Saturday,
November 18, 2006
The Barber
By Greg Alexis
TLF Staff Writer
My barber is a is a jolly, rotund Irish sort, transplanted from
St. Louis, and I think it’s fair to say that like all barbers, you don’t exactly
need a full mop of hair to extract information from him. The guy is constantly
talking, from the time he sees your car, to the time he sees your car leave, and
by the time you get from your car to the chair you’ve already missed a half hour
of conversation and you can’t remember what you might have said.
“A little off the top, please. More off the side.” I know he already knows what
I want, but it’s always nice to sort of catapult my way into the conversation
with this little ice-breaker before I get too far behind. Then I’ll fake like
I’m trying to sleep and listen to the latest farming forecast, auction
information, hunting and fishing reports, and the most up to date blotter
information. Eventually, after he’s done his obligatory duty to society, he’ll
get around to talking sports, or, at the very least, attempt an attack from the
flanks by talking about gambling. . . which usually leads to sports. It all
sounds innocent enough until you consider that the amount of hair I walk out of
there with tends to come and go with local economic activity levels, and if
there’s been a rash of crimes or a harvest crop, I’m likely to be there a while
as my head gets worked over like the 18th hole of Augusta.
“. . . Big Ben--the guy who’s trying to sell his combine--caught a 9 pound small
mouth bass over by Pleasant Lake. Biggest one I ever saw was 15. At least I
think it was 15. 12 or 15. Biggest bass I ever saw. What’s the biggest bass you
ever caught?”
There was a hair tickling my upper lip, but I didn’t want to move. One mistake
now and we’d be one step away from ice fishing. I sensed he was going to break
soon. I was making good time. He was still fiddling around with the long stuff.
“You see that Cardinals game the other night? Can you believe that?”
I opened one eye and scratched my lip. “Yeah. It was pretty bad. Did you see
Denny Greene’s press conference after it? That was even funnier.”
“Mad? Oh, I was mad. How can you lose a game to the Bears like that without even
giving up a touchdown. Stupid. I’ve never seen anything like it and I grew up
with the Cardinals. . .”
“Yeah. You said. . .”
“. . . They weren’t always bad. I know it’s hard to believe. But they used to be
a power!”
“You’re talking to a Lions fan. . .”
“. . .Yeah, kind of like the Lions.”
He was getting around to the sides now. I was still ok, as he was still using
attachments. As long as I was still feeling plastic, there was no need to get
curt.
“. . . But I don’t know what happened to them. They have the worst owner in the
league. . .”
“We have William Clay Ford.”
“Yeah. Kind of like Ford.”
“But I thought Bidwell has been doing some pretty good things?” I didn’t, but I
was trying to cheer him up.
“You’d think. But the thing is, he‘s not a football guy. He doesn‘t know what it
takes to build a winning football team. Pure and simple. He doesn‘t bring in
football guys, he tries to cut corners. When he gets good guys, he doesn‘t want
to pay to keep ‘em. One year he wants to go defense, then he wants to go
offense. He doesn‘t know what he wants to do. Larry Fitzgerald, Anquan Boldin,
Bryant Johnson, Matt Lienart. . . Sounds good, doesn‘t it?”
“Kind of like the Lions.” I said.
“Yeah. Kind of like the Lions. So now we have this new stadium, a new coach, a
bunch of wide receivers, a first round quarterback, and Edgerrin James. And
still we’re the Cardinals.”
“In Indy James didn’t have to be the man.” I said. “You had Peyton Manning
throwing the ball around every game. Nobody lined up to stop James when Manning
was around. That’d be crazy. Every time he ran it was almost a surprise. He had
holes all over the place. But he‘s getting killed behind Arizona‘s line. What‘d
he have? 30 yards on 900 carries? He can’t do it when everybody knows he’s going
to get the ball. He’s not Barry. ”
“Kind of like Scott Mitchell.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everybody lined up to stop Barry, and he made Scott Mitchell look like, well,
Edgerrin James.”
I laughed. “Yeah. Mitchell benefited hugely from Barry.”
“I tell people I’m a Cardinals fan, and you should see the looks I get. You know
what I mean?”
“Yeah. One time I went into a Paris restaurant and asked for the dollar menu.”
My head was trimmed by now and he was applying the finishing touches, dabbling
around the ears, and buzzing off a few loose strands off the back of my neck. I
felt he was sufficiently buttered up enough to unload a sob story of my own with
relative safety.
I said, “We have the same problems. You think you got problems? Our owner is
barely alive, let alone up to date on football. I don’t even know who your GM
is, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t hired from the same network that had Al Bundy.
Our new quarterback has come and gone. One of our receivers has come and gone,
and another would be gone if his fat butt would fit through the door. Our other
receiver is doing ok, but judging from some of his quotes in the papers, I’m not
sure he’s not the one with the substance abuse problem.”
“Ouch.”
“Our quarterback looks like a Hari Krishna, our coach thinks he’s still in ‘Nam,
our offensive coordinator is suing the U.S. Government to have his head added to
Mount Rushmore, and our defensive coordinator is longing for the good old days
with the Jets.”
“At least you have Shawn Rogers.”
“Yeah, in four games, after he cleans up.”
“Ouch. You guys had the Super Bowl, right? And the World Series?” Now he was
trying to cheer me up.
“Best thing that ever happened to Detroit.”
“It renewed fan interest.”
“That, and it forced them to crack down on monorail smut.”
He had the straight razor now, and was scraping the back of my neck. “I know the
feeling.” He said. “You grow up with a team, the players, the guys; they’re a
part of the community. They’re like family. You want to look out for them, look
after their best interests, root for them. You wish them well. You follow their
careers, their lives. It’s like that with me and the Cardinals. I still follow
them to this day, and that’s why I’m so mad about the Chicago game. They had it,
and they blew it. You know what I mean. You saw the game. What did you think?”
I don’t know about you, but I have very few universal rules, and one of them
that has served me pretty well throughout life is “Never say anything bad about
somebody’s family when said somebody is holding a straight razor to your neck.”
“I thought they looked pretty good, under the circumstances.”
“No they didn’t. They looked like the Lions.”
I giggled stupidly. “How much do I owe you?” I already knew how much I owed him,
just as I knew that the Cardinals blew a big one against the Bears, but I’ve
seen that scene before over and over again.
I had to. I am a Lions fan.
