Thirty-one years I have cut hair on this street, and I have never thrown anyone out of my chair.
The man with the red beard did not want to wait. When I told him he was next, he swept my combs and clippers onto the floor and swung at me.
I caught his fist. Then his two friends stood up.
The front chair
They came across the shop and stood one on each side of him, close enough to touch his shoulders. Neither of them said a word.
The tall one had a black ponytail and kept his right hand in the pocket of his hoodie. The other one had a shaved head and a little brown goatee. He looked down at my combs on the floor like he was counting them.
The red-haired man’s knuckles were still in my palm. I had my fingers around the back of his hand the way I hold a boy’s head when he wants to turn around and look at his mother.
“Let go of me, old man,” he said.
He said it loud. He was a loud man. Broad through the chest, a plain black t-shirt, cargo pants with something heavy in one of the leg pockets.
I let go.
He had been leaning his weight into that fist, so when I opened my hand he went back a step and caught himself on the arm of the front chair. He turned his head to his friends, and the back of his skull came around to me. A red buzz cut, a number two maybe, a week grown out. Two crowns. One whorl up high and one lower and to the left, turning the other way, so the hair on the back of his head lay down in two directions at once.
Alyssa was behind the second chair with both hands on the headrest. She had a folded cape over her arm. She had not moved since the clippers hit the tile.
They were all over the floor. Six combs, the big clippers with the cord pulled out, the edger, the neck duster, the spray bottle on its side and leaking. My long comb, the black one I have used since before Alyssa was born, was under the toe of his boot.
“Pick up my tools,” I said.
He laughed. He looked at the ponytail and laughed, and the ponytail did not laugh back.
Then he looked at me, and his face got friendly, which was worse.
“Come on, Eddie,” he said. “You’re not gonna make me do that.”
Nobody had called me Eddie since March.
Walt Hollis
Walt Hollis owned the building. In 1995 he still had a television repair business in this room, and when nobody fixed televisions anymore he put a sign in the window and I called the number on it. He showed me the space with a flashlight because the power was off. Six hundred and fifty a month. We shook on it standing in the dark.
Walt called me Eddie from that first day. My mother called me Edward. My wife called me Ed. The kids at the Y call me Coach, because for twenty-two years I have taught the eight-to-twelves judo on Tuesday nights in the small gym behind the pool. Mostly I teach them how to fall down without getting hurt. Only Walt ever said Eddie, and only Walt could have gotten away with it.
He came in every Saturday for a haircut he did not need. Some Saturdays he brought a grandson and held the boy’s head still with both hands while I worked, and talked over the clippers about the Lions.
My wife was Donna. She did the books on Sunday nights at our kitchen table, and she did most of everything else too, if I am honest about it.
In 2014 somebody came through the back window and took the register drawer and my good pair of Japanese shears. A week later Donna had a man put a camera in the corner over the front door. It was a little white dome, and he painted it to match the wall so the customers would not feel watched.
“You’ll forget it’s there,” the man said.
I did. It costs nine dollars and ninety-nine cents a month and comes off the card, and I see it on the statement and forget it again. Donna put the app on my phone and showed me twice how to go back through a day.
She also told me, for nine years, that the camera could not see the back chair. The dome looked down on the door and the front chair and the waiting chairs and most of the counter, and the back chair sat just past the edge of all that.
“Move the chair, Ed,” she said. “If anything happens back there, it didn’t happen.”
I never moved the chair.
In 2016 Donna sat Walt down at our kitchen table with a pot of coffee and a lease she had typed herself. Fixed rent, eleven hundred and fifty a month, through the thirty-first of December, 2031. Walt read it with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and laughed at her.
“You think I’m going somewhere, Donna?”
“I think you’re going to die someday,” she said, “and your son is going to sell this building to the first man with a briefcase.”
Walt signed it. Donna died in April of 2023. Walt died this March, in his sleep, at eighty-four. I closed the shop for the funeral and stood at the back of the church in my good jacket, and his son Brian shook my hand on the way out and held on to it until the woman behind me coughed.
The back chair has been Alyssa’s since last spring. She is twenty-five. She came to me with a cosmetology certificate and no clients, and the state wants fifteen hundred hours under a licensed barber before she can sit for the exam. That week she had eleven hundred and eighty on the sheet I sign every Friday.
After the funeral I told her that when she had her license, the back chair was hers for as long as I had the room. And that I had the room until 2031.
She said, “And then?”
I said we would think about then when it was then.
Behind the red-haired man, the one with the shaved head started walking backward toward the front of the shop without looking where he was going.
“Corey,” the red-haired man said. “Get the door.”
Corey reached back behind him and turned the lock on my front door.
Fifteen thousand
“You could’ve just taken the money, Eddie,” the red-haired man said. “Fifteen grand. For a shitty little room full of hair.”
He kicked one of my combs. It went skidding under the waiting chairs.
Brian Hollis came to see me the second week of May. He wore a zip-up sweater with a little logo on the chest, and he sat in one of the waiting chairs with his hands between his knees like a man at a wake. He told me his father thought the world of me. He said it twice.
Then he told me there was a company from out of town buying the four buildings on our side of the block. His sister had her half of this one and he had his, and the company wanted all four empty.
“Nobody’s forcing anybody,” he said. “Dad would want you taken care of.”
He put an envelope on the counter. Inside was a cashier’s check for fifteen thousand dollars made out to me, and a sheet of paper that said I would surrender the premises by the first of September.
Alyssa was at the back chair doing a fade on a high school kid. She stopped her clippers and did not start them again until he was gone. Then she came up front and looked at the check without touching it.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
I had no plan to. I mailed it back to his office the next morning with a note that said thank you, no.
In June I went down to that office myself. It was in a strip mall out by the highway, between a tax place and a nail salon, and he kept me waiting twenty minutes in a chair with a split seat. When he came out I told him I would pay sixteen hundred a month instead of eleven-fifty, starting that day, no lawyers, if he would let the lease run.
He smiled at me the way you smile at a child who has brought you a drawing.
“Eddie,” he said. “It isn’t about rent.”
He had never called me anything before.
After that the letters came. One in June, one in August, one the second week of September. They came on letterhead from a law office I had never heard of and they used the word pursuant, and every one of them said the buyer was motivated and the landlord was exploring all options. I put them in the drawer under the register with Donna’s old receipt books.
The September one was different. It had a copy of the whole lease stapled to the back. Donna’s typing, Walt’s signature, mine. Somebody had gone through it with a pen. Most pages had no marks at all. On the third page, paragraph fourteen had a little star drawn in the margin next to it.
Landlord may terminate this Lease upon any act of violence or criminal conduct by Tenant upon the Premises.
I read it at the kitchen table that night, at the same end where Walt had signed. I read it a few times. I have never raised my hand to anyone in that room. I had no idea why a man would put a star next to a paragraph that had nothing to do with me.
Somebody had underlined it twice, in blue pen, pressing hard enough to dent the paper.
Last Thursday
The red-haired man walked around me and sat down in my front chair.
He sat the way men sit when they want you to see them doing it. Boots up on the footrest, elbows out on the arms. Then he pushed off the counter with one hand and spun the chair a quarter turn so it faced me.
“There,” he said. “I’m in your chair. Throw me out, Eddie.”
The tall one with the ponytail had drifted over to the end of the waiting chairs. He was looking down at the end seat with his free hand on the back of it.
The waiting chairs came from the bus depot downtown, when the depot closed in 1998. Donna’s brother Jim hauled them over in his pickup on a Saturday in the rain. Six molded seats bolted to one steel rail, the rail standing on four feet, and the foot under the end seat was bad. If somebody sat down hard on the end, the whole row came up off the floor on that side and rocked, and once in a while it went over. I had been meaning to bolt it to the floor for twenty-seven years. The customers who came more than twice learned to sit in the middle.
Last Thursday, a little before four, a tall man with a black ponytail came in and sat down hard on the end seat. The row came up and he grabbed the edge of the counter.
“Middle,” I said. “The end one tips.”
He moved over two seats. He said he was waiting for a cut. I had a man in my chair and Alyssa had one in hers, and he sat there for twenty-five minutes with his phone in his lap. He never looked at it the way people look at their phones. He looked at me.
When I finished my man and said, “You’re up,” he said he had to go, and he went.
I did not think about him again until we were closing. I was counting the drawer and Alyssa was sweeping around the green umbrella somebody left in August that nobody has come back for. She stopped with the broom in both hands.
“That guy with the ponytail,” she said. “When you were in the back.”
I had gone in the back to move the towels from the washer to the dryer. Five minutes.
“He asked me if you ever hit anybody,” she said. “I said you don’t even raise your voice. He typed it into his phone.”
The dome over the door
“You’re in the chair,” I said to the red-haired man. “So you’re next. Sit still and I’ll give you a cut.”
His mouth opened and shut. Then he put his boots down and came up out of the chair fast enough that it spun empty behind him.
“Nick,” he said. “You getting this?”
The ponytail took his right hand out of his hoodie. There was a phone in it. He held it low at his hip, the lens pointed at me. When he tipped it I could see the screen, the red dot in the corner and the white numbers counting up beside it.
“Get his face,” the red-haired man said. “When he does it, get his face.”
He turned to say something to Corey at the door, and the back of his head came around to me again. The two crowns.
A boy in this same front chair, small, hair the color of a penny, squirming to see out the window. And Walt behind him with one big hand flat on each side of the boy’s head.
“He’s got two of ’em, Eddie,” Walt said. “Work around it.”
“Travis,” I said.
He stopped with his back to me. Corey looked at him. Nick kept the phone where it was.
When Travis turned around, his face had gone red to the beard.
“Took you long enough,” he said.
“Your grandfather used to hold your head.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t you do that.”
Paragraph fourteen was in the drawer under the register, four feet from my left hand.
I took two steps backward, toward the door. Away from the back chair, where Alyssa stood, where nothing happens. I let my hands hang at my sides with the fingers open.
Travis came with me. They all did, the three of them, moving to keep me in the middle.
Up in the corner over the door, painted the color of the wall, the little light on the dome was on.
Tuesday nights
“Hit me,” Travis said.
He stood in front of me with his chin out. He tapped it with two fingers.
“You get one. I swung at you, right? You get one. That’s fair, Eddie. Grandpa would say that’s fair.”
“I am not going to hit you.”
“Fifteen grand,” he said. “You know what my mom’s half is worth? You know what she still owes on her house?” He said a number. I had not asked him for one. “And you’re in here on eleven-fifty a month, cutting old men’s ears until 2031, because Grandpa liked you. Because your wife sat him down with a pot of coffee. Hit me.”
“No.”
Nick propped his phone against the jar of blue disinfectant on the counter, lens toward me, and took his hand away from it. Corey came off the door. Travis looked at the two of them and then back at me.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll help you.”
They spread out. Nick on my left, Corey on my right, Travis in front. I set my feet.
Twenty-two years of Tuesday nights. The first thing you teach a nine-year-old is how to fall. The second thing is that the person coming at you is doing most of the work. All you have to do is not be where he is aiming, and then give him somewhere to go.
Nick came first. He came low and fast with his arms out, the way men come who have watched a lot of fighting on television. I went under his arm and turned in, got my hip into his belt and my arm around his back, and he went over me. He landed flat on the tile like a mattress dropped off a truck. All the air went out of him at once.
Corey got a fistful of my smock from behind. I turned inside it, the way you turn out of a kid’s grip on the mat, and his hand came loose. I put both palms on his chest and pushed.
He went back three steps, and the backs of his knees met the end seat of Jim’s chairs.
The end seat went down and the whole rail came up after it. Six seats and Corey went over together and hit the floor with a crash they must have heard across the street. He lay on his back with his legs hooked over the steel rail, looking up at my ceiling.
Travis came last. He came straight in with his right hand, the same hand as before. I took his wrist in both of mine and turned with it, and he came around and down onto his back across my counter. The combs that were still up there went off the far end like a handful of gravel. He slid off the edge and onto the tile next to Nick.
All three on the floor, on their backs. Nobody got up.
Alyssa was where she had been the whole time, behind the back chair with the cape over her arm. She was looking at me like I was a man who had walked in off the street.
I straightened my smock. There was a button gone where Corey had held it.
“Now pick up my tools,” I said.
Speakerphone
“He said one time,” Travis said.
He was talking to the ceiling.
“He said you’d swing once. One punch, on camera, and that’s paragraph fourteen and it’s over, and Mom gets her half by Christmas. He said you were sixty-one years old. He said you’d probably cry after.”
“Who said?”
Travis put his forearm over his eyes.
I took my phone out of my back pocket. It took me a minute to find the app, because I had opened it maybe four times since Donna showed me. It went back through the afternoon in little squares. I found the square where the door opened and three men came in, and I pressed it and turned the screen down toward Travis on the floor.
From up in the corner, it was all there and all small. Me brushing hair off the seat of the front chair. Travis’s mouth moving. His arm going along the counter, the combs going. The swing, and my hand. Corey backing up to the door. Nick with his phone at his hip. Me stepping back with my hands down. Me not hitting anybody. Then the rest of it.
Travis took his arm off his eyes and watched it with his head turned sideways on the tile. Nick got up on his elbows to see.
“Call your uncle,” I said.
“Eddie.”
“Call him.”
He did it lying down. He put it on speaker and held it on his chest. It rang twice.
“Is it done?” Brian said. “Did he hit you?”
Nobody in the room said anything. On the counter, Nick’s phone was still recording against the jar.
“Brian,” I said.
It was quiet long enough that I thought he had hung up.
“Eddie,” he said. “Hey. Listen. I don’t know what Travis has been telling you.”
“I have it from the door. The camera Donna put in. From when they walked in.”
“I didn’t send anybody to do anything.”
“He is lying on my floor,” I said. “He told me.”
Nick sat up the rest of the way and reached over and stopped his phone.
“What do you want,” Brian said. He did not say it like a question.
I told him. A letter on his lawyer’s paper by Friday, saying the lease stands the way Donna typed it, through the thirty-first of December, 2031. Saying nobody uses paragraph fourteen for anything that happened in this room today. In return the video stays on my phone, and nobody calls the police about his nephew.
“And after,” Brian said. “In ’32. You walk. No lawyers, you don’t fight the sale, you don’t go to the paper, you don’t make a stink at the city. You hand over the keys and you walk.”
Alyssa was looking at me from the back chair.
She would have her license by spring. Five years in that chair, then no chair, at thirty, on a street where everybody knew her as my girl. I would be sixty-seven.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then that goes in the letter too,” Brian said, and hung up.
Travis got up on his knees. He found my long comb first, by the front chair where his boot had been, and put it on the counter. Then the others, one at a time, in a line. He picked up the clippers and wound the cord around them the wrong way and set them down. Nobody told him to do any of it.
Corey and Nick lifted Jim’s chairs back onto their feet. The rail had bent in the middle. The row would not stand level anymore. It rocked on two feet like a table in a bad restaurant.
Corey unlocked my front door. Travis went out last. He stopped in the doorway with his back to me, that red head with the two crowns, and did not turn around.
Then he went out, and the door shut behind him.
Jim’s chairs
The letter came on Thursday, a day early. One page. It said the thirty-first of December, 2031, twice, once in the part about the lease and once in the part about me. I signed where the little yellow flag said to sign, and I put my copy in the drawer under the register, on top of Donna’s receipt books and the September letter with the star.
Jim came by the Sunday after with his truck. He is seventy now. He stood on the sidewalk and looked at his bus depot chairs with the bent rail for a long time.
“I hauled those across town in the rain,” he said.
“I know.”
“You were gonna bolt them down.”
“I know, Jim.”
We put them in the bed of his truck and he drove them to his garage, where he says they still are. I bought four new ones from a restaurant supply place out by the highway, two strip malls down from Brian’s office. Alyssa held the drill straight while I sank them into the floor with concrete anchors. It took us a whole Monday.
That same Monday I moved the back chair eight inches toward the door. Alyssa held the tape measure and did not ask.
She has thirteen hundred and forty hours on the sheet now. She cuts the high school kids, and two of my old men have decided they like her better, which I am told I have to live with.
Yesterday afternoon a man in a work jacket came in fast with his keys still in his hand. He said he had twenty minutes, could I take him right now. I was brushing the hair off the seat of the front chair.
“You’re next,” I said.
He looked at the chair. He looked at me. Then he sat down hard on the end seat of the new row, the way they all do.
It did not move. He picked up a magazine and waited.
If this one stayed with you, go get your hair cut by somebody who has been on the same street longer than you have been alive.
For more stories where someone’s entitlement sparks a confrontation, read “I Said Daniel Was Right, Then Made One Call Before Breakfast” and “The Roommate’s Father Claimed He Could Control the University”. There’s also “My Daughter’s Classmate Handed Her Father Something After He Destroyed Our Birthday Cake” for another tense family showdown.
