The Life of Brian

Lately my scalp and face have been objecting to the razor, so for three or four weeks I did nothing. For the first time in a very long time I looked in the mirror at a beard and what remained of my hair. I decided I needed professional help.

Which is how I ended up in a barber’s chair for the first time in about twenty years.

The barber’s name was Brian. He asked what I wanted. I told him I genuinely had no idea, then gave up and said: “Shave the head, fade the beard, and make it look like it complements this face that was made for radio.”

“I got you, bro. I got you.”

He said it so calmly that I relaxed. This was a man with the situation under control. At least, that was my initial assessment.

He looked like someone who had lived a hard life. Slight, maybe five foot seven, with lean, muscular arms and a slight stoop. Not frail. More like a body that had done some things.

He put a hot towel over my head and, fairly quickly, started telling me about himself.

He was from Mississippi. His father, he said, had been the first Black sheriff in Mississippi. That got my attention.

Brian never grew up with him. His mother was married when she became pregnant, but the child wasn’t her husband’s, and that liaison ended the marriage. He was raised by older brothers who, from the sound of it, were cruel. He didn’t meet his father until he was thirty-eight, after ancestry research finally led him to his father.

By then he had lived a lot of life, and not all of it well. For years he spiralled into the seedier parts of Los Angeles. He never gave me every detail. He didn’t need to. You could hear that he had travelled a long way down roads that get harder to turn around on.

Then his mother intervened, and he gave her full credit for pulling him back. I understood that. Some mothers keep seeing the child underneath whatever mess the adult has made.

He had been clean for years. He boxed competitively, at fifty-six. That explained the arms. It did not explain the stoop, but by then I had stopped trying to assemble him into one tidy picture. There were too many pieces: the father, the brothers, Los Angeles, his mother, the boxing, his sons. One son, he told me proudly, had been an exceptional college football prospect, and under the pride I could hear something familiar. A father watching his boy reach the point where the road divides, and recognising some of himself in it.

All the while, he was working on my head.

At some point he unfolded a straight razor. I had spent twenty years shaving my own head, but never had another man stand behind me with a blade sharp enough for minor surgery. That takes a little trust. It takes slightly more while he’s describing the darker chapters of his life.

I closed my eyes. Not to relax. As a matter of policy. If someone has a razor at your throat, there is nothing useful to be gained by watching.

Then ancestry came up again. He had found Scottish ancestry on his father’s side and was fascinated by Scotland, which gave me my opening.

“My father’s Scottish.”

He lit up, and mentioned Gaelic. From the back of my childhood I produced a line my grandmother taught me in Scotland. I had always remembered it as “It’s a beautiful night tonight, Mrs Bright.” For about five minutes Brian seemed unable to believe what had just come out of my mouth.

It was only later that I learned two things. My grandmother hadn’t been having me on. And it wasn’t Gaelic at all. It was Scots.

It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht.

A beautiful bright moonlit night tonight. After carrying the wrong version around for decades, that felt strangely satisfying. The words had wandered. The memory had not.

For a moment, a Black barber from Mississippi and a Māori bloke from Rotorua with a Scottish father met in the middle of a sentence my grandmother had put in my head years before.

Then the razor went back to work.

“Wow,” I said. “Fifty-six and you don’t need glasses.”

“Oh no,” he said. “I forgot my glasses today.”

This was not information I needed at that moment. I was gripping the arms of the chair hard enough to dent the metal, and the razor had started to hurt. Quite a lot, actually. I considered asking, is this supposed to hurt? Instead I did what men do when faced with a solvable problem. Nothing. I sat there and endured it.

I’ve sometimes wondered if I have a neon sign over my head that says please tell me your life story. People do. I don’t mind. Most lives become interesting if you listen long enough.

So with my eyes closed I filled in what he hadn’t said. What did those years in Los Angeles look like? What kind of man was his father? What was it like meeting him at thirty-eight? How do you carry that kind of cruelty from your brothers for so long that you refuse to attend one of their funerals? And what has to happen inside a person for all of that not to turn him hard?

Because Brian wasn’t hard.

He was gentle. A little battered, perhaps, but kind.

I doubt everything had been resolved, but perhaps enough had.

When he finished, I looked in the mirror. It was fine. Probably a six and a half out of ten. He had been far more interested in telling me his life than in the finer points of my haircut.

I paid, and pressed an extra tip into his hand, cash, separate from the card.

He tried to refuse it. I liked that.

I insisted.

I don’t know that I’d ever go back. But I’m glad to have met Brian.

At home, I found the rest of the bill. A good deal of razor rash, all the way around my neck.

The rash will last a few days. The story I expect to keep.