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Hector and Joe
If you want to get a haircut in my neighborhood, you have two choices on the
same block. There is Hector and there is Joe, once partners, who have divided
up the 2600 block of West Fullerton in the most ecumenical way, by congregation.
Joe Vacarella, 57, is the proprietor of Joe’s Barbershop, a two-seat affair in a little gingerbread storefront he has occupied for 18 years. Hector, his protégé for four of those years, is the owner of the 5-chair Hector’s Barbershop just up the road.
In Hector’s establishment, life is a party. Salsa music blares out of a CD player on the counter. A DVD in back carries the latest Blockbuster movies, and clients who are not actually getting haircuts wander from station to station offering style and design tips to those who are. Jose Munoz, a laid off county employee working on commission under neon clocks and illuminated posters for Pepsi and Mountain Dew, says he specializes in scissors and blow dry cuts. A barber known only as Kato works exclusively carving designs on Latin heads and hands out a card after each saying “I got faded at Hector’s.”
Some 20 years younger than Joe, Hector is known for his rapport with the local teenagers, especially the young Puerto Ricans who favor buzzcuts and skims. One recently gave him a new graffiti-style wall mural. He let another put a sign in his window promising, in addition to haircuts, “We Now Do Graphics.” If you are young and looking for a hip place to hang, Hector’s is your place.
Joe’s is a decidely more low-key situation. For Joe, cutting hair isn’t a marketing opportunity, or even a business, it’s a lifestyle, the only one he’s known (except for a brief stint in the Army in 1966) since he came over to America from Italy at the age of 9. His family hails from Foggia, a province on the Adriatic side of the country near the heel of Italy’s boot. His father was also a barber, with a farm that stretched down to the sea shore, but given the opportunity to come to America, he brought over the whole family to Chicago in 1955.
They moved into the Italian neighborhood along Taylor Street and Joe went to a procession of Chicago public schools, learning English on the streets, fighting his way through black gangs at Crane, and finally graduating from Austin High in 1964. He learned to cut hair at the age of 14 and joined his father cutting hair for 17 more years in a small shop just around the corner on California Street.
When you enter Joe’s, there is the feeling of a world that stopped somewhere around 1974. The walls are graced with a fading team picture of The 1969 Cubs, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra in their prime, and a young Rocky Marciano, gloves poised, in his famous poster stance. An 8-track cassette player is playing Mantovani. (“I love Mantovani,” Joe says, “The only thing I love more than Mantovani is 8-track cassettes. Best sound ever. I fix ‘em, you know.”) There’s a mounted fish on the wall, skins from various prey Joe has hunted as an American Woodsman (see the official membership certificate) and a picture of Joe holding grapes and zucchini from his garden that, depending on the season, he will sometimes bring in from his house in Park Ridge to give away to his customers.
As low key as Joe’s place is, it is always busy. “I work here ten, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week,” Joe boasts. “I’m going to work here until I’m 101, and when I get too old to drive, I’m going to sell my house and move in upstairs.” Joe charges, after a recent price hike, $11 a head. Enough, he says, to get by.
When I went in for a haircut one recent Saturday, Joe had one in the chair and two more waiting in the wings. His regular assistant, Helen, was off for the day. The man in the chair was OJ. He was getting one of Joe’s famous flat tops, just as he has every week for the last 24 years, and Joe was sharing with him the story of the 400 pound customer who broke his chair last week.
“Can you believe it, he busted the arms right off!” Joe said. “I asked him to slide back a little so he grabs the arms and, damned if the metal didn’t snap right in two.”
“That’s your fault, you know,” OJ said. “You need a bigger chair.”
“A bigger chair? They don’t even make these chairs anymore. Fortunately, another one of my customers is a welder and he was here that day. He put it back together, but we had to change the bolts.”
“You know they had this same problem at MacDonalds. Fat people couldn’t fit in the booths so they had to get all new booths -- so they weren’t discriminating against fat people.”
Joe snipped and buzzed in silence. “I’m not MacDonalds,” he said.
Joe saw me pawing through his magazines looking for something to read.
“I got a lot of new books this week. Here, try this one.” He handed me a copy of Maxim. I glanced at the cover How to Get Her to Go Wild! I set it back on the pile. “It’s not like Playboy. It’s clean,” Joe said. “But I got Playboy if you want it.”
“I get lots of books. I signed up once for one magazine and I guess they sold my name to one of those companies who sell lists. So I get all these offers of free magazines. They send me a bill after 10 issues or so, but I just write cancel on it and send it back. But I keep getting more and more books. I guess they think barbershops are good places to sell their book -- and it’s true. A lot of guys take the cards out and subscribe.”
The stack beside me indeed had a lot of “books.” Automotive Parts, Mountain Bike, Maxim, Sporting News, Spin , Vibe, Inc, Penthouse, Men’s Journal.
“I don’t have time to read them all. I just let them sit around, then I give ‘em away.”
Al, the postman, pokes his head in the doorway..
“Not today, huh?” he quickly surmises and leaves.
OJ steps out of the chair and another customer, a young Puerto Rican no more than 14 or 15, steps in. He tells Joe he wants “a bottlecap”, today’s popular cut not unlike the flat top Joe still favors from his youth, but more severe. Joe sizes up his head, then rips the electric clippers skintight up his back and neck, leveling off the top and painstakingly, hair by hair, feathering the edges together. Joe is not a scissors man. He’s got three or four electric clippers and he uses them all to get as close to the scalp as possible (without nipping the skin.)
Joe’s buddy Ray comes in the door carrying a six pack of Miller’s. Joe frowns. There are children in the chair. A big, hulking figure with a face out of the Soprano’s, Ray goes immediately to the broom closet, drops the beer in a cooler and sits on a chair staring at Joe.
“You know where to get a good sub around here?” Joe asks. A customer offers that there’s a submarine shop up on Addison. “You want a sub, Ray? I’m buying.”
“You wanna a what?”
“A good sub. I need some food. You wanna go?” Ray gets up quietly.
“Any special kind? “
“A good Italian sub,” Joe says. Ray leaves. Joe seems relieved.
Then Vic pokes his head into Joe’s doorway. “You gotta fix this. Someone could slip,” he says pointing to a slowly dripping air-conditioner that has left a puddle on the front doorway.
“So fix it,” Joe says. “Aw, never mind. How are you doing?”
Vic takes that to be an invitation to come in and takes a chair near the window. He flips on the TV and the local news is reporting on the forest fires in the west.
“You know, once half this earth was covered with fires -- 135 million years ago,” Joe opines to no one in particular. “It’s true. An asteroid fell into the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico and everything got all disrupted and half the globe burned.”
“Oh, you’re full of shit,” Vic says.
“It’s true. 135 million years ago. Helen was there. She took pictures,” Joe laughs.
“135 million years? That was before people. There was nothing before people, nothing we know of,” Vic says.
“They got rocks, they got dinosaur bones,” Joe says. “It’s all in there. The scientists are pulling it out. Did you see that tape we got here “A Walk with The Dinosaurs”? Beautiful tape, three and a half hours. It tells the whole story.”
“You’re crazy. That was before Jesus Christ. There was nothing before Jesus Christ.”
“Vic, you gotta open your mind. Watch more television,” Joe says.
When the boy is finished, it is my turn. I step into the chair. Joe asks what I want.
I respond not with a name, but a confession. “I haven’t had it cut in about six weeks,” I say.
“So shorter,” Joe says, “but not too short.”
“Yeh, exactly,” I say. As he settles in to do his business, Joe scours his memory to get a fix on me. I’ve been in the shop four or five times before, but he can’t place me.
“So what do you do?” he asks. I tell him I’m a writer. It seems to open a floodgate.
“I got a million stories,” Joe says. “Wait til my book comes out!”
“Are you writing a book?” I ask.
“Not exactly. In my mind, I got a million stories. Like my neighbor. I say ‘hey, maybe you should cut your grass’ and he says, ‘you cut it. You’re the barber,’ and I say, “I don’t do lawns!” And that’s just the start. But I need a guy like you to write these down.”
Someone asks Joe if he is going to be serving his homemade wine again this year at Christmas. “Just finished making it last week,” he says. “I got 27 cases. I think that should be enough.”
Winemaking is another hobby Joe shared with his father. Every year in the middle of September, he goes down to the railyards at 35th and Racine where brokers bring in boxcars of grapes from California and Michigan, and sell wine grapes off the sidings. “There’ll be 10, 15, maybe 20 boxcars. And they’ll have a crate open and a sign telling you what kind of grape it is. You taste it. You like it, you buy it. You don’t, you go to the next one.”
“They’re edible grapes, but they’re not perfect grapes. You know, like some might be smaller, but they’re still good. That’s why they call them wine grapes.”
I ask Joe how he makes his wine. He was waiting for this one. “First you stomp on them for about six months, then you wash your feet and your done.” He laughs. “I tell people that and, can you believe it, they buy it.”
“But really, we got machines now,” he continues. “What you do is you take the grape and, like, you break it. You don’t crush it, and everything drops through the machine into the barrel. Then it sits for between three and ten days. Me, I do it Sunday to Sunday. After that, you strain it and put it in the main barrel. But you got to filter it. Otherwise you get residue.”
“How do you know if you have a good batch”, I ask.
“You taste it. If it’s a little bitter, you might
add a touch of sugar. But the most I ever used was five pounds for 55 gallons.
That’s like nothing.”
Joe snips around the edges of my ear, then goes for the mirror.
“Do you do this with your kids?” I ask.
“They don’t do it. They don’t even like wine,” Joe says. “The fact is it’s a smelly process. You get those stains on the floor, on the wall, and the smell never goes away. Plus it’s a lot of process, then a lot of cleaning and putting away stuff. But I enjoy it. I like the idea of taking something and making something else out of it . . .Want me to get those eyebrows?”
“First thing people see when they look you in the eye are those eyebrows. One’s going up, one down, one sideways. They’re like nose hairs. When people look at you, they’re not looking at your face. They’re looking at those weird eyebrows.”
Joe clips my eyebrows, a sign that the masterwork nears its end, and reaches back tor his Lux 400 to vacuum the stray hairs off my face and neck. “There, now that’s a haircut,” he says, “What’s it been? Three months?”
“Something like that,” I say and hand him my money.
“Say hello to the family,” Joe says.
On my way home, I have to pass by Hector’s. He is out front pitching pennies at a crack in the sidewalk with a couple friends.
“So did you get a good cut?” he asks.
I nod.
“Yeah, Joe always gives a good cut.”