bottle from the shelf and sprinkled a nice-smelling liquid on my head, massaged it in, then combed my hair back and said “done.”
I looked in the mirror. Damned if I didn’t look good!
Thomas turned to my father.
“When he need haircut, if he sweep floor that day, I do it. Okay to you, Antonio Gallini?”
They shook hands, and we left with me basking in the hair tonic Thomas the Barber had sprinkled on my head.
We walked a bit farther that sun-bright day and then slowly ambled back home. Mama saw us coming from the front window and waited for us at the top of the stairs. She stared at Papa in disapproval as we trudged in, but Papa’s face, his wide grin lighting up the furnace-burnt darkness, stopped her. He put his arms around her, the way he must have done when I wasn’t there, seemed to nibble on her ear and whispered, and then she giggled and smiled. She examined me, eyes sparkling, and said, “Bravo, Berto!”
What an amazing man Papa was!
I think of him now, when I see all the kids on medication to help keep them focused. If he were alive today he would have wrinkled his nose in disgust. I laugh to myself when I think of Papa and my first week at school.
When I started first grade, the teacher handed out workbooks. We didn’t have a nun in that grade. I suspect our teacher was a newly minted member of the education community paying her dues in a religious school in a bad neighborhood.
I looked through the manuals for spelling, reading, and arithmetic. By the end of the first week I had filled them all out, front to back. The teacher had a hissy fit when she saw what I had done. She wrote a note to my parents and sternly instructed me to take it to them.
I took longer than usual to walk home that day, and then I waited a bit before giving the note to Mama. She read it and frowned but said nothing. Later, when Papa came home, she showed it to him, and he frowned, too.
And me? I was afraid—very afraid.
Mama and Papa said nothing to me.
Next day at lunch I almost peed my pants, when Mama and Papa both walked into the classroom. He was wearing his work clothes, so he had given up his lunch break to come to my school.
I heard the young teacher greet them, somewhat surprised as well. I heard her describe my crime of completing all my work the first week of school. And then I heard something wonderful.
“Teacher lady, why is this bad?”
It was Papa!
She stammered for a moment, as my father’s eyes bored into her. This was no ignorant immigrant worker.
I am sure she is dead now, but I bless that young woman for having the common sense largely missing today when she replied, “You’re right, Mr. Galen. Let me see what I can do.”
I hope God lets her know about my words of thanks. From then on, that dear woman brought in books from her own library for me to read, while the other kids did “Dick and Jane.”
Maybe if I had been a schoolchild today I would have been classified as ADD, ADHD, or QRSTUV. On the other hand, my mind does tend to wander.
We were talking about the barber.
About every six weeks I would show up at Mr. Putchenkov’s shop. There I would grab a broom handle—which was far taller than I was—and round up the piles of black, brown, blond, red, and gray-white hairs lying in clumps on the tile floor around each barber chair.
It used to remind me of the shaggy fur falling off the mange-laden dogs that wandered the neighborhood, often serving as large-sized cats when they chased down and ate the numerous rats living there.
It was a steamy-hot July day. The air was heavy, a mixture of various shop scents, musky male sweat, and stogie-smoking customers, all overpowered by the stench of whatever was decaying in the river. I had been sweeping for awhile but had to stop and catch my breath.
This was in the days before air conditioning, and even the black-enameled, reciprocating, metal-bladed fan did little to relieve the stifling humidity.
How did Papa manage to survive the foundry furnace heat?
“Here, boy … Berto, sit.”
The door to the shop was wide open, and assorted flies and other insects buzzed in to sniff the colognes and then fly out. There was no screen door, but somehow the insects didn’t bother us. Maybe they recognized larger insects in the general scheme of life.
“Berto, you want Moxie?”
Thomas reached into a wooden icebox at the back of the store and took out two cold bottles of Moxie soda pop. Talk about ambrosia nectar!
Again, my mind wanders. Do they still make Moxie? I used to read the label, looking at the white-coated doctor/pharmacist staring out at me with a pointing finger telling me to drink Moxie for good health.
We sat there, Thomas sitting in one of his barber chairs and me next to a pile of Police Gazettes. He laughed and pointed at the top magazine.
“Lady got big bazookas there, boy.”
The only bazookas I knew about were the ones used in the war, so what would a lady be doing with those? I just nodded.
“Mr. Putchenkov?”
“You call me Thomas, remember?”
“Yes, sir … uh … Thomas, how did you become a barber?”
“Why? You want to become barber?”
I had to admit that what he did seemed like fun: snip-snip click all day long. And this was before I met the lady under the bridge and began to hang around Dr. Agnelli’s clinic.
“Maybe.”
So many things fascinated me I barely had time to sleep. I spent a lot of hours at the library, too—by myself.
I know, I know. Today’s social workers would have to rescue me, because they would have tagged my parents as neglectful for letting me run loose at such a young age—and, heaven forbid, at a library.
“Okay, kid, Thomas tell you life story. You know Mother Russia?”
I shook my head then said, “There’s a big railroad there.”
I had just read about the longest railroad in the world. Railroads fascinated me.
Thomas’s face split in the biggest smile I had ever seen.
“Berto, I help build that railroad!”
He closed his eyes as he talked, and the little shop seemed to disappear, replaced by broad expanses of cold, open land.
“I born in Irkutsk, in Siberia, not far from beautiful lake—Lake Baikal. It twenty-fifth year of Tzar Alexander Nikolaevich Second.”
By my reckoning that would have been 1880.
“My brother and me, twins. I better looking and stronger, but it good to have twin—no need for friends. We hunt, run, cut wood for Papa. We even walk to lake.
“When I thirteen I meet Maria Ivanova. You got girlfriend, Berto?”
I shook my head once more. I didn’t want to mention Kate. Seven- to eight-year-old boys weren’t supposed to like girls. That, too, is another story.
He sighed. “She thirteen and have big bazookas, too.”
He laughed, and then his face creased. I couldn’t tell if it was sadness, anger, or both.
“Two years later Papa come to me and brother. He say son of Tzar, Nicholas Third, building railroad from St. Petersburg, capital city on western border of Russia, all way to Vladivostok in East—longest railroad in world! Papa said would be good jobs for two strapping boys.
“By then I love Maria Ivanova, want marry her. But Papa say