Five Dollar Cut and Heather

What looks so weird about him? Oh it’s that he finally got a haircut.

I picked up Brandy about 9:30 Saturday morning and he had the usual big grin on his face and he waved to me from the porch of his group home, Robert was sitting on the porch smoking like he always is, looking at the bird feeder.

I am not sure what Robert’s story is yet but Brandy said “he’s cool, he’s been in jail a few times.” Robert loves that bird feeder and will go on and on about birds and about how the squirrels try to fly from the tree branch to the feeder and fall flat on their back on the ground nine times out of ten. The deal is…squirrels don’t eat or pursue safflower for some reason, so if you buy safflower, you have no squirrel problem.

Of course it’s more expensive than garden variety bird seed, so I won’t buy that. As head of the bird seed and bird feeder department at Parkview Group Home, I reserve the right to buy the cheap stuff.

“Where’d you get your hair cut?” I asked looking straight ahead as we drove down Reynolds Road.

“Some joint. It’s a hack job but it doesn’t matter I guess, it only cost four dollars and a one dollar tip.”

“Ok not bad for five bucks.” I tell him. I end up paying about forty-five after my twenty dollar tip to the girl who cuts my hair, she’s been doing it for about fifteen years now and hasn’t changed the price once.

She could fire me and I would totally understand, I forget appointments regularly and that’s a loss of good money because she is very busy and makes a ton with regular customers, a day without me is a day without forty-five dollars, but most of all, a day without laughs.

Ask her, she’ll tell you how much she enjoys when I come in.

“Remember when Mom used to rack us?” Brandy asks right out of the blue.

Then he laughs nervously, he wonders where that came from as much as I do, I think for a second trying to figure out the thought process and I can’t. Usually I know what he means or at least where the random thoughts that pop into his head came from, but this one threw me. I just can’t figure out how a thought of my mother racking us came into his head.

We had cookies and coffee at the Barnes and Noble and stopped and grabbed some cokes and smokes, we got back to his place about 1:30 where I sat on his porch couch and napped for about thirty minutes while he worked his word search.

This way I wouldn’t dose off during the ass-shit drive back on I-40 through Greensboro and Burlington.