The Checkout Kid

            He saw the kid who worked the checkout at the convenience store walking down the street, arm in arm, with a girl about his own age, maybe 17. He was a handsome kid. Compared to him, the girl was rather plain, he thought, wondering if people thought the same of him when he was dating his wife, or even now. She was a knockout, his wife. He never asked her if she had dated during their brief separation. He didn’t want to know what they looked like if she had. He wondered if they were sleeping together, the kid and the girl. If we were all contemporaries, he thought, and double dating, people would probably assume his wife, his future wife, was the one dating the checkout kid. He was probably being hard on himself. He was probably a cut above plain.

First Haircut

            “The usual,” he told the barber, John.

            “Remind me.”

            “Number two blade.”

            He’d remembered to wear a shirt with a collar. A collar provides a better vehicle than a crew neck for the paper thing they wrap around your neck to keep the hair from falling down your back.

            An older man walked into the barbershop. He greeted all the barbers, “Angelo, Vinny, John,” with a nod of the head for each name.

            “Have a seat, Tommy,” Vinny, who was available, said, “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

            John asked him who he liked in the World Series. Since neither team was local, it wasn’t a big surprise that he and John had different ideas. Tommy chimed in, agreeing with John.

            “Put on Sinatra,” Angelo, who was cutting a kid’s hair, yelled over to Vinny, who was at the CD player.

            “Eyebrows?” John asked.

            “Yeah.” He called them his Brezhnev eyebrows. The barbers were all old enough to get it.

            Angelo started singing along with Sinatra, “Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away,” then said to the kid, “Betcha you never heard that one.” The kid said, “No,” and Angelo laughed.

            “Ready to greet the world in style!” John said when the cut was done.

            Out of the blue he was struck by a dim memory of his first haircut, his first barbershop haircut. Maybe it was the Sinatra. He remembered sitting in a kid’s barber chair in the form of an elevated red sports car. Or was it a fire truck? He remembered crying.

            “What?” he asked John, holding back the tears.

College Days Full of Hope

            Reading the obituaries, he discovered one of his favorite college professors had been a Nazi sympathizer. He made coffee, in a French press. As he sipped his coffee, Sumatra Mandheling, which he admired for its boldness, he also read about a man in Cambodia who had won a tarantula-eating contest, the first of its kind. The article conjectured it would become an annual event.

            At work that day, he was asked to fill out a self-assessment, an oddly Maoist incursion into American corporate life. He wrote an unqualifiedly rave review of himself, refusing to give his bosses ammunition to use against him. After he had submitted the self-assessment, his thoughts turned to the dead professor. What was that course again? Oh yes, the theatre of cruelty seminar. Looking back, he couldn’t remember anything that hinted at Nazi sympathies.

            Wistful for those college days full of hope, he stood up and surveyed a sea of cubicles in which he was but a speck.