Bill Time

Pouting beside the Ford Ranchero 500 in Williston. Lewis, eight years younger than I had been told it was time to get a hair cut. Lewis, like me in the early 70's of long hair and hippies, rebelled against having to travel down town to Bill Griffis barber shop. And heaven forbid if your turn came and old Mr Griffis, Bill's father, Alfred Griffis, had an opening. He would not let you say, I am waiting on Bill, making you climb on up. He would wrap the striped drape around your neck with the toilet tissue pulled tight enough to choke and slowly prepare his tonsil tools of torture. Old school, the only cuts he knew were the crew or butch. A little off the top or just a bit on the sides fell upon deaf ears literally. "What's that you say?"" Yes", and with the crew cut he would proceed. Even on his finest of days, well in his eighties, he was shaky and erratic.  Invariably, at some point in the process of getting 'crewed', he would go into a coughing frenzy, never slowing the buzzing, as the stainless clippers followed the familiar path of their master, as an old cow on a rutted trail, jerking about with every spasm like an old Willy's on a Gulf Hammock road, sending blond  chunks of hair filling to the floor. It was always my greatest fear that he would decide to give me a shave around the ears, sharpening the straight razor on the leather razor strop, applying the warm lather from the foam dispenser. By the time Mr Albert had straightened up the erratic hair lines and applied stinging tonic water to the bloody moles he had flattened , dashed talcum powder all over you and brushed you down with the soft whisk bristles, you may as well of called Joe Knauff to come and lay you out, dying in the chair, than to have to face your friends the following Monday, shorn shamefully as a bleating sheep returned from a de-wooling.
And is it any wonder Lewis had such a powerful pout, knowing what he was soon to face?