Saturday morning, I got up before light, unlocked the shop, and carried my chair right out onto the Broadway sidewalk, set it down facing the street, and I cut hair on that sidewalk from seven in the morning until a quarter to six.
Free. I would not take a dollar and about nine people tried to leave one in the chair anyway.
Forty-one haircuts. I have not done forty-one in a day since 1993 and my shoulder let me know about it Sunday.
Sheriff Colson sat down at eight and did not need one. Two council members after him. A boy turned four in that chair at ten thirty with his grandmother filming it, and I have his father’s Polaroid on my wall from 1998.
Which brings me to what I actually want to tell.
Thursday night I took the wall down. Two hundred and eleven Polaroids, sorted into a shoebox by the year on the back, because Big Ed dated every one himself. That was his camera. He bought it in 1984, kept it behind my register for twenty-nine years, and took most of those pictures.
There is one from March of 1986. Little boy, maybe five, sitting up on my booster board with a cape on and his chin set hard because he had decided not to cry.
On the back, in his father’s hand:
Lance, first haircut, 3/86. He did not cry. Told him afterward that a man in this town gets his hair cut by Ellis and that is one of the things you get to have. I want him to know that when he is grown and I am not around to say it.
I put that one in an envelope Tuesday and mailed it to Nashville with nothing else in it.
I did not call him and I have not heard from him and I do not expect to. That was not what it was for.
The smoothie place did not go in. I had nothing to do with that and I never asked one soul for anything. That block sits in the downtown overlay, the storefront conversion needed a variance, and the board voted it down five to nothing in a meeting I was not at and did not know about.
Lance sold the building in the spring.
I am two doors down now, in the old insurance office, which Marlene Colson owns and offered me on that sidewalk while I was cutting her nephew’s hair.
Bigger window. Same chair, paid for in 1985, still good. The wall is back up, all two hundred and eleven, and there is room for more of them now.
Big Ed’s camera is behind the register where it was.
He came in in October. Sat in the car out front a while first, then came in and sat down. He did not say much and neither did I, and it was the worst haircut I have given in ten years because my hands were not right.
He has not been back. He mailed the envelope back to me in November with the Polaroid still in it and a note that said, put it on the wall where it goes.
It is up there. Third row, left side, 1986, a boy who did not cry.