To order a copy of
Except in Dreams
send $1
(check, money order, stamps, or
cash) to:
William P. Tandy
PO Box 963
Havre
de Grace, MD
21078 USA
esp@leekinginc.com
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Excerpt from Except in
Dreams
Annapolis Barber Shop in
Eastport, where everyone who walks through the door is, so far as its employees
are concerned, in the Navy.
“Especially you….yeah, you,
sitting over there…you’re next in the chair…you in the old
submariner-issue sweater that looks like it came out of the lucky bad at a
now-defunct military institution (never mind the safety pins).” Genuine
old Navy, NOT Old Navy.
A half-dozen
barbers, one woman, and I wind up in the chair of a crazy Italian in his
mid-thirties.
“Have you considered
barber college, son?”
Male barbers
bite.
“How short?”
“A bit. Still long enough to
part.”
“So, real
short?”
“Yeah, buddy.
Whatever. ‘Real’ short.”
Yank, chop, snip, buzz, chop, yank, yank,
chop….
Across the shop, a boy of
about seven or eight sits in the barber’s chair while his father gets his
hair cut in the chair adjacent.
“Dad, are you gonna bet on the Super
Bowl again this year?”
“I
don’t know,” replies Dad. “It took me all year to cover the last
one.”
A wave of laughter submerges
the shop.
From behind my head comes the
vaguely familiar whirring sound, like a small electric motor…hands are
gone from my head, and then….
….Foamy warmth on the sideburns,
neckline, glint of surgical stainless, NO, YOU WEIRD BASTARD!….
“Square it off in the back?”
“Yeah,” I manage to mutter
despite the fact that I am almost completely paralyzed with intense horror as
the fiend takes up his straight razor.
Focusing on the floor in front of
me…shearings everywhere….thinking happy thoughts, thinking ANY
thoughts that don’t involve the heinous possibilities of what’s going
on behind my back….
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Are they still playing that
20th-Century thing?”
“Twentieth-Century thing? I don’t
know what….”
“On TV, on
ESPN. The 50 Greatest Sports People.”
“I think they’re down to number
five or so,” adds the barber. “And they haven’t done Ali or Ruth
or Jordan yet.”
“Maybe you
could bet on who will be number one, Daddy.”
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