Cobblings from My Memories

At the end of dinner at Medium Rare last night, the server brought over a parting gift, a piece of Bazooka Joe bubble gum for each person at the table. What surprised me was not that they gave us the gum after we had already had dessert and paid the check (really, a second dessert? why bother with the dessert menu if I'd had known gum was coming?), but the fact that it was Bazooka Joe, a gum I honestly had not seen since I was probably 13 or 14 years old.

It's always amazing to me the things that take you back to your childhood or formative years. Innocent things like ... say ... a piece of gum. You see, I'm not a gum person. I only chew it on extremely rare occasions (I can only count 3 times in the last year that I've had gum, and two of them were after concerts where heavy drinking was involved). And yet there was the piece of Bazooka Joe, instantly transporting me back to The Loop Barber Shop on Dundee Avenue in Louisville. Just blocks from my childhood home, this was my first and only place I went for a haircut until I went to college.

It was your typical barber shop, and judging by the photos still looks pretty much as it did in the '80s when I was there. I loved that they used scissors to cut your hair instead of buzz trimmers, because it meant you had to take your time and actually talk to each other instead of it being a factory system atmosphere. To get me to sit in that chair for the whole time and not wiggle around (and thus be stabbed in the noggin with sharp scissors), the barber would promise me that if I sat still he'd give me, you guessed it, a piece of Bazooka Joe. I always thought this was so cool. I loved the moment when he got the vacuum out and sucked up all the hair from the chair and my shoulders because that's when he reached into this drawer that was filled with nothing but gum. Plus it was great to chew the gum and carefully open the wrapper so as not to tear the comic strip that came inside each wrapper, along with fortunes or lucky lottery numbers.

I'd then sit and chew on that gum for the next 30 minutes as my dad got his hair cut and listened to the news, weather and traffic radio station that blared on the old radio next to the old cash register with the enormous buttons to depress and the loud 'cha-ching' noise you don't hear anymore yet everyone knows what it means. I'd rummage around looking for the box in the back that held all the gum and could never find it. It's where I read Sports Illustrated for the first time, and where I always thought it weird that there was one barber who in a decade or so of going there to get my hair cut never had a single customer but was always employed and was just there. He was an institution of the place, so he always had a chair.

It's really bugging me now that I can no longer remember my barber's name, because he was a cool dude who was nothing but the friendliest guy and always asked the right questions of his customers no matter their age. I know he died sometime while I was in college or shortly thereafter, and I'm sad about it now as I was then, since I spent more time with him sitting in that shop over the course of 10 or so years than I did with many extended family members. Though it looks the same, I'm sure the place has changed, as all things do, but at least it's still there, cutting hair and maybe doling out candy to the kids who need the bribery in order to avoid an accidental lobotomy. It'd be a tradition worth carrying on, and it's nice to at least know Bazooka Joe is still an option to fill up a drawer when an unruly kid won't sit still..