Soon after we moved into our home I found a quaint barbershop in the center run by a Marco, an old Italian man with a deep coarse voice. He was a chain smoker and would have a dry cigarette dangling out of his mouth during haircuts and then head to the back room to light up between appointments.
On the walls of his shop were predictable pictures of gondolas, maps of Sicily, and photos of Sinatra in Vegas. Interesting about the photos was that Marco appeared alongside Sinatra. "In my youth I was a back-up singer and I spent 2 years with Frank." "Why did you leave?" I asked him on several occasions. He never really answered the question and the closest I ever got to an understanding was when he said: "It wasn't the singing. It was the other stuff. I couldn't stay in Vegas. Things got too hot."
I went to him for four years and one Friday morning he told me: "Doc, I'm going to sell the shop. I got lung cancer and it's bad. You know it's the smokes. I got maybe a month or two." I was shocked by his declaration. As he started cutting my hair, he opened up, as if in some confessional, and I listened as he told me his story of coming to the USA, getting involved in some "bad stuff with some bad guys," moving to Boston after living in Vegas, getting married and divorced, then opening up his shop where he finally found peace. He took his time, pausing to catch his breath, making sure he had left nothing out. It was the longest haircut of my life
After the haircut that day, I shook his hand and thanked him for his years of great service and wished him peace as he faced his final days. I never saw him again and for some time the shop remained closed.
I tried a few other hair-dressers but none captured the combination of character, great haircut and closeness to home. And then one day the shop re-opened. Gone were the Italian memorabilia, the smell of cigarettes, the old swivel chairs and in came signed photographs of Patriot, Bruins, Red Sox and Celtic greats. Bright wall colors, replaced the red and white striped wall-paper and the new paint-job made the shop look bigger. The chairs were new and well padded and faced a wall of clear mirrors where aged and framed single mirrors had once hung.
The new manager was young and energetic. Within months it was hard to get an appointment and we struck up a great relationship. By his station, nearest the window looking out onto Massachusetts Avenue, was a picture of a handsome young boy. "That's my son," he told me proudly. "He has has some problems, he is on the spectrum but he is the joy of my life." He told me that his father-in-law owned the store and that they owned a chain of similar stores throughout Boston. "I hope that one day I'll make enough to buy him out and then this will be mine."
He knew that I was a child psychiatrist and and that I had written a book on parenting children with autism and we bonded over how society sees children with hidden disabilities, disorders or differences, conditions not visible to the eye, yet manifest by the child's difficulty in functioning in the world they live in.
In a few years he became the barber to children whose hair no one else would cut. These children, some of whom were intolerant to human touch, somehow succumbed to his gentle manner and they left his shop looking sharp and stylish. People came to him from all over New England to have their children with developmental differences get a haircut.
He told me of the struggles that many of his families had had to endure. The young mother whose millionaire husband had left her when he realized his child had autism, the parents whose three children were all on the spectrum and who had been blamed for their children's "bad behavior" by a school-teacher, the pediatrician who refused to examine his child until the child was under complete control.
In the early years, as his business grew, he hired many assistants. After a few months they would disappear. "What happened to that other guy?" I would ask. "The guy was a crook. Stealing money from the till. I caught him and kicked him out telling him if he ever came back I would go to the police." And so it was that employee after employee would be hired then fired for stealing money. "They all seemed so nice. You have such bad luck," I sympathized.
His dedication to kids on the spectrum was beyond question. Driven by his love for his son, he was remarkably sensitive to any intolerance of children with special needs. One day while I was waiting for my hair-cut and marveling at the way he was dealing with a particularly fidgety child, a man, also waiting in turn, looked at a parent, "can't you control your child?" he said out loud while pointing at a young boy who was running around flapping his arms and who appeared to be quite happy.
The manager put his scissors down and looked at the man: "Get the f@ck out of my store you f@cking a$$hole, and don't ever come back." The man blanched and stayed seated and said, "How can you stand this, why can't people control their kids?" The owner approached the man, "Did you hear me?" The man's eyes widened and realizing the order was real, stood up quickly and left. All the waiting parents applauded and he went back to cutting the fidgety boy's hair.
His compassion transcended that for kids on the spectrum. He hired a new crop of assistants, all of whom were people who had openly struggled themselves with various vices and mental conditions. One employee was a man who had suffered a minor stroke and who despite his left sided weakness was still able to hold scissors and give a great haircut. Another, and my favorite, was a young Italian who had been at AA for five years and went daily because alcohol had nearly killed him. He hired young people with Down's syndrome to sweep up the hair and paid them more than minimum wage.
The young Italian told me that he himself was trying to give up smoking because it was affecting his soccer play. He reminded me of Marco because of his reflection that the shop had brought him peace. Every 4 months he received a shipment of Italian coffee from his grandmother in Florence and he kept a package for me out of his stash as a gift for our shared love of coffee.
Recently I went in for my haircut and my Florentian went on and on about the weather, the record snow in Boston and the relative lack of snow in Anchorage. "Do you know that the weather is so hot in Alaska that they had to change the course for the Iditarod dog race?" I told him that I had not known, and after a while I asked him where the manager was, that I had not seen him in months. He held his right index finger to his lips instructing me to be silent, and after the haircut beckoned me to follow him into the backroom. "You didn't hear? He's gone. Done. His father-in-law told him to get out. All of us here in the store told his wife to leave him!"
"Why? What happened? He was such a great guy! So kind and a great hairdresser, he really cared about people with problems." I asked.
"Turns out that he was stealing money and blaming it on the other guys. That's why they were getting fired. He was using the money for crystal meth. Using nearly every day. He couldn't take care of his kid because he was spending all the money on drugs. It's really sad."
And so it is. This compassionate man had succumbed to the power of crystal meth's addiction. It destroyed his relationships, his family and his career and now all these kids throughout New England are left without the one person who could cut their hair.
Judgment comes in so many flavors. I realize that I had judged him as wonderful. In the depths of his descent into addiction it would have been easy to judge him for his failure and weakness. It is easy to make snap decisions about people based on the little information we have of them. We don't really know the lives of others. Like the manager, I too am flawed dealing with my own moments of darkness and struggle, hidden to the experience of others but there nonetheless.
And so I commit to not judge those whose lives I do not know. To neither be blinded in adoring awe of their good works nor be derisive of behavior I don't understand or agree with. I commit to be curious and try to be more understanding in the belief that people are trying to do the best they can and that sometimes the best they can do is behave in ways that end up destroying their lives. I send them all the loving compassion I can muster and hope the manager fins his way back to the store. I miss him.
