Sometimes The Past Emerges To Break Your Heart

It was during one of my return visits home from college, and I was in the vulnerable seat that is the barber's chair.

I sometimes imagine a barber offering an old-fashioned lather and shave with a sharp blade - a man submits his neck to a stranger with a knife, trusting that no harm will follow. It's an interesting exercise, counter-intuitive to personal safety in so many ways (moreso when you've studied the blood vessels of the neck), and yet it remains a norm.

A friend and I once mused (I am certain we were not the first) that you cannot truly call a place home until you have established a barber and a dentist in the area. Dentists, like barbers, assume a working proximity to the internal carotid artery that places them in a comparable risk category.

In college, home was still where my parents lived, so I got my haircuts while on vacation at the same Fantastic Sam's where I'd obtained them during high school.

There have been two memorable (bordering on great) barbers in my life, both named George.

My original George, George the Elder, gave me my first haircut at around a year of age, a fact I knew because he kept a photo from that milestone taped to the periphery of the mirror in his barbershop. He and his wife ran the business well into their 80's.

George had a vaguely Eastern European accent, one that hinted at but never openly discussed an escape from persecution and a new start after WWII in America. He had a magnificent lion's mane of white curly hair that seamlessly joined a full beard and walrus mustache, with the tips of the mustache waxed and curled to perfection.

His idea of cool was trying to make me look like Fonzie from Happy Days. I'd indulge whatever way he combed my hair out of affection while in the barber's chair, and immediately muss it up as soon as I was out of his sight line and back in mom's stationwagon. I loved the guy, but hip he was not.

I went to George through the end of elementary school until we moved to another town a couple of hours away, where I became the charge of George the Younger, a waifish and effeminate latino man with a product heavy look that feathered his hair toward a central point resembling the crown of a cockatoo. This George had a wispy mustache and no beard. He was probably the first person I can recall as being openly gay (aside from a cousin who would confirm my suspicions many years later).

Although it could not have been easy cultivating an unusual appearance among a community that prized conformity, George was a good-natured guy and people appreciated him. He worked at the Fantastic Sam's in the same strip mall that held the town K-mart. Among a customer base that prioritized thrift, he was an unexpected spark of glamor - even a minor celebrity.

I never requested him explicitly from the rotation (requests cost extra, and we were not such lavish spenders) but mostly seemed to pull him as my barber by luck of the draw. Despite initial concern that he might leave me looking as out of place as he did among the locals, he always gave me precisely the haircut I was hoping for. He was kind, a little gossipy in a harmless way, and always interested in what I considered a very provincial high school existence.

On this particular visit home, on this day, George was not working according to the woman who was assigned to me, but she promised to send him my regards. She asked if I was a student at the nearby university, and I replied that I was home from college but had grown up in the area.

She inquired about the local high school I'd attended, and asked if I'd known of a particular student who went there at around the time I did. It was a girl whose name I did not recognize until she mentioned a nickname: the girl was known as "Cobra" for her elaborate, product-filled hairstyle.

I recalled her instantly - a year or two below me in high school, she wore dark eyeliner that had a goth quality, kohl eyes highlighted by a remarkable hood of gravity-defying hair. She must have spent an hour on her appearance every morning to cultivate such an elaborate look. We'd never spoken, but in a small town like ours, where exotic species were uncommon, she was a rare orchid walking down the hallway to class among mostly daisies.

Without thinking about it too much, I poured these recollections out to the hairdresser. I mentioned seeing her in passing at high school, the remarkable aspects of her appearance, reflecting on the bravery it must have taken to risk difference in that time and place.

I asked the hairdresser how she knew Cobra and what she was up to these days.

She's my sister. She took her life six months ago.

Silence.

Thank you for remembering her. It brings her back in some small way.