Ch. 68 – A Curtain of Hair

The bus’ brakes ground and shrieked as the bus slowed down in front of the stop at the edge of Chinatown.

The doors opened, and a glitchy female voice coming from the intercom encouraged them to make sure they had their belongings before getting off.

Sally and Derrick passed the empty driver’s seat before hopping off the bus, and over the chunks of concrete at the edge of the broken sidewalk. The street signs in this part of town were even more faded and rusted than the rest of Chinatown, and the place as a whole was certainly worse for wear than the part that Hack Alley was situated in.

“How far is the barbershop from here?” Derrick whispered to himself, checking the map on his phone. Sally was close behind him, floating along with all grace of a malfunctioning police canine drone. Her footsteps stuttered a few steps behind Derrick, and the concrete chunks clattered as they scraped on the ground.

“Wha—,“ Sally cried, almost tripping over the smaller pieces of concrete, before Derrick caught her arm and steadied it so she could reach solid ground.

“Thanks,” Sally said, huffing and wincing. Her arm squirmed under Derrick’s grip. “I’m okay now.”

“OH, sorry, I didn’t mean to grab you so hard!” Derrick said, releasing Sally.

“It’s fine, I know you were only trying to help,” Sally said. She rubbed her right arm, but caught up to Derrick’s side with a flurry of shuffling.

The navigation on his phone pointed them further down the street, which was luckily well-lit. “Hey, is that arm of yours okay? I noticed you’ve only been using your left arm this whole time,” Derrick asked. Some people were left-handed, but it was almost as if she was a cripple or something.

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to talk about it right now.” Sally said, bowing her head, so that her bangs formed a curtain of hair that obscured her face.

“Ah. Okay.” The sudden silence made Derrick’s throat itch, and clearing it under his breath didn’t help.

The entrance of the barbershop emerged from behind a stack of broken pallets full of rotting fruit. The rotating red, white, and blue barber’s pole was still turning, far past the 9 pm closing time on the placard in front of the barbershop. The shop itself was much larger than expected. Judging by the pipes running along the side of the building, it might’ve been a repurposed industrial building.

The sound of trickling liquid came from the entrance of the alley aside the shop, where a man’s half-down trousers peeked out. The barbershop was close to bursting, judging from the view from the glass doors, so the attendees must’ve already gotten tired of the bathroom line.

As Derrick grabbed the handle, the heat coming from the glass doors almost radiated out into the air. A man who was leaning up against the glass stumbled backwards, and the pungent stench of a sweaty room burst out. The roar of a room full of middle-aged men chattering made it impossible to hear any one conversation thread, except for the lone, unfamiliar voice screaming over a loudspeaker.

“Oh my—,” Sally began, before her comment was drowned out by the noise.

Derrick held his breath, and then forged inwards, tapping the closest sweat-drenched man on the shoulder. he breathed out.

The man nodded, and mouthed something, but it was impossible to hear him. He stepped out past Derrick and walked towards the alley, probably to join the other man in taking a piss.

Sally came in after Derrick, and the flow of people heading out of the barbershop for a piss enveloped them from behind.

The crowd was incredibly dense.

Derrick’s foot slid on something as he sidled past a group of men, and he grabbed someone’s shoulder for support. There was a sharp tug on his hand, and a squeak from behind him. Sally had also slipped on something, which, looking down through the forest of jean and cargo pant-clad legs, were bundles of hair. It obviously wasn’t strange to see cut hair in a barbershop, but there was so much of it, like no one had even bothered to clean it up.

Amid the din of the chattering and general noise, there was a distinct buzzing sound coming from the side of the room. The problem was that it was impossible to see anything over everyone’s heads, much less find Tony, or that buzzing sound.

Derrick tugged his shirt, which had gotten rumpled and misaligned from pushing past the crowd. Sally wasn’t doing much better; she shirked back from the men as she bumped into them, and her bangs clung to her forehead in a sweaty mess.

Derrick leaned down and yelled into her ear. “It’s not gonna be easy to find Tony in here, unless we want to make a big scene. Any ideas?”

“WHAT?” Sally yelled back.

“HOW SHOULD WE FIND TONY?”

Sally cupped her mouth and her tiny chest puffed up. “WHAT ABOUT FINDING THE OWNER?”

“GOOD IDEA,” Derrick yelled back, and gestured towards the edge of the shop. “I HEARD A BUZZING SOUND NEARBY, MAYBE HE’S THERE.”

Sally cocked her head. “I CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING, BUT SURE, I’LL FOLLOW YOU.”

They pushed through the crowd, getting turned around more than once, but then ended up in a corner of the shop, where the row of barber chairs had been moved to. Among the mass of sweaty men stood Xian, flitting around the small space that the crowd had carved out for him, wielding his clippers in hand, and wearing a grin on his face. His gaze jumped from the head of a seated man, to the next person in line, who was holding cash out in his hands. A sort of line had formed around them; apparently a lot of these men had decided to get hair cuts while they were gathering here: a sort of two-in-one deal. As Xian grabbed the cash and pocketed it, and then took up his scissors and comb, the men further down in line stuffed some money in Xian’s jeans back pocket, and Xian nodded at them, apparently keeping tally in his head.

The throng of people surrounding Xian was almost impenetrable—it must have seemed like Derrick and Sally were cutting in line for the haircuts, but as they jostled and tried to squeeze through, Tony’s face appeared from behind a few men, as the men crouched down to pick up something they’d dropped. Tony was in the corner, drinking a bottle of beer, red-faced and sloppy, and staring blankly at the makeshift stage—made from a large sheet of plywood stacked atop plastic crates—where the unfamiliar man was screaming through a loudspeaker. The man was definitely drunk too, as he slurred his words, which were unintelligible by the time they’d been amplified by the loudspeaker.

Sally put on a burst of speed, and muscled through the crowd with surprising force. She charged in, one arm sort of dangling at her side, as the other blocked her face from stray elbows amid what was basically a mosh pit. “COME ON, DERRICK, I SEE HIM.”

The path that Sally cleared started closing almost immediately after she blew through. Derrick slipped in a few paces after her, and felt the wall of sweaty shirts close ranks behind him.

“TONY!” Sally called out.

Tony seemed to be stuck in a trance, as he didn’t even turn his head until Sally was a few feet away, and shaking his shoulder.

“Wha—,” Tony said. “. . . What? Sally? What are you doing here?”

“I came looking for you, but you weren’t answering my texts, and you weren’t at the shop,” Sally said. “When I got there, Derrick answered the door, and said that you might be doing something dangerous . . . So I came here because I was worried!”

“Oh, baby,” Tony said, closing his eyes. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, and pulled his notification tab down. Lots of colorful notifications flooded across his screen. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I mean, I didn’t want to tell you about all this”—Tony gestured around them with his bottle—“yet.” I’m still not sure how it’ll turn out.” Tony put his hand over his mouth, and a familiar convulsion went up his bulk.

“Oh, fuck, he’s about to throw u—” Derrick started.

“Vomit—“ Sally said as Derrick was about to finish. Of course she could tell the signs too. It was a safe bet that she’d helped him through many vomiting sessions, since she worked at the bar and all.

Derrick shouted. Tony’s sweaty, pungent scent smothered Derrick as he slung Tony’s free arm over his back and lifted up. Another hand brushed up against Derrick’s as it rubbed up and down Tony’s back. Probably Sally’s, but he couldn’t see her past Tony’s bulk.

They headed towards the door, almost barreling through the protest attendees, or at least those who didn’t move out of the way quickly enough. The man screaming through the loudspeaker finally ended his tirade, and the energy in the crowd’s intensity wavered as another man stomped up the makeshift stage, no doubt getting ready for his turn on the loudspeaker. But the moment of lucidity among the crowd created openings—where arms had just been jostling, and bodies had just been pressing—large enough for them to squeeze through to the entrance.

They burst out through the glass doors and into the fresh night air, and Tony took barely a few steps towards the designated ‘bathroom’ in the alley before vomit shot from his mouth and splattered on the asphalt. Steam came up from the vomit pile, like they were at a rancid sauna.

After Tony had thrown up all he could, and wiped his mouth clean, Derrick sat him down on a plastic crate by the entrance. “Why are you wasting your time with this, Tony? It’s a mess in there, how are they organizing anything?” Derrick asked.

“You haven’t seen Li Xian really work yet, my boy,” Tony coughed. He spat onto the ground. “Ah, fuck, I really had too much.”

“What do you mean ‘really work’?” Derrick asked. “From what I could see, he was just taking advantage of the crowd to make some extra sales. The man was cutting their damn hair, while they stuck bills in his pants like he was a bar girl! —Ah—” Derrick glanced at Sally, who was red-faced and staring at the ground—hm, but it wasn’t so different from how she normally looked, so she might not’ve taken offense? Still better to be safe than sorry.

Derrick cleared his throat. “Sorry, I meant that he was basically . . . grifting.”

Tony shook his head. “He’s just getting people riled up first. You see those guys up on the stage? They’ve all had beef with the Leopards for the longest time, and Xian picked ‘em all out for their connections with the community and their way with words. You need to get everyone excited before they’ll really consider taking a risk. If you guys really wanna know how Xian works, let’s go in again, and watch what he does.”

Sally’s face was as openly skeptical as it’d ever been, but she eventually nodded her head. Tony smiled at her, and they whispered sweet nothings into each others ears. Kind of impressive how Sally was pretending not to notice Tony’s rancid breath. Or maybe she noticed and didn’t care because she was just that head-over-heels for him?

Derrick sighed. “I guess we can give it a shot.”