Go West, Young Man
Once again, in Berlin, a Stephanides lives among the Turks. I feel comfortable here in Schoneberg. The Turkish shops along Hauptstrasse are like those my father used to take me to. The food is the same, the dried figs, the halvah, the stuffed grape leaves. The faces are the same, too, seamed, dark-eyed, significantly boned. Despite family history, I feel drawn to Turkey. I’d like to work in the embassy in Istanbul. I’ve put in a request to be transferred there. It would bring me full circle.
Until that happens, I do my part this way. I watch the bread baker in the doner restaurant downstairs. He bakes bread in a stone oven like those they used to have in Smyrna. He uses a long-handled spatula to shift and retrieve the bread. All day long he works, fourteen, sixteen hours, with unflagging concentration, his sandals leaving prints in the flour dust on the floor. An artist of bread baking. Stephanides, an American, grandchild of Greeks, admires this Turkish immigrant to Germany, this
The bell on the door of Ed’s Barbershop in the Scranton bus station merrily rang. Ed, who had been reading the newspaper, lowered it to greet his next customer.
There was a pause. And then Ed said, “What happened? You lose a bet?”
Standing inside the door but looking as though he might flee back out of it was a teenage kid, tall, stringy, and an odd mix if ever Ed saw one. His hair was a hippie’s and came down past his shoulders. But he was wearing a dark suit. The jacket was baggy and the trousers were too short, riding high above his chunky tan, square-toed shoes. Even from across the shop Ed detected a musty, thrift-store smell. Yet the kid’s suitcase was big and gray, a businessman’s.
“I’m just tired of the style,” the kid answered.
“You and me both,” said Ed the barber.
He directed me to a chair. I—the easily rechristened Cal Stephanides, teen runaway—set my suitcase down and hung my jacket on the rack. I walked across the room, concentrating as I did on walking like a boy. Like a stroke victim, I was having to relearn all the simple motor skills. As far as walking went, this wasn’t too difficult. The time when Baker & Inglis girls had balanced books on their heads was long gone. The slight gracelessness of my walk, which Dr. Luce had commented on, predisposed me to join the graceless sex. My skeleton was a male’s, with its higher center of gravity. It promoted a tidy, forward thrust. It was my knees that gave me trouble. I had a tendency to walk knock-kneed, which made my hips sway and my back end twitch. I tried to keep my pelvis steady now. To walk like a boy you let your shoulders sway, not your hips. And you kept your feet farther apart. All this I had learned in a day and a half on the road.
I climbed into the chair, glad to stop moving. Ed the barber tied a paper bib around my neck. Next he draped an apron over me. All the while he was taking my measure and shaking his head. “I never understood what it was with you young people and the long hair. Nearly ruined my business. I get mostly retired fellas in here. Guys who come in my shop for a haircut, they don’t
“Just a haircut.”
He nodded, satisfied. “How do you want it?”
“Short,” I ventured.
“Short short?” he asked.
“Short,” I said, “but not too short.”
“Okay. Short but not too short. Good idea. See how the other half lives.”
I froze, thinking he meant something by this. But he was only joking.
As for himself, Ed kept a neat head. What hair he had was slicked back. He had a brutal, pugnacious face. His nostrils were dark and fiery as he labored around me, pumping up the chair and stropping his razor.
“Your father let you keep your hair like this?”
“Up until now.”
“So the old man is finally straightening you out. Listen, you won’t regret it. Women don’t want a guy looks like a girl. Don’t believe what they tell you, they want a sensitive male. Bullshit!”
The swearing, the straight razors, the shaving brushes, all these were my welcome to the masculine world. The barber had the football game on the TV. The calendar showed a vodka bottle and a pretty girl in a white fur bikini. I planted my feet on the waffle iron of the footrest while he swiveled me back and forth before the flashing mirrors.
“Holy mackerel, when’s the last time you had a haircut anyway?”
“Remember the moon landing?”
“Yeah. That’s about right.”
He turned me to face the mirror. And there she was, for the last time, in the silvered glass: Calliope. She still wasn’t gone yet. She was like a captive spirit, peeking out.
Ed the barber put a comb in my long hair. He lifted it experimentally, making snipping sounds with his scissors. The blades weren’t touching my hair. The snipping was only a kind of mental barbering, a limbering up. This gave me time for second thoughts. What was I doing? What if Dr. Luce was right? What if that girl in the mirror really
“This is like taking down a tree,” opined Ed. “First you gotta go in and lop off the branches. Then you chop down the trunk.”
I closed my eyes. I refused to return Calliope’s gaze any longer. I gripped the armrests and waited for the barber to do his work. But in the next second the scissors clinked onto the shelf. With a buzz, the electric clippers switched on. They circled my head like bees. Again Ed the barber lifted my hair with his comb and I heard the buzzer dive in toward my head. “Here we go,” he said.
My eyes were still closed. But I knew there was no going back now. The clippers raked across my scalp. I held firm. Hair fell away in strips.
“I should charge you extra,” said Ed.
Now I did open my eyes, alarmed about the cost. “How much is it?”
“Don’t worry. Same price. This is my patriotic deed today. I’m making the world safe for democracy.”
My grandparents had fled their home because of a war. Now, some fifty-two years later, I was fleeing myself. I felt that I was saving myself just as definitively. I was fleeing without much money in my pocket and under the alias of my new gender. A ship didn’t carry me across the ocean; instead, a series of cars conveyed me across a continent. I was becoming a new person, too, just like Lefty and Desdemona, and I didn’t know what would happen to me in this new world to which I’d come.
I was also scared. I had never been out on my own before. I didn’t know how the world operated or how much things cost. From the Lochmoor Hotel I had taken a cab to the bus terminal, not knowing the way. At Port Authority I wandered past the tie shops and fast-food stalls, looking for the ticket booths. When I found them I bought a ticket for a night bus to Chicago, paying the fare as far as Scranton, Pennsylvania, which was as much as I thought I could afford. The bums and druggies occupying the scoop benches looked me over, sometimes hissing or smacking their lips. They scared me, too. I nearly gave up the idea of running away. If I hurried, I could make it back to the hotel before Milton and Tessie returned from seeing Carol Channing. I sat in the waiting area, considering this, the edge of the Samsonite clamped between my knees as though any minute someone might try to snatch it away. I played out scenes in my head where I declared my intention of living as a boy and my parents, at first protesting but then breaking down, accepted me. A policeman passed by. When he was gone I went to sit next to a middle-aged woman, hoping to be taken for her daughter. Over the loudspeaker a voice announced that my bus was boarding. I looked up at the other passengers, the poor traveling by night. There was an aging cowboy carrying a duffel bag and a souvenir Louis Armstrong statuette; there were two Sri Lankan Catholic priests; there were no
