me. His shirt clung to his body like a hefty bag. Actually, I think his shirt was made of hefty bag plastic.

            “I just want the hot towel shave,” I said.

            “You need haircut,” he said. “I make you very handsome.” He already had the clippers out and was finding a guard to trim my hair even though I said I didn’t think I had enough money.

            “We have…how you say?....slot machine in corner.”

            Now that I think about it, I am not even sure that this man worked at the barber shop. But he had worked somewhere. He had a gift of gab that I couldn’t understand. Whenever he spoke the old man in the corner who had taken over my Playboy and the kid who sat in the chair just vacated by his client laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. I felt like I was in Poland or Serbia and the only thing American was the tennis being played on the small TV screen.

            I closed my eyes and tried not to breathe in the rancid salami of his armpits as he reached over me and slapped my head between his hands like a ball of dough. My chin was the guiding mechanism which he used to alert the rest of me along with the words up or down.

            Every time I looked in the mirror he was putting on another guard for the trimmer. The shelves of dusty creams and combs and scissors looked like they hadn’t been used or cleaned in years. It seemed as if all of his clipping was for effect, as if his doing this was to ensure that the inflated price of 33 dollars would be paid for the haircut I didn’t want in the first place. I wondered whether I would even get the shave that I came in for.

            “You look,” he said. “Very handsome, yes?”

            I looked in the mirror and beside the mirror to the cut out of Anderson Cooper. We had the same haircut.

            “What about the shave?”

            He backed away from the chair to get a smaller clippers, and, before I knew it, he ran a comb and clippers over my eyebrows. It appeared in the mirror as a manic Pez dispenser shooting dozens of hairs in rapid machine gun succession.

            “Wait.” He grabbed my chin like he was trying to pull it away from my face. He shaved both cheeks, chopping away the months of growth in a motion rougher than he’d done the eyebrows. I mean the entire eyebrows. Really. I have no eyebrows now.

            Salami pits then leaned across me with sweat coating his hefty bag and reached for an electric shaver that goes all the way to the skin. He squeezed my cheeks, rubbed them, and took whatever had been left by the clippers.

            “Very handsome?”

            “Yes, but what about all this?” I was left with a goatee.

            “Don’t worry. I take care of you.”

            He said something to the old man in the back, and then I heard a microwave door open, close, and run. In the same manner as before he got rid of my goatee. I heard him open the microwave door. Then he lathered my face in foam and covered it with the hot towel he must have gotten from the microwave. Finally…what I had come for.

            The musk of shaving cream overpowered the salami, and I felt that I was somewhere else, that I was a part of life, that I couldn’t hear the other men talking or the announcements on the tennis match. The horns outside ceased to exist and at that moment I knew what presence meant. The blade on my bare skin did not feel as wide as what I was used to and this I attributed to his vast knowledge and experience, the same as the way a veteran skier doesn’t need his skis to be as long as an amateur’s. I was in the presence of greatness, and even though I still was unsure of where he had been born or what his earlier days of shaving looked like, I now felt a confidence in this man’s hands, as if having a blade in one and the face of a man in the other was what God had put him on this earth to do.

            This twist of emotions was akin to the difference between Evan Williams and Maker’s Mark. I closed my eyes and let his touch take me away like a hundred-dollar massage. The microwave beeped and opened and closed, and he wiped my face with another hot towel and then massaged something that smelled like cucumber into my pores and then put another hot towel over me.

            It was the second round!

            His hand guided the blade along my face with the gentleness of a fisherman cleaning his catch. His seventy years had elevated him to the top of his profession. One day I would be able to say that I had had my face shaved by the grand champion. One day I would stand before his statue at 143 7^th Avenue and tell my children about this day. No wonder Anderson Cooper only came to this place!

            As these thoughts circled through the calm I made the grave mistake of opening my eyes.

            His hand was scratching a disposable bic razor against my skin. The whole world smelled like salami again. The microwave rang. Another hot towel. Powder all over a brush that he dabbed against my skin. In the mirror was an image that would have really appealed to those who had come to the Village looking for the Kafkaesque. Eyes without brows.

            He massaged my shoulders and removed the cape.

            “I told you,” he said. “I make you look good.”

            I told him that I only had 37 dollars.
           “Is okay,” he said. “We have slot machine.”