September 7, 2012--Chapter 6: Augie's Back Room

I went to Augie’s Barber Shop for more than a haircut.  

True, my mother sent me about every six weeks to get 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 what went on in that room that I went eagerly to Augie’s. 

His store was on Church Avenue just a block from where we lived, but it could have been across the ocean.  Most noticeably, Augie and one of his other two barbers were Italian.  In our Jewish neighborhood, a place that Italian, and thus exotic, was an attraction unto itself. 

There were five chairs, including one in the shape of a pony with a saddle where the little kids got their hair cut if they were still at the stage where they cried when getting trimmed.  Sitting on the horse was to distract them, which it did, but it was also a form of humiliation because it exposed them for what they were--crybabies.  

So those of us who were still kids tried not to cry so we could graduate as soon as possible to a real chair.  Even though we needed a booster seat until we were tall enough for our heads and hair to be accessible above the headrest to Augie and his colleagues.  Getting promoted to a real chair at Augie’s was a bigger deal than getting promoted from the fourth to the fifth grade at PS 244. 

As the owner Augie had the first chair nearest the window, cash register, and the pony.  He was the only one allowed to take money and make change, but other than that, he didn’t place himself above the others.  In fact, there was a huge brass Italian coffee machine 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 storeowners 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 to stack towels.  I wondered if Augie had this extra chair in the hope that business would improve and he would need to hire a third barber. 

Sal worked next to Augie.  He had only a one-inch rim of plastered-down hair and I thought was not a good advertisement for a barbershop.  It looked as if he never needed to have his hair cut, or at most once a year.  If Augie had customers like Sal he not only wouldn’t need that extra chair, he probably wouldn’t need Sal. 

Every time my mother sent me for a haircut, she reminded me to let Sal cut my hair only if Hymie, Jewish Hymie wasn’t available.  She insisted that they, not Augie, knew how to cut hair the right way, which to her meant leaving the neck “long” in the back.  “He may know how to make coffee, if that’s what he does with that machine, but he doesn’t know from long necks.”

When it came time to shave my neck, to clean up any remaining stubble left over from the snipping, Hymie or Sal were the only ones to be trusted who didn’t shave so high up the back of your head that you came home, as my mother put it, 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.  Under no circumstances was I to let Augie cut my hair.  “He may be OK with shaving Italians,” she would say, “Or making coffee, but he’s the owner and owners are only interested in money.  So he works too fast.  He uses the electric clipper more than the scissors.  He wants you in and out of his chair as fast as possible.”

This at times posed for me a considerable dilemma: for a ten-year-old to find Hymie and Sal busy and Augie fussing with his espresso machine 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 into 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 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, she liked the hair shaved quite high around my ears.  I thought this made my prominent ears stick out even more, assuring that Mel Lipsky 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!”

In addition to the basic business—haircuts--there were many 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 working there?  (“Because,” Augie told me, “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.”) 

But most fascinating to me was what they did with the cut hair that fell to the floor.  Hymie said, with considerable authority, “We sweep it up and make it into hamburgers and then send them to the starving Russians so when they eat them they get sick and die.” 

I had never thought of hair being such a lethal weapon but was excited that my hair was being used to defeat Stalin.  After Hymie told me about how hair was more deadly than poison, I realized why 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.  And wondered what other dangers were secretly lurking.

Thus when Augie offered me my first job, saying he would pay me a dollar for sweeping up on Saturday mornings when the place was busiest (even Augie then had to put aside the coffee cups and join in the shaving and haircutting), I jumped at the chance, not just because of the money, not just because having a “job” would move me a step closer to being considered grown up; but because the job involved sweeping the floor, putting the hair in a lidded can, and by doing that I would be contributing to winning the Cold War.  I assumed that after I completed my work someone from the Army would come to Augie’s and take the hair to the Brooklyn Navy Yard where they would make it into those killer burgers. 

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. 

*    *    *

At the far end of the shop, beyond the last, unused chair and to the right of the stainless steel globe within where the towels were steamed before being plopped onto the faces of the men stretched out waiting to be shaved, there was a green door.  Sometimes 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 stories, I noticed that a kid I knew from school, Tony Lombardo 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 his hangout, the pool hall on East 54^th Street.

Tony Lombardo was an anomaly at P.S. 244.  Not because he was Italian (there were three other Italians in my grade), but because he was famous for having been left back four times.  At seventeen, he was still in the 6^th grade.  He was old enough to shave and drop out, 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 ante up. 

Or perhaps he remained because every girl in 6^th grade had a crush on him.  It was rumored that the Siegel Twins’ infatuation might have progressed beyond the crush stage.   Some of us, when we heard about Tony and Rachel and Rochelle Siegel, who with the help of Bust Cream and Mel Lipsky had developed very nicely, we thought that maybe we too should figure out how 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 left back, I even thought about resigning my job as blackboard monitor. 

The next few Saturdays were routine at Augie’s.  They were as busy as usual since Saturday was the one day a week when our fathers were available to get their hair cut or, if they had a wedding or  Bar Mitzvah to go to, a professional shave.  But they were not routine to me because I had work to do. 

Since no kids were permitted on Saturdays, they were reserved for men, my job included being sure that there were magazines other than the Police Gazette for the men to look at while waiting their turn.  On Saturdays the usual fare 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 of placing them on the side tables by the chairs where the men sat, to think I’d also be getting a dollar from Augie at four o’clock, that was my idea of what it meant to grow up.

On the third Saturday, which was extra busy because the following 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 room and empty it in the big container by the alley door

Without thinking, I pulled the door open and burst in, clutching the pail full of hair to my chest.  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 found myself standing in the back room of Augie’s.  

Tony Lombardo was there, squatting beside a sweaty 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, 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 he said, “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 bum. You got me?”  That phone he slammed back into its cradle.

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 collecting my nickels.

Just then the door from the alley opened and through it came perhaps the most respected man in all of East Flatbush, the dentist Dr. Gluck, who everyone called Honey Gluck because of his sweet disposition.  He was wearing his white coat and was clearly in a hurry.  He went right over to the man with the telephones and took a big roll of bills from his pants pocket.  He peeled off 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. Gluck, not only a World War Two veteran but also a decorated hero who had filled allied teeth while under enemy fire.  The only man in the neighborhood who had enough money to own a fully-detached one-family house.  A professional, not just someone with a hole-in-the-wall grocery store or worked in the City cutting fabric, but Honey Gluck, who my mother idolized, was betting on the horses!   This was more growing up in one day than I could handle.

I was not totally unaware that this sort of gambling went on and knew that the man with the cigar was a bookie.  I knew about bookies from my father, but he told me that it was only goyim who bet on horses.  Not Jews.  Not someone like Dr. Gluck, a Jew, who, when he finished placing his bets, looked over toward me, smiled, and, like Tony, nodded and winked as if to initiate me into this world of men. 

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 fluoride treatments, the latest, and showed me how to brush, “Like this,” he said holding my hand gently in his, “And you will never get gingivitis,” this man was placing bets on horses with a bookie in Augie’s back room.

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 studded leather jackets and rolled up their sleeves, simultaneously lighting cigarettes by snapping their thumb nails across the tops of wooden kitchen matches, I noticed 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 froze where I was standing.  I couldn’t make myself move.  My mouth literally hung open.  Were their other things I hadn’t noticed?  

Indeed there were.  The walls in the back were covered with pinup calendars.  As you might imagine, these were not like the ones up front where hair was cut, the ones with girls pictured 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 to Augie’s 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). 

Just as I was sneaking looks as these calendars, the alley door opened again, and I almost fainted when I saw framed in backlight the Siegel Twins.

They flounced toward Tony who popped up grinning from his squat.  They were wearing 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, squealing over to Tony where they began hugging and kissing him—Rochelle on his right, Rachel on his left.  Then the bookie pulled himself slowly up from his chair, letting the phones ring off the hook, and snuggled up close to the three of them, joining them in a groping 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 Hymie joining Sal in laughter.

And as I turned to go back through the door to the shop to resume my work, behind me I heard what was an unmistakably familiar voice, “Say Tony, how are you doing?  I got a ten spot here for that little gray filly in the seventh at Belmont.”  

It was my father.