...Two Bits

Got a haircut last night at Slope Barber on Fifth Avenue. I love this place. You should go there even if you don’t live in Brooklyn. Even if you don’t live in New York, you should come visit us and get your haircut there.

But call first. Just don’t drop in and knock on the door. We may not answer. We may just stare at your from behind the peep hole. You may think you hear us giggling as you lug your bags back out into the street, but that’s just the television. We leave it on when we’re not home.

We get our hair cut by Kathy, because she seems like the only one who can use scissors. The guys can take care of you if you need a Gumby fade or “Brooklyn” carved into the back of your head. Well, the truth is while we were there a kid came in trying to get “Brooklyn” carved into the back of his head, but the veteran guy – a dreadlocked African American with a Rastafari patch on his smock – pretended like he didn’t know how. It was near closing time and a proper “Brooklyn” would take a while.

Don’t get me wrong, I like my haircut and I like my kid’s haircut, but the real reason I like going there is for the conversation. Last time we were there we got the lowdown on all the best tattoo artists in New York. There’s this dude who lives near Bay Ridge who use to take breaks in the middle of tat jobs to shoot heroine. Apparently he’s off the horse now and there was some debate as to whether the quality of his work has suffered for it.

Yesterday the debate focused mostly on corns and the best way to remove them. A longtime customer came in to show off his purchase from the pharmacy. It was a medicated corn removal product and Rastafari lamented his own corn. He’s had it since the Biltmore Ballroom, he said, which translated to the Gregorian calendar would be roughly sometime between 1987 and 1995. He went on about the ’gators and British Knights collecting dust in his closet, because the pain of wearing them is too unbearable.

Kathy suggested soaking the corn in hot water, letting the center “rise to the top,” then digging it out with a razor. From there the conversation spanned topics ranging from the deviltry of George Bush and Tony Blair to a lawsuit involving lead poisoning at the Brooklyn Arms in Fort Greene to the love child of Diana Ross and Michael Jackson (Evan Ross).

Seriously, that was the most entertaining haircut I ever got in my life. (4 stars)

Blood Spray

Yet more reprehensible damage was done to my child this weekend when I took him to go see Hot Fuzz. The movie features three or four super-graphic yet unquestionably comic murder scenes. I can’t recommend this film for most seven-year-olds, but mine seemed to enjoy it even though I kept trying cover his eyes with my hand.

Yeah, I worry about him. I really can’t justify taking him to see rated R movies. The truth is I really wanted to see it and he was willing and, hey, at least it wasn’t Shaun of the Dead or Vacancy. I know, not a very strong argument at all.

I will say that these days parents seem overly concerned with protecting their children. Things were different when I was a kid. We played for hours on end unsupervised by adult eyes. We got beat up and knocked down. We were exposed to storm drain pornography and Faces of Death and copious amounts of Howard Stern and Cheech and Chong.

And while my parents were often unable or unwilling to guard my virgin senses from the graphic tumult of media overload, they did lie to and hide things from me a lot. I don’t want to do that.

I’ve also taken him to see Meet the Robinsons, The Last Mimsy, Wild Hogs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Everyone’s Hero. And isn’t exposing a child to two hours of mediocrity harmful, too?

The Del Monte Experiment

I once ran away with a girl to California. She attended Stanford and I stayed at her dorm while I looked for a place. When I first got there her roommate took me on a tour of the campus. Upon arriving at the quad she pointed out Jordan Hall.

“That’s where they did the Stanford Prison Experiment,” she said. “A professor took got some students to pretend to be guards and others to be prisoners. They had to shut it down because the guard students started abusing the prisoner students.”

Sounded cool. Mad scientist conducts cruel experiments on young men. The experiments involving real people have always fascinated me. Did you ever that film in school warning about drugs, the one where they use footage of clinical experiments with LSD? Good stuff.

I looked for it, or something like it on YouTube, but all I found was this:



…and this one on the dangers of hotdogs when using drugs…



But I was able to find this other video I remember where they examined the effect of LSD on spiders:



Sorry, I get distracted easily. Where was I? The Stanford Prison Experiment. Flash forward to about three weeks ago when John Steward brought Philip Zimbardo onto the Daily Show. Turns out Zimbardo is the mad scientist! And he just wrote a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. It’s about the SPE and its relation to Abu Ghraib.

So I’ve been reading this book and I’m on the part where he’s detailing some of the abuses by the Stanford student guards. They don’t beat the prisoners or anything, but they exercise dominance over eating, pissing, shitting, talking, sleeping and movement. They leverage the comfort of other prisoners to squash rebellious or disobedient prisoners.

Remember that scene from Full Metal Jacket with the jelly donut?



Flash forward to last night. My kid’s friend and his mom are over for dinner. And the friend is not eating his food. Understandable, since I’m a pretty lousy cook. The highlight of the meal is the tilapia, which he won’t even try. But then he starts asking for stuff like Fruit Roll-ups and gummy vitamins.

The solution is simple bribery/bargaining. Finish A + B and you can have C + D. It’s pretty standard stuff I’m pretty sure every parent has used at least once. The teaching value of this type of arrangement is vague, but I figure it’ll help if the kid ever becomes a labor organizer or something.

But then my child ups the ante, asking for, ironically, a donut. Amazingly, he actually finished all the food on his plate, which he never does. The straight forward solution is pretty obvious. Give subject 1 a donut and inform subject 2 he can get one too only if he eats all the food on his plate. But I try a different, more sinister approach:

The friend can have a donut if he eats all of his corn. But my kid can have a donut if his friend eats half of the corn on his plate. How diabolical is that?

Halfway through the corn, subject 2 loses interest and the two wander off. 20 minutes later they come back for the donuts. I’ve cleaned off the table by then and the opportunity to finish the corn is gone.

I give my kid his donut, of which he asks to share with his friend.

“It’s you donut, you can do whatever you want with it.” Now, in all honesty, I’d rather they both eat only half a donut. In retrospect, if I would have just given each half a donut in the first place, everything probably would have gone okay. But I think as a matter of pride subject 2 couldn’t swallow that the only reason he was getting any donut at all was through the benevolence of subject 1. He was, after all, the one who had to do all the corn eating in this deal.

So he broke down and started crying. It was as all very tragic. Eventually he left with his half-donut still weeping. The part that really made me feel like shit, however, was that I completely forgot to give him his Fruit Roll-Up.

Standing on Eviction

His grandmother told him he grows a little each night, so every morning now he wants his growth charted on the jamb between the kitchen and living room.

This morning he put up his own marks and I had to scold him for it.

Children really don’t grow a little each night, I don’t think, and besides, we don’t own this apartment – we’re only renting.

I spent the walk to school explaining what would happen if we didn’t pay our rent each month. I went through the process of eviction as well as I know it. He seemed comforted when I told you have a few weeks or months after you are issued a notice of eviction to move out.

But I just looked into it apparently it only takes three days to kick a person out of his apartment. I guess I’ll share that news with him tonight. I try to be honest with him, not shield him from reality.

Student gunmen, sexual predators, wars on terror, global warming, escalated incidences of asthma and cancer among New Yorkers – you got to keep it real.

But with all the bad, there’s the undeniable beauty of the city we live. Even a trip to the movies can be awe inspiring.