Letter

The first barbershop I can recall going to more than once was on Harvard Street in Allston, up the block from Herrall’s Ice Cream. The man who ran it was perpetually ill-shaven and the windowsill of his shop was littered with springs, wires. screws, and other discarded innards of watches he mended as a side line. His eyesight wasn’t too good and the haircuts I got from him were never more than mediocre, but I’d go back because it was close to where I lived and because I liked looking at all that junk in the window.

My next regular one was Stanley’s on Western Avenue in Chicago, on the next block from the Empty Bottle. Stanley spoke almost no English and I spoke no Polish, so aside from his confirming, “Regular haircut?” the rest of our communication amounted to smiles, nods, and the exchange of currency. Stanley cut exclusively with scissors so he was constantly flicking the blades open and closed to rid them of lingering hair. The sound of metal swiping metal was like a refrain throughout my visits. Stanley’s was unisex and a woman, perhaps Missus Stanley, often worked at the second chair. There was also an apartment behind the shop that they would sometimes disappear into. The shop felt like an extension of a home.

About eleven miles south down Western was Johnnie’s Barbershop. It was a door down from Hardboiled Coffee, where I worked when I lived in Beverly. Johnnie was semi-retired and told me, half-joking, that he only went in to get away from his wife. I often saw him napping in the barber’s chair as I passed on my way from the coffee shop to the dumpster or the parking lot. But men whose hair Johnnie had cut their whole lives would bring their young sons in regularly. That probably kept him going. He reminded me a lot of the watch-mender in Allston because both their hands shook as they worked.

After leaving Beverly, I started going to Metropolitan Barbers in the Monadnock Building. That building might be the most beautiful high-rise in Chicago and that fact had a lot to do with my going for haircuts there. But the barbers kept changing to the point that the last time I logged on to their booking site, not only was my favorite barber gone but their hours of operation were cut in half. I decided to try a place closer to home.

Barker’s Barbershop opened a couple years ago on 18th Street, just west of Halsted. They have three or four chairs going all the time. I went a few times before settling on a young kid named Julio. He wasn’t twenty-one yet but had just become a father to a baby girl. He takes his time doing his work and takes obvious pride in it. We talk about how the neighborhood around the shop is changing. He likes some of the new spots to eat.

I like to sit in the waiting area and watch the barbers work. Those Hitler Youth-type haircuts which are in style now take a lot of care to get right and likely require weekly touch ups to maintain, which can’t hurt the shop’s bottom line. I don’t remember ever caring as much about my appearance as many of the young men in the chairs do. I shaved my head with clippers myself or had a girlfriend do so through most of high school and college. Barbershops seemed like unnecessary extravagance. But then I saw those springs, screws, and clock-faces in the window of the shop on Harvard Street and went in.

Now I can’t even recall the last time I wore a watch.

—I reviewed William Inge’s very flawed Natural Affection for the Reader.

Monday morning I showed up at the Skylark with my coffee and breakfast sandwich to babysit the bar as it was being prepped for a film shoot. I’d bartended the night before and seen the newly-green walls and faux-Irish bar decor. I’d listened to the grumbling of the regulars and watched the dumbfounded glances of patrons trying to put a finger on what was different at the bar that night. Others came in as if it was like any other night. They were there to drink and what was or wasn’t up on the walls was of no concern to them whatsoever.

Jimmy instructed me to watch that they didn’t tear the place apart, then took off. I opened my laptop to try to do some work but kept looking around as the crew worked away to ready the room for shooting the following day. They had to do as much as they could while still leaving the bar operational for that evening’s regular non-movie-magic business. The booze, beer taps, glassware, and bar itself remained as they’d always been; everything else was a little or a lot off.

The barstools were now wooden and had backs, rather than round and vinyl with chrome legs. There were many, many more tables and each one had it’s own little lamp with its own little lampshade. The Oddfellows banners were replaced by Boston T signs for a fictional Orange Line stop called Dover. There were now photos of various Kennedys and not a single one of Anton Cermak. A neon above the hallway to the kitchen promised live music but didn’t elaborate. A sign over the ladies’ room said Slainte in that Irish bar Gaelic font. The CSI pinball machine was replaced by a Wurlitzer jukebox.

I watched a lighting tech test out light strips placed behind the bottles of liquor. She manipulated virtual dials on her tablet to make them change into a succession of hideously bright colors. There were also strips of green light to illuminate the front of the bar down to the floor. She told me about the other shows she’d worked on, which included the whole variety-pack of Dick Wolf franchises. She didn’t think any more of those than I do but we both agreed that it was good that locals got jobs on those shows even if they had nothing to do with Chicago and little with basic human decency.

The show they’d be shooting here the next day would have nothing to do with Chicago either. In fact the Skylark was to play a South Boston bar called the Black Emerald in a pilot for a TV show based on Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone. I asked Jimmy before he’d left whether they’d paint the walls brown again and he said no, because if this series got picked up and they wanted to shoot here again, they’d just have to repaint it all over again.

As an electrician opened one of the curio cabinets in the back bar, he turned to me and asked if the tchotchkes and keepsakes were theirs or ours. “Ours.” I told him, “so please leave them as they are” and felt like I’d done my job for the day.

The day after the shoot I came in to eat and to see if the Skylark was the Skylark again. Aside from the green walls, everything else was mostly back in place. I asked Sheila what she thought of the walls and she said it wouldn’t have been her choice but that it looked clean. I joked that I’d have to do a whole new series of paintings now that the bar had changed.

I’d have painted the Skylark again even if it had remained exactly as it had always been.

—I wrote about Wendy Clinard’s new project which incorporates early 90s photos of Pilsen, flamenco, hip-hop, everyday sounds, and a mess of other elements, for the Reader.

Sometime in the spring of ’78, I was taken out of first grade in Moscow because my parents told me we were going to take a trip. They neglected to mention we weren’t coming back. My memories of that time are fragmented and inseparable from my parents’ retellings and photos taken by friends and family. Still, some things have stayed with me through these past forty years which I’m pretty sure were lived firsthand.

The sailor’s outfit my mother made for some school event which was the wrong shade of blue, making me stand apart from my classmates—the teacher threatening to cut my curls short—the hot bubliki bought from a kiosk as reward for surviving a trip to the doctor—being held down so the dentist could drill at my teeth with no anesthetic—mooning passing trains with Pavlik in Pushkino.

In Rome, while waiting to be allowed into the US: running back to the pensione we were living in, needing to take a shit in the worst way and not making it. Then, taking off my soiled underwear and throwing it out the window so as not to be found out. They never found out.

In Billerica, Massachusetts: trying chocolate milk for the first time in school—not being allowed to go to the bathroom except for proscribed times—going to ESL—being put a grade back because I knew no English but knowing every curse word—and using many—less than a year later.

Countless times at my parents’ table with them and their friends yelling about the horrors of the old countr—seeing a Time story about John Lennon’s assassination and mixing him up with the founder of the Soviet Union—my mother telling me about what a happy child I’d been. But that was before we moved to America. I have no memory of being happy; I have to take her word for it.

My father used to tell me about how when he was in school, the heroes and villains in history books would change from year to year, depending who fell in or out of favor in the Soviet hierarchy. I think about that a lot these days. I wonder whether school children today will become inured to the daily lies and absurdities emanating from the White House the way my parents’ generation was in response to Politburo fantasies. Being deceived and acting like it’s normal has become a way of life for many. That’s the way it was in the Soviet Union for seventy-five years and many in today’s Russia wish it were so again.

At the coffee shop the other day, a woman I know asked me what I thought of the turmoil in my home country. Her boyfriend is from Russia and is in the process of applying for his green card. He’s worried that with the tensions between the two countries his status will be imperiled. I told her to tell him to hang onto his Russian passport—at the rate we’re going here, it’ll be more valuable to him than a US one.

When we left forty years ago we were stripped of our Soviet citizenship. When people ask whether I’ve ever been back, I tell them there’s nowhere for me to go back to because the country I’m from no longer exists. But now, bits and pieces of that long-gone place make regular appearance online. The Soviet Union has reemerged in some weird cyber-ghost form. So much of the art of disinformation pioneered and perfected in the Evil Empire is on proud display on all our many screens now.

But I have no plans to leave the country newly-minted novelist Sean Penn calls “a shopping mall with a flag”. Where the hell could I go?

Strangely enough, my parents’ favorite place is neither in Russia nor in America. They love Italy and have returned there countless times over the years. This June I’ll be joining them for a week in Fiesole. We can toast the anniversary of our immigration from one of our pitstops along the way. I’ll try not to shit my pants this time.