The Family Album/The Life of Cousin Bill Shows That Tonsorial Art Is Not Always for Heart's Sake

by Arthur Baer

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THE LIFE OF COUSIN BILL SHOWS THAT
TONSORIAL ART IS NOT ALWAYS FOR
HEART’S SAKE

THAT’S cousin Bill Adams. He was my aunt’s niece on his uncle’s side. He’s almost the image of George Washington with that wart on his nose. Maybe it’s Lincoln. Anyway, Bill had so many warts that his photograph looks like a railroad map.

Bill went to college and when he was about thirty years old my uncle decided that Bill ought to go to work again. Bill didn’t like this so good because he claimed that one backward step would make any man lose his carpet slippers.

Anyway, Uncle borrowed enough money to send Bill to college again for the pest-graduate course. It was a barber college and Bill cut almost as many classes as customers. They used to give would stripes for injuries received in the second chair from the right and perfume was used whenever they couldn’t get anethetics.

Bill was the prize student and used to operate on subjects at the daily clinic. The other pupils would gather around out of morbid frivolousness while Bill would shave the victim and carefully explain the use of each part of his face as he held it up so they could see it.

After he graduated out of the nearest exit uncle gave him enough money to open a barber shop. He thought this would keep Bill quiet. It was a good idea, but used cars aren’t the only things that don’t work.

Bill had eighteen chairs in his place, nine to each barber.

That kept both of ’em busy. When they had eighteen customers in there on a Saturday night they would slap hot towels on all their faces and try to scare the whiskers off instead of using hammers or some more civilized system.

Bill would be scalping some bird in Chair One, while another tourist’s face in Chair Eleven would be frying. Whenever he smelled something burning he knew the whole bunch was done and he would turn ’em out like biscuits.

The service wasn’t so good, but it was accurate and fast. And by getting shaved eighteen at a time the customers could get club rates.

Once Bill made a mistake and shaved a guy with the back of the razor instead of the edge. Do you know that this man was the only customer who ever came back the second time?

Business got so prosperous that Bill’s creditors invented the safety razor to drive him into some other business where tools weren’t weapons.

So Bill got married and furnished his house with the insides of a barber shop.

They had a palatial bungalow in the suburbs and it was beautiful in the Spring when the caterpillars were crawling among the buds on the red and white revolving barber pole in the front yard.

Bill had his shiniest nickel-plated and enamel chair in the parlor. They looked fine. There was eight of ’em in the parlor and fourteen polished brass cuspidors. Besides some of the handsomest tonic and dandruff signs you ever saw. Of course, the signs had strangers’ faces on ’em. But Bill didn’t like us relatives, anyway.

The parlor, corridor and other rooms were all papered with Bill’s mirrors and there were six more barber’s chairs in the dining room.

Bill had twin barber chairs in his wife’s boudoir and she got used to sleeping sitting up in a beautiful chair. But it was kinda funny if she happened to get a cold. Bill would rush to the doctor and holler, “Hurry up, Doc, my wife is sick in bed on two chairs.” This got to be a standing joke among the neighbors who spoke to Bill. So Bill never heard it.

Mrs. Bill used to cook New England dinners in the boiler which Bill used to use to steam his towels. There was always a Turkish taste to the food, and Mrs. Bill could never get the soapy flavor out of the coffee mugs, which had customer’s names on ’em, but not their telephone numbers. Not that Bill was jealous, but there was some beautiful gilded cups in his dining room dinner set. They didn’t match, anyway.

The kitchen was great. The ketchup and vinegar were in bay rum bottles, and Bill used to ask his visitors to shake ’emselves another plate of soup into their consomme barber cups.

It required good bookkeeping to get your food right. Pond’s Extract was tomato sauce, and Eau de Cologne was gravy and sometimes it was Eau de Cologne.

Quite often the icing on the angel cake turned out to be lather. But Bill’s wife didn’t mind that so much.

What made her get her divorce was whenever Bill left home for a trip.

She stuck out her lips for Bill to kiss, and instead Bill would dust her face off with a whiskbroom.