The next morning I made two phone calls, put on my good jacket, and drove down to that landlord office to see him in person.
The first call had been to a lawyer. The second had been to a man whose first haircut I gave forty years ago, a boy who used to squirm in my chair and who grew up to buy and sell buildings for a living.
The landlord thought he had watched a beaten old man lock up for the last time. What he had actually watched was me realizing he had made a serious mistake.
He had tripled my rent overnight to force me out, and he had never once bothered to read the lease the old owner signed with me years ago, the one that fixed my rent and my right to that corner for years still to come.
My lawyer read it to him, slow, across his own desk. The rent hike was not legal. Not while my lease ran. He could not triple a number the paper had already fixed, and he could not push me off a corner the paper said was mine.
His fancy salon plan died right there.
But that was not the end of it. Because the boy whose first haircut I gave, the one who buys and sells buildings now, had made a few calls of his own.
The building was for sale, quietly, the way these things are. And before that landlord could dream up his next trick, my old customer bought it out from under him.
I do not rent that corner anymore. I do not answer to a landlord at all. My shop sits in a building owned by a man who learned to sit still in my chair when he was five years old, and who told me the rent would never rise a dollar as long as I wanted to cut hair there.
Three chairs, a striped pole, and me. Still on the corner of Elm and Second, where I have been for thirty-four years, where I gave this town its first haircuts and its sons their first haircuts too.
The landlord who called me a good run that was over does not own a thing on that block now. He sold and moved on, a little poorer and, I hope, a little wiser.
A barber chair is a kind of church, I always said. Turns out the congregation looks after its own.
The boy whose first haircut I gave brings his own grandson in now. Three chairs, three generations, and the same striped pole turning slow in the window. I put the little one up on the board across the arms of the chair, the way I did his grandfather forty years ago, and I give him his very first haircut while his family watches.
That is worth more than any rent that landlord ever dreamed of charging. Some things you cannot put a price on, and a man learns that too late, or he does not learn it at all.