Freemans

To the sounds of Metallica’s Live Shit, I sat down to a shave and trim at Freemans Sporting Club shortly after noon yesterday.

Joey, my barber, was heading to the Metallica concert that evening, and to prepare, in a scene straight out of High Fidelity, tore out the classical guitar CD we’d been listening to and enjoying, and he kicked a junk pile of metal straight into the crotch of the still slumbering Lower East Side. Clang! Oof! Enter Sandman.

While there, I learned a lot. I learned about mescaline trips in Peru, I learned about a German cannibal who’d posted a want ad on the internet and proceeded to dine on his victim… with his victim, and I learned if I shave with anything more than a , I’m just destroying my skin. The entire time, I imagined my grandfather, on a similar Sunday, sitting beneath the barber pole, thumbing through a tattered stag magazine, a wood crate of warm Schlitz at his feet, listening to music my grandmother would have called “noise,” and discussing the rigors of making his granddaddy’s bathtub gin.

I’m sure he thought he was pretty cool, too.

Doused with a bouquet of Musgo Real, eucalyptus, and rose water, suffering slight whiplash from all the headbanging, I was ready to greet my day.