The Mad Barber of the Bronx.

The Mad Barber of the Bronx.

He was wide-eyed and his face ghostly white. And, to my 8-year-old-eyes, very old. He had just enough flesh hanging over his bones to seem like a skeleton in hot pursuit as he ran passed the candy store.  Or, in his white barber’s coat he could have been a horror comic cover with a surreal hospital theme: a post-mortem doctor chasing an unwilling corpse, scalpel at the ready. I see him now, tall and gaunt and deadly earnest, long legs carrying him much faster than they should have been able to, down Sheridan Avenue and up McClellan Street, with an open barber’s razor held high in his right hand.

We needed no encouragement to stay ahead, our faces contorted with fear and excitement, eyes and ears pulled back as if by the wind. Exquisite terror urged us on. We ran for our lives. Meanwhile, six blocks away, at 161^st and River Ave, the Yankees would be winning, or Mickey or Yogi or The Scooter would make sure they would be by the end of the 9th.

All was normal in the west Bronx.

The barber, a German, an immigrant---surely a survivor of the war, but on which side?---had a small shop on a side street off the Grand Concourse. We’d tease him by dancing around the front of the shop, banging his window, one leg tensed for escape. He showed no reaction while he clipped and shaved his customer, until the moment our awful teasing and ignorant chants (“Heine”? “Kraut”? “Nazi”?) dredged up what-ever demons lay shallow in his skull. In one movement he was away from the chair, out of the door, razor high. We were gone, around the corner and up the hill towards the Grand Concourse, the Bronx’s parade route version of the Champs Elysée, laughing and screaming. Then right on the Concourse towards 167^th Street and the refuge of the alleyways that ran under the Art Deco apartment buildings standing side by side, sentinels of safety.

We headed for their dark storage rooms and dusty furnace rooms and finally, at the back, concrete rear “gardens”. You wanted to get in amongst the rusty bikes and dusty baby carriages of grown-up babies, and disappear, schhh and silent, in the blackness. You did not want to get caught out back where there was only one way in and out, and the walls were too high to climb.

Today the same buildings, with their tongue-in-groove flooring, spacious sunken living rooms and Deco multi-colored tiles, and a 25-minute commute on the D Train to Columbus Circle, are waiting to welcome a new migration of young families seeking sanctuary from Manhattan, this time not from the terrible old ghetto-like lower-east side, but from the new uber-fashionable lower-east side where restaurants are French and rents are terrible.  Unfortunately, in both neighborhoods the sour pickles are gone.

Besides playing hooky and going to Yankee Stadium (Bleachers, 50¢) this early test of manhood and sadism (the two almost always go together) was the most exciting thing an eight-year-old could wish for: a rite of passage and a dumb shit thing to do. How long could you wait before you ran?  Who would wait the longest? The Barber was a mystery. What nightmare exploded in his brain from a tragic or malevolent past? Was he a refugee from a concentration camp with faded purple numbers on his forearm, or one of its guards---a Nazi who had been interned in America and after the war, and, as the 40’s dragged into the 50’s, simply let go.

Here amongst Bronx streets named for mostly useless Union generals, he found a little private war where, for us, every engagement ended with an egg cream, a long pretzel and an elevated heart rate. From adrenalin rush to sugar rush, and the candy store. What bliss.