Jack V. Sturiano - FI One: Memoirs of a Forensic Investigator

I was dozing in the straight-backed wooden chair in old Mr Pelosis barber shop. He was just finishing cutting the hair of a guy who was coughing up gobs of sputum into tissues that he pulled from a big box on his lap. The guy would almost strangle trying to cough this stuff up, but finally, with his face turning blue, the sputum would release its near-fatal grip on the lower reaches of his bronchial tree and be propelled onto the tissue, while Mr Pelosi waited; just this lunger, then the kid, then me, I thought.

The tattered copy of Esquire on my lap was a year old and missing the last page of the article I had started to read. I glanced towards the magazine rack but others were of similar age and condition. My eyes closed again. Mr Pelosi had gotten noticeably older in the past year. He had lost much of the flesh from his face. His once ruddy cheeks had been replaced with the gray, lifeless jowls seen in advanced cases of atherosclerosis. He hadnt shaved today; an ominous sign, I thought, when a barber doesnt shave. He still carried too much weight from the neck down, and his white smock was stained at just the point where food would hit his protuberant abdomen if it missed his mouth.

I took a look at his surgical jar with the blue disinfectant solution. It seemed the number of combs in the jar had been decreasing in direct proportion to the years Id been coming to his shop. The jar was empty. He was on his last comb. It occurred to me that there was a good chance that he probably wouldnt be here the next time I came for my semi-annual beard trim and two-minute run of the scissors through what was left of my hair.

I silently cursed again the medical education that gave me these insights. I began to mourn for the old man whom I had grown to like as much for his warmth and humor as for the refuge his shop offered from the unisex, blow-dry, hairspray places that had taken over in our town in recent years.

I think the thing that originally attracted me to his shop was that it seemed as if it hadnt changed since it opened in 1949. When I passed the big barber pole swirling inside his shop, I would be entering a time warp, and suddenly it was 1955 and not 1987. I would be eight years old again, sent for my monthly 35 cent regular haircut and the liberal application of the green stuff that kept my hair in a perfect hardened cast for at least four days. The shelves were filled with bottles of various hair lotions and creams. There would be the poster of Fearless Fosdick with bullet holes for Wild Root Cream Oil. Florida water, witch hazel, Bay Rum, hot towels, straight razor shaves, talcum powder in a cloud about your head. In the summer, my father would have us get crew cuts, but they were more like boot-camp cuts. Now all of these familiar male grooming rituals are all gone, and Mr Pelosis shop just had some of this and it felt right. I still use Bay Rum.

Im mourning not only Mr Pelosis getting older and nearer to death but also my own lost youth. I see these signs all the time as a death investigator, and I just wish I could turn it off from time to time.

The Lungers haircut was finally finished. He gathered up his tissues and lit up a Lucky Strike, which brought on a paroxysm of coughing. Unable to speak, but waving goodbye, he left. It was the kids turn and she was prompted toward the chair by one of a pair of elderly ladies who had been conversing just before with Irish accents. She was a small child with long, straight, black hair. She couldnt have been more than four years old and this was probably her first professional haircut. The girl was looking at Mr Pelosi with sad, fearful eyes, but his smiling face seemed to win her over. He very formally shook her hand and then shakily lifted her onto the childs seat and snapped the cloth around her neck. She looked warily at Mr Pelosi as he began to cut her hair.

My eyes began to close again and I wondered what it would be like to sleep for eight uninterrupted hours a night. The past forty-eight hours had been particularly brutal, if that term had any meaning left after the thousands of deaths Ive seen in nine years. This last wave of death descended with tornado-like swiftness after a week that had been remarkable only for the vicious homicide of a young woman three nights before. Car and train accidents, drownings, hangings, cancer patients, had all arrived in a deluge of death. All this and the moon hadnt been full nor had there been any change in the weather or an approaching holiday the usual harbingers of this much death. How much can a man take and still be part of the human race, I thought again.