Clipped

Last week my wife and I were hiking Lucifer’s Falls in upstate New York. Who could have guessed that a few days later it would be my morals that would land in the Devil’s hands.

The side streets of my neighborhood look calm enough, but open the wrong door and the lowest behavior presents itself, albeit in a Brooks Brothers suit. When I rented an apartment some years ago, an otherwise innocuous walk up on the next block, almost identical to my building, was busted hosting a brothel. A bustling bar had an even more bustling apartment above it hosting after-hours drinking and gambling. Somebody once actually tried to sell me steaks of questionable ownership out of the trunk of their car.

Through most of my life I’ve resisted most vice, save an excessive beer from a friendly bartender. Then Friday, in broad daylight, I fell.

The purpose of my journey was noble enough—picking up our take out lunch. I had walked the side street to the restaurant a thousand times or more in my life, never really paying any attention to the urban topography. Approaching a still-closed storefront, I saw the masked man, a figure vaguely familiar but hard to identify. As I reached an acceptable social distance, his heavy figure supported a quick flick of his neck causing his nose to point slightly upward—the international sign that he recognized me. My next step toward him trapped me for good. In one swift motion his face turned to a door I had never noticed before while simultaneously saying “Let’s go.” The tone was not one of a kind party invitation.

Whisked through the door, I walked with him through a dirty corridor that hadn’t seen the light of day in a century, or whenever the sagging brick building was built. A hard right took me to another door and no other option but to open this portal and enter into my fate. Coming from the shaded outside, my eyes needed to adjust to the sparkling bright fluorescent lights inside. The place was familiar, but backwards. Looking out to the front door, the metal gate was all the way down, blocking any sunlight. Black garbage bags covered the two large windows that would otherwise provide a view to the street. You couldn’t see outside, and outsiders couldn’t see in. Almost exactly three months to the day since my last fix, New York’s newest den of iniquity was about to deliver—I sat down into the comfortable chair of a barbershop speakeasy.

It didn’t have to be this way. Unshorn for weeks, my hair resembled a cross between Doc Brown in Back to the Future and a rejected Muppet prototype. Yet as the world witnessed our elected leaders decriminalizing curfew breaking, property destruction, and looting, hair cutting was considered not just non-essential but potentially worth a trip to a police cell. Undeterred, my barber went underground, now literally pulling people off the street trying to make a living. He and his compatriot were the only, socially distanced, staff; both were wearing masks and thus complying with all necessary regulations except those pesky executive orders to close.

My journey into this morally deprave morass of personal hair care now took a happily routine turn. We bantered idly as the overgrown mass was expertly coiffed. Another patron asked when the shop decided to go rogue, with the brilliant reply coming, “When I saw Cuomo on TV last week with a new haircut and he didn’t explain how he got it.” Sartorial justice was being served one illegal scissor snip at a time. Besides payment, all the barbers asked from me was to put my mask as I left so that I looked like normal pedestrian. I did the former with a huge tip and the latter to make sure the cops didn’t get on my barber’s case.

There was some salvation later that night when I turned on the news. A reporter was live outside some bars and restaurants breathlessly sharing how patrons were standing on the sidewalk, drinking, laughing, and even eating food without social distancing or using masks. On cue a patrol car rolled slowly by with its lights flashing, and then just as leisurely passed by without so much as a warning to the scofflaws. The nanny-state correspondent could barely hide her disappointment. Whatever numbered “phase” the government has us in needs to move on like the moods of a teenager. Besides, I hear illegal haircuts are just the entry drug to covert indoor dining and group soccer games. In this case, I won’t “just say no.”

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved