Berto's World_Stories

by R. A. Comunale M. D.

  I guess it was his old-country way of father-son bonding. It didn’t matter to me. I was ecstatic. I would get to spend more time with Papa!

  It was still chilly, so we put on our church-basement-sale jackets then headed down the stairs and out. We didn’t wear hats or gloves. We were men.

  I remember running to catch up with him as he strode down the street. He wasn’t a tall man, but he could move like one, and I had to shout at him to slow down. He turned and saw me puffing to catch up, and he actually laughed out loud.

  Papa almost never laughed.

  We walked across the river bridge, and I saw the blinking red light in the window of the Western Union Telegraph office. I didn’t know what it did until much later, when I went to medical school. Then I came to hate what it stood for.

  That is another story.

  We soon passed the tenements and entered our town’s small-business district. As we walked on, Papa would point out the different shops and tell me what they did and who ran them. We passed Mr. Ruddy’s shoe repairs and Mr. Huff’s electric motors. I smelled the ripe aroma of provolone cheese emanating from Mr. Zuppa’s grocery and the pungent smell of hanging salami from the butcher next door. Papa didn’t say much except that the butcher shop was owned by the Mad Russian.

  “But Papa, why is he mad?”

  “Just because, Berto.”

  Papa pointed out the radio repair shop and told me that the man who fixed things there had actually worked for Mr. Marconi, the inventor of the radio, and his assistant was General Eisenhower’s personal radio technician during the war that just ended.

  We passed by the glazier (Are there still shops where you can get pieces of glass?), and then a storefront with a red-and-white-striped pole in front. A man even more stocky and muscular than Papa stood in the doorway.

  As we moved on, a gruff, strangely accented voice called out, “Who cut kid’s hair? I kill man who did that.”

  I saw Papa’s fists ball up, and he turned and walked toward the man in the doorway. I yelled, “No, Papa,” and the other man raised his arms, hands palm forward, and began to laugh.

  Papa stopped and stared at him.

  I got between them and looked up at the jowly-faced man wearing a short white jacket and dark pants. His solid-black hair was slicked down by pomade, and his eyes seemed peculiar in their shape. It wasn’t until later when I studied anthropology that I learned about the tribes who had lived in the Steppes of Russia.

  He looked my father squarely in the eye and said, “I am Putchenkov.” He extended his right hand and Papa did the same. I relaxed when both men shook hands and my father replied, “I am Antonio Galen.”

  The other man winked.

  “Was not Gallini?”

  My father nodded and again the man laughed.

  “Ya, they tried make me ‘Putch.’ I said I was not dog, and Putchenkov was good name.

  “Now,” and he looked down at me, “what is name?”

  “Berto,” Papa replied.

  “Call me Thomas, Thomas the Barber.”

  “It’s my birthday,” I said.

  “Ah, Berto, come in. I cut your hair!”

  In those days, haircuts for men were twenty-five cents, thirty-five with a shave. Kids were ten cents. Papa shook his head.

  “I cannot pay you.”

  “No, no. Is birthday gift.”

  To this day, whenever I enter a true barbershop for men—not those fancy, unisex salons and hair-stylist joints—the scents of bay rum, lilac, allspice, and antiseptic trigger my olfactory memory of that day when I first entered the shop of Thomas the Barber. Other scents I never learned to name emanated from the bottle-lined shelves on the mirror-covered walls. Shaving mugs, many of them personalized, hung from the back, and the small sink held the magical shaving soap and bristle brushes in a row. There were three, creamy-white, enameled pedestal chairs and six customer seats capped off by a table laden with issues of Police Gazette and Grit.

  Mr. Putchenkov reached into a dark corner and pulled out a small, wooden, cushioned shelf. He placed it over the black leather seat, picked me up as if I were a feather, and sat me on the cushion. Then he draped a pinstriped, blue sheet around my chest and neck.

  I kept looking at Papa, not knowing what to expect, especially when I saw Thomas pick up a big pair of scissors and a comb. He ran the comb through my hair, and suddenly I heard the snip-snip click, as the barber began to cut the shrub on top of my head.

  Snip-snip click, snip-snip click. On it went, until my head actually felt lighter. He ran the comb through my hair then took another gadget, flipped a switch, and I felt the buzzing hum of the electric trimmer, as it moved up and down the back of my neck and under my ears.

  When he stopped, he looked at me and asked, “You want shave?”

  Papa laughed—again!

  Mr. Putchenkov took a conical milk-glass bottle from the shelf and sprinkled a nice-smelling liquid on my head, massaged it in, then combed my hair back and said “done.”

  I looked in the mirror. Damned if I didn’t look good!

  Thomas turned to my father.

  “When he need haircut, if he sweep floor that day, I do it. Okay to you, Antonio Gallini?”

  They shook hands, and we left with me basking in the hair tonic Thomas the Barber had sprinkled on my head.

  We walked a bit farther that sun-bright day and then slowly ambled back home. Mama saw us coming from the front window and waited for us at the top of the stairs. She stared at Papa in disapproval as we trudged in, but Papa’s face, his wide grin lighting up the furnace-burnt darkness, stopped her. He put his arms around her, the way he must have done when I wasn’t there, seemed to nibble on her ear and whispered, and then she giggled and smiled. She examined me, eyes sparkling, and said, “Bravo, Berto!”

  What an amazing man Papa was!

  I think of him now, when I see all the kids on medication to help keep them focused. If he were alive today he would have wrinkled his nose in disgust. I laugh to myself when I think of Papa and my first week at school.

  When I started first grade, the teacher handed out workbooks. We didn’t have a nun in that grade. I suspect our teacher was a newly minted member of the education community paying her dues in a religious school in a bad neighborhood.

  I looked through the manuals for spelling, reading, and arithmetic. By the end of the first week I had filled them all out, front to back. The teacher had a hissy fit when she saw what I had done. She wrote a note to my parents and sternly instructed me to take it to them.

  I took longer than usual to walk home that day, and then I waited a bit before giving the note to Mama. She read it and frowned but said nothing. Later, when Papa came home, she showed it to him, and he frowned, too.

  And me? I was afraid—very afraid.

  Mama and Papa said nothing to me.

  Next day at lunch I almost peed my pants, when Mama and Papa both walked into the classroom. He was wearing his work clothes, so he had given up his lunch break to come to my school.

  I heard the young teacher greet them, somewhat surprised as well. I heard her describe my crime of completing all my work the first week of school. And then I heard something wonderful.

  “Teacher lady, why is this bad?”

  It was Papa!

  She stammered for a moment, as my father’s eyes bored into her. This was no ignorant immigrant worker.

  I am sure she is dead now, but I bless that young woman for having the common sense largely missing today when she replied, “You’re right, Mr. Galen. Let me see what I can do.”

  I hope God lets her know about my words of thanks. From then on, that dear woman brought in books from her own library for me to read, while the other kids did “Dick and Jane.”

  Maybe if I had been a schoolchild today I would have been classified as ADD, ADHD, or QRSTUV. On the other hand, my mind does tend to wander.

  We were talking about the barber.

  About every six weeks I would show up
at Mr. Putchenkov’s shop. There I would grab a broom handle—which was far taller than I was—and round up the piles of black, brown, blond, red, and gray-white hairs lying in clumps on the tile floor around each barber chair.

  It used to remind me of the shaggy fur falling off the mange-laden dogs that wandered the neighborhood, often serving as large-sized cats when they chased down and ate the numerous rats living there.

  It was a steamy-hot July day. The air was heavy, a mixture of various shop scents, musky male sweat, and stogie-smoking customers, all overpowered by the stench of whatever was decaying in the river. I had been sweeping for awhile but had to stop and catch my breath.

  This was in the days before air conditioning, and even the black-enameled, reciprocating, metal-bladed fan did little to relieve the stifling humidity.

  How did Papa manage to survive the foundry furnace heat?

  “Here, boy … Berto, sit.”

  The door to the shop was wide open, and assorted flies and other insects buzzed in to sniff the colognes and then fly out. There was no screen door, but somehow the insects didn’t bother us. Maybe they recognized larger insects in the general scheme of life.

  “Berto, you want Moxie?”

  Thomas reached into a wooden icebox at the back of the store and took out two cold bottles of Moxie soda pop. Talk about ambrosia nectar!

  Again, my mind wanders. Do they still make Moxie? I used to read the label, looking at the white-coated doctor/pharmacist staring out at me with a pointing finger telling me to drink Moxie for good health.

  We sat there, Thomas sitting in one of his barber chairs and me next to a pile of Police Gazettes. He laughed and pointed at the top magazine.

  “Lady got big bazookas there, boy.”

  The only bazookas I knew about were the ones used in the war, so what would a lady be doing with those? I just nodded.

  “Mr. Putchenkov?”

  “You call me Thomas, remember?”

  “Yes, sir … uh … Thomas, how did you become a barber?”

  “Why? You want to become barber?”

  I had to admit that what he did seemed like fun: snip-snip click all day long. And this was before I met the lady under the bridge and began to hang around Dr. Agnelli’s clinic.

  “Maybe.”

  So many things fascinated me I barely had time to sleep. I spent a lot of hours at the library, too—by myself.

  I know, I know. Today’s social workers would have to rescue me, because they would have tagged my parents as neglectful for letting me run loose at such a young age—and, heaven forbid, at a library.

  “Okay, kid, Thomas tell you life story. You know Mother Russia?”

  I shook my head then said, “There’s a big railroad there.”

  I had just read about the longest railroad in the world. Railroads fascinated me.

  Thomas’s face split in the biggest smile I had ever seen.

  “Berto, I help build that railroad!”

  He closed his eyes as he talked, and the little shop seemed to disappear, replaced by broad expanses of cold, open land.

  “I born in Irkutsk, in Siberia, not far from beautiful lake—Lake Baikal. It twenty-fifth year of Tzar Alexander Nikolaevich Second.”

  By my reckoning that would have been 1880.

  “My brother and me, twins. I better looking and stronger, but it good to have twin—no need for friends. We hunt, run, cut wood for Papa. We even walk to lake.

  “When I thirteen I meet Maria Ivanova. You got girlfriend, Berto?”

  I shook my head once more. I didn’t want to mention Kate. Seven- to eight-year-old boys weren’t supposed to like girls. That, too, is another story.

  He sighed. “She thirteen and have big bazookas, too.”

  He laughed, and then his face creased. I couldn’t tell if it was sadness, anger, or both.

  “Two years later Papa come to me and brother. He say son of Tzar, Nicholas Third, building railroad from St. Petersburg, capital city on western border of Russia, all way to Vladivostok in East—longest railroad in world! Papa said would be good jobs for two strapping boys.

  “By then I love Maria Ivanova, want marry her. But Papa say go Lake Baikal. They start railroad bypass ‘round lake. I leave. Brother promise to follow. Railroads big things back then. Even Prince Nikolas, later become Tzar, came. He declare railroad open.

  “I cut wood. I help carry cross-beams for track. Muscles get big. See?”

  He flexed his arm, and a football-sized bicep leaped out.

  “I also freeze my…”

  He paused. He realized he was talking to a kid and didn’t want to get crude. It didn’t matter. Even at that age I knew what he meant. Mine got cold when the heat didn’t work in our tenement.

  “No towns or pretty women, so hair get long. One day, other man hand me shears, tell me cut his hair. I cut. Terrible job. I cut more hair, get better.”

  His expression darkened.

  “Make much money cutting hair—more than railroad work. Go home to Papa. Give him money then go see Maria.”

  His face fell, and his eyes moistened.

  “You got brother, Berto?”

  “No, Thomas.”

  “Good! You lucky. I find out Maria now live with brother. So I leave Irkutsk. Travel Europe, emigrate Canada. Go Vancouver, work as logger. Muscles get bigger. Cut more hair. Go San Francisco...”

  “Why’d you come here, Thomas?”

  He smiled but said nothing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t pretty.

  When we had finished our Moxies he cut my hair. Then I swept the rest of the shop and went home.

  A year passed. Every six weeks I showed up at his shop. We didn’t talk about his family, but he did tell me more of his adventures helping to build The Great Siberian Railway—later called the Trans Siberian Railway and then just the Trans Sib. He described men freezing to death, getting crushed between railway cars, dying in fights, or being attacked by packs of wolves.

  By then I was eight, and that’s when the dead lady called me. Soon after that I knew what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be. I started hanging around Dr. Agnelli’s clinic. But I kept showing up and sweeping up the barber shop, lulled by the snip-snip click of Thomas’s scissors.

  I was sweeping up one Indian-summer day. As usual the shop door was wide open, the flies buzzed, and the fan rattled in a vain attempt to cool off the inside.

  That was the day I first saw the butcher.

  He walked in, white apron stained blood-red to brown—old stains covered by new ones. He held a large meat cleaver in his left hand. He said nothing. He just sat in an empty barber chair and waited.

  Thomas also said nothing. He finished with his last customer, walked quietly over to the second chair, took a straight razor from the shelf near the sink, pulled out the razor strop attached to the chair, and began to sharpen it.

  The butcher clenched his cleaver more tightly.

  Thomas took a mug down, put a bar of shaving soap in it, took a lathering brush, and applied the white cream to the butcher’s face. As he brought the razor to bear on the man’s neck, the cleaver rose for a brief second then settled down once more.

  Thomas didn’t even bother with the butcher’s scalp. There was no hair there to cut.

  When Thomas was done, the man rose from the chair, threw two quarters on the counter, and walked out.

  Thomas looked at me. He winked, but said nothing. Then he cut my hair. I finished sweeping then left.

  Another year passed, and by then I was shadowing Dr. Agnelli’s coattails at the clinic. One day it had been relatively quiet, with only a few knife wounds, sick kids, and a lady going into labor unexpectedly. I once had joked that he needed to stock some Moxie in the refrigerator, and by golly he went out and stocked it!

  I was always amazed at refrigerators. Like the barber, Mama and Papa had an ice box that needed a new block of ice at least once a week. But a refrigerator? Wow! Just plug it in, and things got cold!

  Anyway, Dr. Ag
nelli and I sat there in the back room on a threadbare couch. He sipped a black coffee, and I luxuriated in a really cold Moxie.

  Just then the outside clinic doors banged open, and loud shouts erupted. We ran to see a hysterical woman speaking in a foreign tongue followed by Thomas carrying the butcher in his arms. Dr. Agnelli immediately took charge.

  “What happened?”

  Thomas spoke quietly, but the tension in his voice was obvious.

  “Chest. He clutch chest and fall.”

  Dr. Agnelli steered Thomas and his burden over to an empty gurney cart, listened to the man’s chest, and then opened a drawer in the medicine cabinet and took out a brown bottle. He undid the cap, took out a tiny pill, and put it under the butcher’s tongue. Slowly, the man’s hand, which had been tightly clutching his chest, relaxed, and the sweat on his forehead stopped its heavy dripping.

  By then the nurse had wheeled in a big wooden box, a new toy of Dr. Agnelli’s he had told me about a while back. She attached wide rubber bands with metal plates to the butcher’s hands and feet and placed one plate on his chest.

  Dr. Agnelli turned on the machine and watched, as a two-inch-wide strip of paper unrolled with black marks on it.

  “See, Berto, this is what a man’s life looks like.”

  He held up the strip, and I saw the peaks and valleys that graphed out the electrical energy of the heart. I didn’t know it then, but the butcher’s pattern wasn’t good.

  “Thomas,” Agnelli called out, “is that his wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need to speak with her. Will she understand me?”

  “No.”

  “Will you translate?”

  The barber nodded then motioned the woman over to where the doctor stood.

  “Your husband is very ill. He has had a heart attack. He needs to go to the hospital. I can call for an ambulance.”

  Thomas spoke rapidly in the multi-consonantal language of his birth, and the woman started to shake and sob. He grabbed her by both arms and shook her, and she settled down. Again, rapid fire words poured from his mouth, and finally she nodded agreement.