Fifteen Minutes With Vikki

Today I decided to get a haircut. I went to the Harbour (notice the u) Barber Shop. The last customer was leaving as I arrived. Just the one barber and I were in there. She immediately introduced herself as Vikki and asked my name. That introduction took maybe 20 seconds at the most. During the 15 minutes I was in the chair I learned: 1) that Matt Lauer had an affair while he was covering the Olympics for NBC and that affair has put his marriage in jeopardy; 2) that he's like all men; 3) that his wife is gorgeous; 4) that Vikki's husband did the same thing to her 13 years ago; 5) that the cheatee was a relative of hers; 6) that her ex is a liar, cheat and bastard; 7) that she moved to Charlevoix to get away from him; 8) that she has two grown daughters, and I was shown photos; 9) that the daughters now get along OK with the father; 10) that Donald Trump's hair is not a comb-over; 11) that she knows how to do comb-over cutting; 12) that the customer before me had a comb-over and he let her cut it all off (no medical HIPAA rules must apply in the barbershop world); 13) that she knows how to do flat-top cuts. That's a lot, don't you think? And our fifteen minutes weren't up.

I rewarded her with the story about Charlie the barber in Cincinnati. Charlie was my neighborhood's master flat-top cutter in the mid-to-late 1950s. Most jocks wore flat tops then, and all us pretend jocks copied them. Business boomed for Charlie. He bought commercial property from my parents, who lived next door, and opened a bar. There was immediate trouble. People peeing, and worse, in my parents' back yard. Drunken shouting outside their bedroom window. And, of course, drunken fights.

My mother was supervisor of nursing at a local big hospital on the 3 to 11 pm shift. She arrived home one night to find Charlie lying in his parking lot, having been shot in the upper chest below a shoulder. Shot by a jealous husband or boyfriend, as I remember. Everyone begged my mother for help. She leaned over Charlie and claims she gave a moment's thought to just letting him die in payment for all the aggravation he put her through over the years. Then she says she thought, "No, I'll save his life." But she took a middle approach. She grabbed the bar rag, stuck it in the bullet hole, told one of the drunk bystanders to hold it there until the ambulance arrived, went into her place and went to bed. Charlie lived.

From "Hi, my name's Vikki, what's yours?" to "Charlie lived." - exactly 15 minutes.