I was depressed.
It was 9/11/2009 and liars are yelling "You Lie!" at the President and Bin Laden still hasn't been caught and earlier my truck wouldn't start.
At this stage of the game there was only one thing that could cheer me up. It was to get a haircut.
Not because a haircut is magical - but because the person who gives me my haircut is.
I pulled into the parking lot in front of her shop and tried to comb my gray hair with my hand before going in - so it doesn't look like I'm the absent minded old geezer I am getting to be.
Inside the door I catch a glimpse of the "Magician" who will cut my hair. She is far in the back and sees me, too. I sit down and she yells "HEY!" over all the people, young and old who are between us.
I yell back "HEY!"
She says, "I'll be with you in a minute and I say, "Ok."
Now she's on the phone and I hear her telling someone, "Well, I was trying to get out of her, but now I've got to dye this and do that and give a hair cut."
So I have come at a bad time, but I know from experience, it will be a good time for me. In a minute she comes forward toward her chair by the window, leading an elderly woman who it appears has just had her hair washed.
I say, "Can you get me out of here by three thirty?" and she says she can.
I settle back and just watch her work. She is trimming the old woman's hair. The old woman is saying, "I've lost weight." The Magician is saying, "You sure have!"
She looks at me and smiles. Then the old lady is saying, "I've got too much gray hair," and the Magician is saying, "No, you don't!" She smiles at me again.
She is doing the same thing to the old woman that she is going to do to me in a few minutes: telling lie after lie that will make me feel good about myself. Wonderful in fact.
That is why... she is the Magician. She can make even me and the old lady feel like living again, even before ever telling the story of her sister losing her wig.
From out of the back comes an even older woman than the one sitting there. She is using a walking cane and she is traveling at the speed of about one inch a century. Every step she takes scares me. I don't believe she will make any more - not even one more - without falling. But she does.
I think she is headed for the door, but I'm not sure, she is going so slow. Very close to teetering and falling over completely.
The woman in the chair looks at her and says to her, "I think I know you. Where do you go to church?"
That strikes up a long conversation about churches and preachers. "Oh, I love that man. He never dresses up. He's just common," says old woman number one. "I just love to see him run across the stage when God get's in him!"
I look at old woman number two. There is flesh sagging down, hanging off her arm, and even that has a bandage on it, with blood seeping through. There is no way to tell how beautiful she once was. It's all gone now. Just make-up on someone walking slowly to the grave, with rest stops at a hair salon.
I am reminded of how cruel young people are - I was - when I was young. My mom would come home and she would say, "I just got back from the beauty shop," and I would say, "Was it closed?"
I thought that was the funniest thing. I said that to her many times. And she never said, "You're time's coming, Smart Ass."
Now my time has come.
The two oldies are still talking church.
"So that's where you get all your love from," one says about the other, about some other church some other where.
Then they ask the Magician where she goes to church and she tells them, and one looks down at her and says, "Your toe nails look so pretty that color."
The Magician, who is wearing sandals and jeans and a black top, says, "I had to wash and paint them today - you have to when you cut grass and play out in the mud."
Number two woman asks number one woman what her name is, and the woman says, "I'm worth a lot: I'm a Jewel." They both laugh. I smile, but I am not seen. I am just an unimportant man-fly sitting in a chair, waiting for a gray hair cut.
While the two women talk "amongst themselves" as Andy Griffith used to say, the Magician asks me if I have seen my friend's - her relative by marriage - little boy. I say I haven't, and she says, "He just can't stay away from me. Jumps right up in my arms."
She goes on to say the little boy looks like he was "spit right out of the his daddy's mouth" - a term I had never heard before - as well as another phrase she says immediately after - which is, "He looks so much like his daddy it's a SIN."
This place, this Magician and her shop and the people in it are all special to me. I come here, I hear things and see things and I go away feeling alive again. Sometimes alive happy - sometimes alive sad - but always alive.
I love to hear the Magician speak, to watch her work. She's from another universe different from the dull one I dwell in: a place where it is a sin to look so much like your parents, and where instead of labor pains and trips to the hospital to give birth, you're just spit right out of your parents mouth.
The old, old woman is definitely trying to leave now. I say trying because I don't know how in the hell she will make it. I rise to help her and open the door and help her and two huge handbags out into the parking lot and into a big-ass Cadillac. And when she drives off fast, I know I am going to be deathly afraid the rest of the day, to know that she is out there on the highway.
Her hair is fine, but the rest of her body has no business driving.
I go back in and re-sit.
The Magician is putting curlers in the old woman's hair now. Then she got a white looking catchup bottle shaped thing and started squirting black dye on the rollers. She stops and moves her free hand to her face saying, "I've got something in my eye."
I tell her, "Put a little of that black stuff in it."
She smiles and says, "If I do that, I won't have an eye." She finishes filling the rollers and sends the woman - orders her is more like it - to another chair down the road - to let the dye sink in I guess.
Then it's my turn in the top chair.
I tell her, just kidding, that maybe next time I'll let her hose me down with some of that black stuff in my hair.
She says, "OK, but we can't let it stay in there too long."
"Or what?" I say.
"Or your hair will fall completely out."
The old woman with the rollers comes by and says she's going next door to get a drink. "Ok," says the Magician. "But don't stay gone too long."
I say, "Have you ever done that too anyone? Let the dye stay in too long?"
She says, "No, but someone's done it to me."
I said, "Well, what did you do?"
She said, "Well, after I got over the shock, I got a wig. And my sister got one, too, because she had cancer, then we all went to Florida and her husband got drunk and pushed her in the pool and her wig came off and floated to the top."
Now, I've heard a lot of things in my life, but I believe that was absolutely more information given in one breath than I had ever heard before. And I had to laugh at both the statement and the visual of the wig floating to the top.
The Magician laughed too, but she was also starting to wonder where in the world the woman was who went out for a drink with her head full of black dye. "She better get back soon," she said.
Then she asked me if my friend had shown me "the picture."
I said, "No, what was it?"
She said, "Well, it was actually two pictures. The first picture was of a woman who had plastic surgery on her breasts, and they were big, but one nipple was up too high and one was down too low. And she was asking the Doctor, who had his back to the picture, what had gone wrong."
"And the second picture was of the doctor facing us, and one of his eyes was up high and one was way down low, and he was saying, I don't see nothing wrong with them."
I laughed yet again, and the old woman came through the door with her drink and the Magician said to her, "Get over in that chair - we've got to get that out of your hair as soon as I finish here!"
So she's finishing up my hair when the phone rings and another stylist hands it to her without saying anything. I can hear a man's voice and the Magician is just saying, "yeah, yeah, uh, yeah." Then out of nowhere she suddenly says two words I have never heard from a woman talking on the phone before. She says, "Big boobs."
I break out into a big laugh because I can't imagine in what context those two words could be used.
I hear her tell the guy on the phone, "Oh, I'm just cutting hair and this guy is laughing at me." They talk a little more and she says "bye" and hangs up. "My family is crazy," she says.
I say, "I've just got to ask you... why did you saw "Big boobs?"
She said, "Well my sister had breast cancer and after they were removed she wanted the biggest pair she could get, so she got them, and now she's walking around telling her husband her back hurts, and neither one of them can figure out why, and he asks me, and I said, "Big Boobs."
I'm laughing out loud again - this time for a long time - while she brushes the hair off the back of my neck and shirt. I pay her and she gives me a big hug and smiles goodbye.
And she has made me feel so much better than when I came in. She is indeed a Magician. To everyone.
I go outside.
I don't have a big-ass Cadillac, just an old beat up truck.
And they still haven't caught Bin Laden.
But now, I feel like I can make it til the next hair cut, sometime in the far distant future.
You see, when you're a geezer your hair doesn't grow fast, and all kinds of things don't work any more.
But you never ever forget... who makes you smile.
And you always go back, even when you no longer have hair...
or move at the pace of one inch a century.
Or don't go to any church at all.