TheNightBarber
When I was about 16, my family lived in a very small town in Washington. The Town was not very large and there was not in the way of services there. One of the things that there were not a lot of were barbers and hairdressers. My mother had a friend who was the town hairdresser and her name was Marcia. Marcia was a very eccentric looking woman for the time who seemed to have her own style. She wore very tight pants, skin tight men’s wife beaters or a bandanna as a blouse. She had wide animated eyes, a large mouth that always had bright red lipstick on her lips. She favored very large hoop earrings and her hair was a huge nimbus of teased permed hair that almost resembled a huge reddish brown afro. She had one of the first tramp stamps I’ve ever seen and other tattoo’s and she smoked like a demon. I was gobsmacked by her and she became kind of an obsession with me.
My brothers and I would be taken to get haircuts by her and as it was in the early 80’s we would get pretty traditional haircuts for the time.I don’t think we were charged a month or my mom would trade her some home grown pot for our haircuts. I liked to get my hair cut shorter than most as I was influenced by punk and also Harrison Ford in Blade runner. Marsha would cut our hair as a cigarette dangled from her voluptuous mouth. I would watch her cut my brothers hair and I would sweat as she laughed and hovered over my siblings as they would get their feathered haircuts; Marwesha would snap out the cape and light another Pal Mal and I would hop in the chair and she would smile at me and tease that she was going to shave me bald or give me a military flat top. Little did she know I was screaming inside for her to do exactly that, even as I would have been mortified. My feelings were mixed but she made me nuts and eventually came to be a constant in my adult desires.
One time when she was over at our house, she talked about having me mow her lawn in exchange for a haircut, my heart nearly leapt out of my chest. I was working towards that idea to come to fruition. My ideal would have been her taking me into her cool house after I mowed her lawn dripping with sweat. She would offer to take my clothes so she could wash them during my haircut, and then in my underwear and she would cape me and shear me to the skin and then later my head and shave me bald as a que ball. Then she would take me upstairs and make a man of me.
Her Husband was a kind of tough biker type, and he saw through my testosterone-addled mind. He would poke fun at me and I was terrified of him. This and our eventual unexpected move to another nearby town took those dreams from me. Still, Marcia has stayed in my mind all of these years and I think back on how wonderful it would have been to have Marcia shear me and shave me bald and ride me like a bucking bronco.
