Except for a pat on the back and a muffled thank you, the haircuts my brother-in-law gave me were free. The only cost was the small velvet yarmulke I kept in my car’s glove compartment.
I knocked twice on the apartment door and my brother-in-law appeared, sheepish and apologetic as if he were knocking on my door at midnight. He wore a pair of dress pants and a button-down white shirt. His beard was black, bushy and unkempt, filled with bits of whatever he had been eating. My brother-in-law put a finger to his lips and bade me follow him through the kitchen, where a pot of tomato soup groaned on the burner, then past the dining room where photographs of rabbis hung in gilded frames. In the apartment’s barred windows, I saw the moon hold up its bright head like an unrepentant child.
It wasn’t that haircuts were expensive. Five dollars at most in the Armenian barbershop on Rockaway Turnpike. The Jewish barbers on West Broadway charged seven and you had to put an obligatory dollar in the Lubavitch pushka. Both shops employed the same rotating group of barbers: hirsute Bukharian Jews who had migrated from Russia when the Iron Curtain fell. Each man was almost identical with black greasy hair, mail-away hairdresser diplomas, and pictures of their fat elderly red-haired mothers.
Money wasn’t a factor in why I came to the eleventh floor of my sister’s apartment building. I never went there in the summer when I could buy watermelon from the black kids...
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