February 11, 2006--Saturday Story: "Augie's"

Augie's

I went to Augie’s Barber Shop to get more than just a haircut. True, my mother sent me there about every six weeks to have one. That’s what she thought was going on--haircuts and, for the men, shaves—but she had never been to the back room. I duly got my trims, but it was for that room that I went to Augie’s.

His shop was on Church Avenue, just a block away from where we lived, but it could have been across the ocean. First of all, he and the other barbers but one were Italian. In our Jewish neighborhood, a place that Italian, and thus so exotically otherworldly, was an attraction unto itself. But it was because of the other things that went on there that it was truly foreign.

There were five barber chairs, including one in the shape of a pony with a saddle where kids got their hair cut if they cried. Riding the horse was to distract them, which it did, but it was also a form of humiliation because it revealed them for what they were, crybabies. After all, what’s so awful about getting your hair cut?

So those of us who were kids tried not to cry so we could graduate as soon as possible to a real chair. Even though we had to sit in it on booster seat until we were tall enough for our heads, and hair, to emerge above the head rest. Getting promoted to a big chair was to most of us a bigger deal than getting promoted from the fourth to the fifth grade.

Augie was the owner so he had the first chair nearest the window, cash register, and the pony. He was the only one allowed to punch the register keys and make change, but other than that and cutting hair and giving shaves by the window, he didn’t place himself above the others. In fact, the huge brass Italian coffee machine was on a table near his chair and he spent more time making coffee for the other barbers and himself than bossing them around. In that way he was unique—all other store owners in the area seemed to spend most of their time yelling at people, those who worked for them as well as the customers.

There were two other barbers and they always worked at the same chairs. I never saw anyone cut hair at the last one; it seemed to serve primarily as a place for stacking towels. I wondered if Augie had this extra place in the hope that business would improve and he would need to hire a third man.

In the place next to Augie was Sal. He had only a one inch rim of plastered-down hair and I thought did not make a very good advertisement for a barber shop. It looked as if he never needed to have his hair cut, what there was of it, or at most maybe once a year. If Augie had customers like Sal he not only wouldn’t need that extra chair, he probably would have to fire Sal.

When my mother sent me in for a haircut, she instructed me to only let Sal cut my hair if Hymie, yes non-Italian, Jewish Hymie wasn’t available. She insisted that he was the only one who knew how to cut hair the right way, leaving the neck “long,” which meant when it came time to shave the back of the neck, with a freshly stropped straight razor, Hymie was the only who didn’t shave so high that you came home looking like a yokel who lived on a farm.

In fact, my mother insisted that if Sal and Hymie had customers and only Augie was free, I should wait for Hymie or, if absolutely necessary, Sal. Under no circumstances was I to let Augie cut my hair. “He may be OK with shaving,” she would say, “Or making coffee and putting it in those little cups; but the boss is only interested in the money. So he works too fast. He uses the electric shaver more than the scissors. He just wants you in and out of his chair.”

This at times posed for me a considerable dilemma: for a ten year old kid to find Hymie and Sal busy and Augie only fussing with his hot steam and thus not otherwise occupied with hair, and then to have to say to him when he waved me toward his chair, “I’m waiting for Hymie,” or worse, “I’m waiting for Sal,” that was beyond my capacities. And thus I would slink to his chair (he by the way was the first one to say to me, slapping the leather seat of his chair, “Kid, I think you’re big enough now not to have to use the booster”) knowing that as an inevitable result even more trouble would await me, because when I got home my mother, who had the uncanny ability to know at a glance which of the three had cut my hair, as if they had somehow left scissor marks as distinctive as their finger prints, she would send me right back to Sal or Augie (never Hymie) to have them make adjustments to what they had inflicted on me.

This usually involved trimming a little higher around the ears. Though my mother liked the neck long, for some reason she liked the hair shaved quite high around my ears. I thought this made my prominent ears stick out even more, assuring that Donny Friedman at school the next day would point at me and in a voice that would resound through all the halls of P.S 244, gleefully bellow, “Look, Dumbo!”

There were lots of things to wonder about and learn at Augie’s. For example, why did the barbers keep dipping their combs in a blue solution called Barbercide? (Hymie said, “To kill the hair germs and the lice.”) Why did they make a pyramid of hot towels on the men’s faces before giving them a shave? (“To soften up the skin so the razor can cut closer,” Sal claimed.) Why did they brush off the back of the neck with white talcum powder after they finished shaving there? (“Because the powder gathers all the shaved hairs sticking to your neck so when you button your shirt collar you won’t feel so itchy and scratch yourself until you bleed,” Augie told me.)

But most interesting to me was what they did with all the cut hair that fell to the floor and settled around and among the chairs. Hymie said, with considerable authority, “We sweep it up and it’s made into hamburgers and then send them to Russia so when the Communists eat them they die.”

I had never thought of hair being such a lethal weapon but was excited that the hair that was cut from me was being used to defeat Stalin. Though when Hymie told me about how hair was more deadly than poison, I remembered my mother warning me that when I had a hair in my mouth I should be sure not to swallow it, that I needed to spit it out. Until then I did not realize the mortal danger I was facing every day from something so seemingly ordinary. I wondered what else was lurking to put me in danger.

So when Augie offered me my first job, saying he would pay me a quarter for doing it on Saturday mornings when the place was busiest (even Augie had to put aside the coffee cups then and join in the shaving and haircutting), I jumped at the chance, not just because of the quarter, not just because by having a “job” I would be another step closer to being grow up; but because the job involved sweeping up the hair, gathering it in the corner, and putting it into a small lidded can; and by doing that I knew I would be contributing to winning the Cold War. I thought that after I did that, someone from the Army would come to Augie’s, collect the hair, and take it to the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Fort Hamilton where they would make it into those killer burgers.

Thus, after getting my mother’s permission, which was easier than I had expected (“It’s good for everyone to have a job so they can learn the value of money”), I leapt at Augie’s offer, not realizing that by entering his employ I would be taking an even bigger step toward growing up than I could have anticipated.

This I know you realize involved the back room.

At the far end of the shop, beyond the last, unused chair and to the right of the stainless steel globe within which towels were steamed before being plopped onto the faces of the men stretched out waiting to be shaved, there was a door. Some times when I was waiting for my haircut, sitting behind the barber chairs reading the Police Gazette or New York Confidential, neither available at home, in school, or at the public library because of their racy crime stories, I noticed that a kid I knew from school, Tony Randazzo would run into Augie’s, out of breath, clearly not interested in getting a haircut, and after looking back over his shoulder would open the door a crack and slip inside. He was rarely there for more than five or ten minutes. Then the door would open about six inches, Tony’s nose would appear (it was that long), then Tony himself would follow, and with a nod to Augie would be out onto Church Avenue again, heading west at a trot toward the pool hall on East 54th Street.

Tony Randazzo was an anomaly at P.S. 244. Not because he was Italian (there were three other Italians in my grade alone), but because he was famous for having been the only one to have been left back four times. Therefore, he was still in 6th grade even though he was almost seventeen. He was old enough to shave and drop out legally, so it was puzzling why he didn’t. Maybe it was because he was making money off the other kids, charging each of us a nickel a day to “protect” us from the other Italians who he said would beat us up on the way home if we didn’t pay up.

Or perhaps he remained beyond the required years because every girl in 6th grade had a crush on him. Further, it was more than rumored that the Siegel Twins’ infatuation had progressed considerably beyond the crush stage. Some of us, when we heard about Tony and Rachael and Rochelle Siegel, who were developing very nicely, thought that maybe we too should figure out what we had to do to get left back since neither the Siegel Twins nor any other girls would even say hello to us. To increase my chances of being demoted, I considered that maybe I should resign my job as blackboard monitor.

So when I kept noticing Tony sneaking in and out of Augie’s back room, I thought something must be going on there that involved what all the Jewish people in the neighborhood thought Italians did—making illegal wine. But that went on in the basements of their houses, not in the back of barber shops, shoe repair stores, or pizzerias, the only other places where there were Italians. Maybe, when I began my job sweeping up the hair I could learn more about what was going on.

The first two Saturday’s were routine days for Augie’s but not for me because I was hard at work! Saturday was a day when only men came in, no kids were allowed, and one part of my job was to be sure that there were some other magazines for the men to look at who were waiting. On Saturday’s the Gazette was supplemented with the girly magazines Swank and Dude. For me to be directed to the cabinet next to the unused chair where they were kept and to have the responsibility to place them on the side tables by the chairs where the men waited, as well as catch a peek at them when I arranged them there, well to think I’d also be getting a quarter from Augie at four o’clock, that was my idea of growing up.

On the third Saturday, which was extra busy because Monday was the first night of Passover and the men wanted to look their best when they went to their mothers for the Seder, knowing they would come under increased scrutiny and potential criticism (“You didn’t even have time to take a haircut for Passover?”); and thus I was scurrying from one chair to the next because the hair kept piling up almost too fast for me to sweep it away. Before one o’clock the pail for the hair was overflowing and Augie told me to take it to the back and empty it in the big container by the alley door.

Without thinking, I pulled open the door to the back room and burst in, clutching to my chest the pail full of hair. As the door swung closed behind me, I stopped in my tracks, gasping for air. Not because I was out of breath from exertion, but because I was in the back room of Augie’s!

Tony Randazzo was there, squatting beside a man I had never seen before who was seated in a chair next to a small table on which there were at least five telephones and neat piles of note paper on which he was writing whatever it was Tony was whispering to him. All the while picking up the phones that rang incessantly, holding two with raised shoulders to each ear and a third in front of his mouth, where a cigar was dangling, barking into each in turn by shrugging first one than the other shoulder.

Into the one held up to his right ear, “Yes. Five-to-two. Ten spot.” And into a second phone at his left ear, “Two-to-one. For five. Got it.” Then into the third, the one he held in his hand, “You owe me twenty-five. No action for you ‘til you pay up. You got me?” That phone he slammed back into its receiver.

Tony swung his crouching body in my direction and gave me a nod. Never before had he even noticed much less acknowledged me, except of course when he was collecting his nickels.

Just then the door from the alley opened and through it came the most esteemed dentist, perhaps the most respected man in all of East Flatbush, Dr. Henry (everyone called him Honey) Traub. He was wearing his white coat and was clearly in a hurry. He went right over to the man with the telephones and took what looked like a roll of a hundred dollars from his pants pocket. He peeled off at least six or seven tens and slapped them down on the table, saying, “Five on number three in the first. Ten on number seven in the second. Ten again on the three horse in the third. . . . “

This was Dr. Traub, not only a World War II veteran but a decorated hero who had filled teeth while under enemy fire. The wealthiest man in the neighborhood. A professional, not just someone who owned a grocery store or worked in the City, but Honey Traub, who my mother idolized, was betting on the horses!

I was not unaware that this sort of gambling went on and knew by then that the man with the cigar Tony worked for was a Bookie. I also knew about Bookies from my father, but he told me that only the goyim bet on horses. Not someone like Dr. Traub, a Jew no less. Who, when he finished placing his bets looked over toward me, smiled, and like Tony also nodded. This man who knew more about my mouth and gums and teeth than my mother, who took care of them as if they were his own son’s, just last week beginning to give them a fluoride treatment, the latest, and showed me how to brush. Not side to side but from the gums down. “Like this,” he said holding my hand gently in his, “And you will never get gingivitis.”

As he was slipping out the alley door in came four other men I knew from the neighborhood. They were friends of Tony’s and were there to shoot some pool. As they shook off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves, simultaneously lighting cigarettes by snapping their thumb nails across the tops of wooden kitchen matches, I noticed for the first time that dominating Augie’s back room was a full-size pool table. Without more than grunting greetings to Tony they began to chalk up their cue sticks and rack up the first set of balls. In a moment the sound of ivory balls smacking into others filled the room, as did their smoke.

I couldn’t move. My mouth literally hung open. Were their other things I hadn’t noticed?

There were. The walls were covered with Pinup calendars. As you might imagine, these were not like the ones up front where the girls lay against draped backgrounds, with their backs arched, wearing two piece bathing suits. Those were intoxicating enough for me. To catch a look at them as the pages turned with each new month was half the reason to come regularly for haircuts.

But those in the back room were of a very different sort—they had pictures of totally naked girls! Against the same scarlet backgrounds, with backs slightly more arched, but with naked breasts and rear ends (the rest unfortunately was covered by their artful poses).

Prior to this the only naked breasts I had ever seen were in National Geographic magazine when there was a story about a tribe in Africa where the natives didn’t wear any clothes. But at the risk of offending, I need to tell you that on the calendars in Augie’s back room, the naked girls were Americans!

Just as I was sneaking looks as these calendars, the alley door opened again, and I almost died to see . . . the Siegel Twins!

They flounced toward Tony who pulled himself up from his squat. They were wearing their identical rabbit fur jackets which they flipped off and tossed onto the pool table, which drew curses from the guys shooting pool because their game was now ruined. The Twins giggled at their protests and ran to Tony where they began hugging and kissing him—Rochelle on his right side, Rachael on his left. The Bookie also rose from his chair, letting the phones ring off the hook, and snuggled up close to the three of them, joining them in a four way embrace.

As I was struggling to think what the Twins were doing here and what would happen next, from the front room of the barber shop I heard Augie calling to me, “Did you get lost back there or something? You’d better get in here. The hair’s piling up to the ceiling.”

I could hear Sal and Hymie joining him in laughter.