Essay Club

I joined an informal essay club. Here are two on the themes LOST TRACK and HAIR, respectively.



A man stands behind a length of countertop, an enormous brass cash register to his left, a work smock neatly tied around his trim frame, staring, unsmiling but proud, into the viewer’s eyes. The picture of my grandfather circa 1950’s lives on a shelf above my desk sharing space with a few other choice objects. My father’s father was an Irish man, son of fresh-off-the-boat-immigrants. He lost his parents at a young age to fever, learned the trade of shoe repair and raised a family of six, running his shop in downtown San Francisco for fifty years. My father was his first son as I am the first of my fathers five. And I have none.
O gauge (pronounced ‘oh’ gauge) is a collector’s truffle. A common size in model trains made by Lionel and other companies for years. The exact replica of the real world trains are modeled to 1/48th the size. When my father was a boy he was given a steam locomotive and five cars, a coal car, a box car, a tanker car, a bin car and a caboose by his father as a present. And there was track. Enough to make a large figure eight. The engine was controlled by a two handled rheostat hooked up to the metal track which carried an electrical current. It also had a knob to make the train whistle and, if you put a pellet into the smoke stack, the engine would trail a white wisp of smoke as it steamed along.
When I was a boy this amazing train was passed along to me. Most Christmases it would be set up near, or at times, around the family tree. It was a wonderful thing to see it make its way, whistling and puffing, through the stacks of presents. When not employed for the holidays, the train was set up on a board on a couple of saw horses in a play room or ‘reck’ room if we happened to have one at the time. Eventually, as I got older and left for college then to a city and then the bigger city, the train spent its time in a box. It made its way a decade ago to the east coast and now sits on a shelf, displayed but dysfunctional.
I lost track. I mean I have some, but not enough to make a circle let alone a figure eight. Also the rheostat needs to be repaired by someone who knows what the hell a rheostat is. But more importantly, and really why the mighty little replica sits on a shelf is that there is no boy. That track is also lost.
From father to son and the son becomes a father and passes to son who becomes a father who has a son. That track is lost. I have no son and never will. Did I ever want one? A scale model of me? One forty-eighth my size, at least for a while? We’ll that’s a hard thing to know. You can find yourself in a figure eight thinking about that. I lost track. But I still have a train.




Michael was the leader, the elder statesman if you will. His stature came mostly from his age, supported by his big booming basso of a voice. We all knew that he had a certain undeniable cred because he once had a recurring part on a long running TV show back in the seventies. I want to say it was Green Acres, but it wasn’t, I checked. It was something like that. He had made a lot of money in LA at the time. Not that he needed it mind you. He was not at all shy about regaling us with stories of his hollywood family ties and the parties he was privy too growing up.
If Michael was the undisputed top dog of our group of four, Richard was second in line. He had had a soap career back in the day. He was not as old as Michael, nor as broken down. Richard had a quieter sadness to him as he painted his face. David was third in line, a scrappy fifty year old inveterate boozer, an Irishman to the core. I was fourth, the understudy. I covered them all.
Every night, sometimes twice a day, I would join them in a cramped dressing room upstairs from Broadway and 46th street, and watch as they changed into costume. It was a modern dress play so the change was subtle but there was still the ritual, the care, the slow transformation that each used to shed the dust of the streets and enter the world of suspended disbelief. It didn’t matter if the play sucked. We couldn’t change that. We were the actors who’s job it was to take a sows ear and do something with it.
I learned some invaluable lessons during the six months I lasted. Hang your pants from the cuffs. Tuck your dress shirt tails into your underwear. The elastic band will help keep the shirt taut in front. Tie you tie once, then slip it over your head. If you have a good knot going why fuck it up by undoing it? Polish your shoes once a week, change your dress socks often, deodorant is a must, and Gold Bond is highly recommended for that cool refreshing feeling.
What was also obvious to me over time is how much attention was paid to hair. It was brushed, combed, fussed over in a manly way, but never, ever spoken about. Goo was applied and very occasionally a blow dryer was employed in an effort to gain cooperation from an unruly strand but there was no discussion. Those with hair, and all three elder actors in the room had thick manes, didn’t make much of it. They combed and patted and sprayed (or not) those salt and pepper locks that have been kind enough to stick with them into the golden years. Bald men, having nothing to speak about, were spared the feelings associated with having nothing to speak about.
The silence was suspended only once. It was a brief, furtive moment. I had asked Michael, while we were alone in the dressing room, who cut his hair. He looked at me as if to determine my worthiness. Settling on an unspoken positive assessment, he wrote a number and name on a piece of paper and handed it to me without any other acknowledgement.
Following up a week later I walked into a small hair salon with some trepidation. In the back, seemingly operating independently from the establishment that surrounded him, was another Michael. A bald man with scissors.
I have been returning to his chair every six weeks or so for going on five years now. We talk about barbecue (even though I’m a vegetarian), cars, building projects, politics, women and anything else that comes up. The one thing we never ever talk about is hair. I walk in, he cuts it, I walk out. Enough said. Thanks Michael for the Michael we share, but not another word.