The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down at the South End’s premier tonsorial emporium, Joe Waltham’s barber shop behind the O-Zi-Ya wrecking yard has been open every day but Sundays during the Covid-19 Lockdown. He’s got the red white and blue barber pole out front even though it no longer rotates and he’s got an American flag the size of a billboard hanging from the peak of the roof where it just about but not quite touches hallowed ground. The boyz at the Diner call him G.I. Joe, maybe because he’s a Viet Nam vet, maybe because he’s a patriot in the culture wars. Joe is what we call a Hard Ass, not much of a sense of humor, quick to rile, definitely not a man you want to get started on an argument.

G.I. thinks the Covid panic is a hoax. He thinks the government is using it as an excuse to ruin his business and everybody else’s. “Look at how they’re sending everybody a check,” he muttered at the Diner the last week it was still serving breakfast before opening his shop. “Tell em not to work and then send em money. Socialism, that’s all it is, a way to make us sheep, pay us Not to work, make us reliant on government. It’s all bullshit. I got a right to work, I got a right to run my business the way I want and nobody, not the government, not the Governor, nobody can tell me otherwise.” Most of us agreed with that last part. Nobody tells G.I. much of anything.

Course that doesn’t stop Two Toke from telling him something. He’s stirring the pot the way he’s stirring another dollop of sugar into his already sweetened coffee. T.T. hasn’t seen the inside of a barber shop in who knows how many years judging by the shoulder length hair he usually keeps in a pony tail under his baseball cap, what G.I. has referred to more than once as a jackass tail, not that Two Toke minds, he’s just glad to have hair at all in his old age. “You think they invented the plague, Joe? You think maybe they created the virus in the first place at some lab and dropped it on us? If it’s a hoax, you figure the body counts are bogus?”

“Just like Nam,” Joe shot back. “Phony numbers. The government’s a bunch of damn liars, you can count on that.”

“Well…..” T.T. watches Joe over the rim of his cup, taking a long sip while the rest of us around the long table start to dread what’s probably coming next. “You figure all those doctors are liars too?”

“All I’m saying is I’m going to take my chances this epidemic is nothing but a bad cold, a flu bug, same as we get every year. We don’t tell people to stay home, hide, shut your business, quit shaking hands, be afraid. People die every year, Tom, that’s a fact.”

A couple of the boyz nodded in agreement. None of us knew a single person who contracted Covid, much less died of it. I don’t think any of us do now, a couple months later. Two Toke shook his head and set his cup down. “I wouldn’t care if someone gave you the virus, Joe, but the idea is to keep it from spreading, you know, to the rest of us. I can live without a haircut for awhile.”

“Tell you what, Tom, your next one is on me, no charge, totally free.” The boyz waited for T.T. to stop spooning another bag of sugar into his coffee. Two Toke finished up, licked the spoon and smiled. “Freedom ain’t Free, G.I. But thanks for the offer.”

I’m not sure how many of us have been shorn by Joe since the Lockdown ordered barber shops and hair salons to close. But I hear that he’s doing fine, plenty of folks who think a haircut is worth the gamble. My own hair is getting pretty long again. I can live with it that way.

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