descending coronary artery. Okay, hang on. You know what I gotta do.”
I sure did. Even with the pain and twilight-sedation drugs in me, I felt myself tightening up a bit. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I knew he had to do balloon angioplasty, using an expanding, balloon-tipped catheter to break through the blockage, and then install a stent to keep the artery open.
Not bad for an almost-octogenarian retired doctor, eh?
“Do you feel anything, Galen?”
“Boy, if I had you back in my classroom you’d feel something about now. ‘Course I feel something! Get on with it.”
Soon he did, and I saw the dye course through the stent-widened, left anterior descending artery in my heart, carrying its river of life to my poor old myocardium.
“Ain’t science wonderful, Crescenzi?”
“Yep! Now what were those other two thoughts crossing your non-existent neurons?”
I giggled again. The SOB must have given me more pain meds through my IV.
“Well,” and then I knew for sure as my speech slurred slightly, “now I can attend the wedding of you and your lover.”
Crescenzi was the best damned interventional cardiologist around. He also was gay. Back when he was my student it was all I could do to keep some Luddite profs from having him expelled for “unspecified reasons.”
“And the other?”
As I drifted off I mumbled, “My first real haircut.”
When you live hand to mouth, some of the niceties of the middle class are a luxury. Include haircuts in that category.
Papa and Mama would take turns putting a bowl over my head when my hair got too shaggy for them to tolerate, as well as the nuns at my grammar school. I didn’t feel bad. All my friends got the same kind of haircut and, sometimes, those without a mama—like Salvatore—would come over, and my folks would do the honors.
Recipe: Take one pot or, more commonly, one soup bowl, and place over squirming kid’s head.
Then take pair of scissors, better known as shears.
Cut whatever hair sticks out from under the mold.
Complete the process and voila! You get a very bad but functional, marine-style haircut—at no cost, except the other kids making fun of you. But usually they didn’t. We all looked the same, and the nuns just ignored it as a fact of life in our neighborhood.
I had just turned seven that early spring day, and Papa was enjoying one of his rare days off. He must have been feeling exceptionally good. After I had blown out the candles on the three cupcakes—our substitute for a cake—he stood up, looked at me and Mama, and said, “Berto, we go for a walk.”
I guess it was his old-country way of father-son bonding. It didn’t matter to me. I was ecstatic. I would get to spend more time with Papa!
It was still chilly, so we put on our church-basement-sale jackets then headed down the stairs and out. We didn’t wear hats or gloves. We were men.
I remember running to catch up with him as he strode down the street. He wasn’t a tall man, but he could move like one, and I had to shout at him to slow down. He turned and saw me puffing to catch up, and he actually laughed out loud.
Papa almost never laughed.
We walked across the river bridge, and I saw the blinking red light in the window of the Western Union Telegraph office. I didn’t know what it did until much later, when I went to medical school. Then I came to hate what it stood for.
That is another story.
We soon passed the tenements and entered our town’s small-business district. As we walked on, Papa would point out the different shops and tell me what they did and who ran them. We passed Mr. Ruddy’s shoe repairs and Mr. Huff’s electric motors. I smelled the ripe aroma of provolone cheese emanating from Mr. Zuppa’s grocery and the pungent smell of hanging salami from the butcher next door. Papa didn’t say much except that the butcher shop was owned by the Mad Russian.
“But Papa, why is he mad?”
“Just because, Berto.”
Papa pointed out the radio repair shop and told me that the man who fixed things there had actually worked for Mr. Marconi, the inventor of the radio, and his assistant was General Eisenhower’s personal radio technician during the war that just ended.
We passed by the glazier (Are there still shops where you can get pieces of glass?), and then a storefront with a red-and-white-striped pole in front. A man even more stocky and muscular than Papa stood in the doorway.
As we moved on, a gruff, strangely accented voice called out, “Who cut kid’s hair? I kill man who did that.”
I saw Papa’s fists ball up, and he turned and walked toward the man in the doorway. I yelled, “No, Papa,” and the other man raised his arms, hands palm forward, and began to laugh.
Papa stopped and stared at him.
I got between them and looked up at the jowly-faced man wearing a short white jacket and dark pants. His solid-black hair was slicked down by pomade, and his eyes seemed peculiar in their shape. It wasn’t until later when I studied anthropology that I learned about the tribes who had lived in the Steppes of Russia.
He looked my father squarely in the eye and said, “I am Putchenkov.” He extended his right hand and Papa did the same. I relaxed when both men shook hands and my father replied, “I am Antonio Galen.”
The other man winked.
“Was not Gallini?”
My father nodded and again the man laughed.
“Ya, they tried make me ‘Putch.’ I said I was not dog, and Putchenkov was good name.
“Now,” and he looked down at me, “what is name?”
“Berto,” Papa replied.
“Call me Thomas, Thomas the Barber.”
“It’s my birthday,” I said.
“Ah, Berto, come in. I cut your hair!”
In those days, haircuts for men were twenty-five cents, thirty-five with a shave. Kids were ten cents. Papa shook his head.
“I cannot pay you.”
“No, no. Is birthday gift.”
To this day, whenever I enter a true barbershop for men—not those fancy, unisex salons and hair-stylist joints—the scents of bay rum, lilac, allspice, and antiseptic trigger my olfactory memory of that day when I first entered the shop of Thomas the Barber. Other scents I never learned to name emanated from the bottle-lined shelves on the mirror-covered walls. Shaving mugs, many of them personalized, hung from the back, and the small sink held the magical shaving soap and bristle brushes in a row. There were three, creamy-white, enameled pedestal chairs and six customer seats capped off by a table laden with issues of Police Gazette and Grit.
Mr. Putchenkov reached into a dark corner and pulled out a small, wooden, cushioned shelf. He placed it over the black leather seat, picked me up as if I were a feather, and sat me on the cushion. Then he draped a pinstriped, blue sheet around my chest and neck.
I kept looking at Papa, not knowing what to expect, especially when I saw Thomas pick up a big pair of scissors and a comb. He ran the comb through my hair, and suddenly I heard the snip-snip click, as the barber began to cut the shrub on top of my head.
Snip-snip click, snip-snip click. On it went, until my head actually felt lighter. He ran the comb through my hair then took another gadget, flipped a switch, and I felt the buzzing hum of the electric trimmer, as it moved up and down the back of my neck and under my ears.
When he stopped, he looked at me and asked, “You want shave?”