...And the Damage Done by Michael Marano Page B

barbers. Drunk with grief, I walk into the shop and into the past that pools there like blood under a bruise.
    I sit in the cracked leather chair as the old man sets a hot towel on my face. I will not go to Marie’s showing, that has since its announcement become her wake, looking like the drunkard she saved me from becoming. “Ever since the AIDS came,” the barber says, as he had the first time I had come here and the day after that, “the Health Department makes us wear doctors’ gloves.” He scrapes my face with a latex-sheathed hand that, in the corner of my sight, is free of the glove and of liver spots. I breathe slowly as the razor touches my skin where a blade less fine and wielded in a drug-addled grip had made its enduring mark on me. The past displaces the present in my awareness as a stone displaces water in a dish. Behind me, in the mirror, men the color of twilight sit in suits with broad lapels and wait for their turns in the chair that had come and gone decades ago. They are like the men who had courted my mother, who told her they could give her “a better life” and lift her to respectability. I smell colognes no longer manufactured, and the ghost-scent of saddle soap. The cracked leather at my back feels whole and smooth.
    As the barber finishes the task I cannot do myself, he pulls away the bib and fully leans me forward in the chair. “How’s it look?” he asks, as I see what I can of myself in the mirror and as the glimpses and scents of the past wink out.
    “Great,” I say . . . though the truth would be, “
I don’t know.
” I’m thankful that I do not breathe, in the way that I just breathed the air of the past, the smooth featureless suffocation reflected back at me.
    On the street where the barbershop rots, a wind comes off the Bay, cold. It touches the rawness of my freshly shaved face, and all of me feels the need to tremble.
    “
You’re greedy. And selfish. Because you’re not whole.
”
    Imagine the beast that hid under your bed, the branch-clawed thing that cast moon-shadows on your window stepping from childhood fear and walking beside you on a street littered with the wrappers of takeout meals.
    I look to the man walking beside me, to one of
them
who have hounded me since childhood. He draws my attention with the same revulsion and fascination a hornet does when it lands on my arm. I see the
both
of him; the man’s younger self walks like a grey shadow within the man’s present self. Like all of
them
, the one who accosts me is a pale, slovenly old shit, paunchy from knowing the world from what he can grasp and consume. The man reeks of his own past.
    “
And you’re cruel
,” he adds. I see past his worn denim jacket, his dashiki straining to cover his gut, and his kente head wear and glimpse the young man he had been when this city and what he understood to be the world had been indisputably his. I taste his hatred of me mingled with his stink.
    The man’s shadowy, younger self wears a fringed jacket of suede and a wide-brimmed hat. It looks as if the man’s older self has eaten his younger self, as if his own youth were yet another thing to be taken in to nourish him. A rose-coloured newspaper is tucked under the man’s arm; his younger self carries the
Berkeley Barb
in the same way.
    In the late afternoon, I step into twilight, into the dusk that made up the flesh of the men I glimpsed from the past. It is the dusk in which I am deaf—the wordless non-present in which past and future blur and bleed. I find safety there, as the old bastard spews forth his prattle. I walk miles to where I will take the bus that will bring me to the Waterfront where Marie’s showing and remembrance will be. In my chosen deafness, the words of the man’s present self, designed to erode my will, are dim as words heard through a thick stone wall; the words of his past self are purely silent. I don’t know why he . . . why
they
. . . now forsake their program of stealth and