13

We Get Acquainted

Ronnie turned thirty-six in 1971.

That year, I wrote “See Ronnie” in my datebook more than sixteen times. But I didn’t go. On my 1988 calendar, I wrote his name in capital letters, with stars. I still didn’t go.

I was busy, and it was hard to hear about my tenderhearted mother being so cruel to him.

My guilt mounted, and finally I started seeing him again. I went to the barbershop four more times over the next year or so. As soon as I came through the door, he’d launch into a rambling gush of story fragments and observations. He jumped from subject to subject—local pizza joints to British royalty, Vinton politics to camera lenses. He lectured me. He’d saved up insights to share with me. He was desperate to talk.

He threw college-boy words at me—“elitist,” “fatalist,” “utopia”—and urged me to study fifteenth-century English history as he had. Only then could I fully comprehend Virginia’s pompous past. Yet his knowledge about all that seemed spotty, like a quilt missing squares. Not surprising for an eighth-grade dropout whose early schooling kept being interrupted. Still, he possessed an eager mind.

He’d visited the graves of our grandparents in country cemeteries. He’d researched the blue-blooded owners of Keswick’s oldest farms. Studying the backgrounds of people from his past helped him figure out where he fit in. “That’s how I found myself,” he said with pride, to underscore that he had put himself in context, and nobody had helped him.

He didn’t come right out and say it, but I could tell he was proud of me. He’d been following my newspaper stories. I’d won national awards and was a Pulitzer finalist for a series about how exterminators were poisoning and defrauding people. “You’re the only one of us who’s amounted to anything,” he told me between haircuts. Sad as that statement was, at least he considered himself to be in the family “us.” Every time I saw him, I wanted to cry, but not in front of him. To do that would make me more a part of his life than I was comfortable with, at least not yet.

I did what I’d learned to do as a journalist: I listened. By then, I’d been a reporter more than twenty years. I’d written about colorful strangers of all sorts in several states and cities. Ronnie was the greatest enigma of them all.

He’d lived in Virginia all his life, yet he didn’t sound all that Southern. He boomed on and on in a cynical Godfather patois. Everything was a caper. Everybody was on the make. Men were jokers, cats, and bozos. Women were sirens if they were good-looking, squaws if they weren’t. Ronnie didn’t drive his car. He wheeled his unit.

Then one day he told me that in his first barbering job, the immigrant businessmen nearby mentored him. They were from Northern cities. They became the fathers he needed; they left their imprint on him, I could hear it.

“I think the Democrats are going to nominate Jesse Jackson,” I announced to him cheerfully one day in 1988. Jackson was patching together a coalition of blacks, whites, poor, rich, Northerners, Southerners, gays. I believed he could be elected. Ronnie hooted. “You kidding me? That’s Mickey Mouse eating blackberries.” That was my favorite comeback of his to anything he thought idealistic mush. It meant, “You’re dwelling in Cartoonland, kid. The world ain’t all that good.”

He embraced cynicism and irreverence instead, and whenever I’d say something that rang that chime—like what a lousy job the media were doing covering the campaign—he’d snicker with glee and slowly nod his head.

* * *

IN THE YEARS when I was reconnecting with Ronnie, I ran a gantlet between him and Mom—fact-checking with her what he’d tell me and running back to him to learn more. As a sister and a daughter, I was careful—those two were wary of each other; their memories tapped a soul-close vein. Deep down, however, I remained a nosy reporter. I wanted to know every crumb of their story.

Each time I was with Ronnie, I felt worse for him and more confused about our mother. For the most part, she corroborated his accounts of events they’d shared. Each inquiry, though, seemed to ping against the lead wall she’d erected in her mind to keep from thinking about him. Each inquiry was a small shaming by her chosen child.

But what was I going to do? Once I got to know Ronnie, I couldn’t turn away. I had a right to know what had happened to my brother.

* * *

ON THANKSGIVING DAY 1988 at my folks’ house in Charlottesville, Mom surprised me by phoning Ronnie out of the blue to invite him to lunch. It was late in the morning. The turkey was roasting in the oven; the potatoes were boiling in the saucepan. Ronnie lived two hours away. This was not a sincere invitation.

The young niece of Ronnie’s landlady answered the phone in Vinton. She hollered up the stairs to Ronnie that a woman named Adria—Mom spelled it out—was inviting him to lunch. He shouted back that he was going hunting—probably not a sincere reply either. Ronnie’s hunting expeditions started way before dawn. Mom hung up the phone, grumbling in the clumsy anger of the guilt-ridden.

At Christmas that year, Ronnie reported that she’d been writing to him. Around then, Virginia lawmakers, propelled by my reporting, were preparing massive reform to regulate pesticides. Still, her focus on me chafed Ronnie. “It’s ‘Mary Carter this’ and ‘Mary Carter that.’ She don’t give a damn about me.”

His feelings about her were tangled and mercurial. I couldn’t predict his attitude on any given day. He admired her, yet he blamed her for everything wrong in his life, and I was beginning to agree with him there. I didn’t talk much about her to him. My relationship with her was so drastically different. No need to rub his nose in it.

He was unwavering, however, in his contempt for Daddy. I’d heard his recollections of Daddy not treating him right. And yet Daddy had defended Ronnie to that social worker at Western State. But Ronnie didn’t know that, and I didn’t either at that point. It didn’t matter. I knew it was easier for Ronnie to heap blame on Daddy than to spew all his hatred at his own mother.

Somewhere under Ronnie’s protective bramble of furious language, I thought I detected a kind heart. I wondered if I could fight my way through his armor and get to know that side of him. With each visit, I was beginning to put the people, places, and events of his life in chronological order.

* * *

IN AUGUST 1953, he’d stepped off a bus onto the hustle-bustle streets of downtown Roanoke. The state institutions that held him for ten months had turned him loose. They lined up a job for him. No more shock treatments. No more heavy metal doors clanging behind him. His asthma disappeared once he got away from Mom, and now the world lay before him. He had a comb in his pocket and a trade certified right there on his barber school diploma.

He’d graduated from the thousand-hour, six-month-long barbering course just down the road from Western State at the state-run Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center in Fishersville, Virginia. It certified him in haircutting, shaving, shampooing, scalp treatments, massaging, barbering science, barbering ethics, and barbershop management. The day after graduation, he turned eighteen. I don’t know if my folks went to the ceremony, if there even was one, or if Ronnie came home that weekend. I’d just turned eight, and I don’t remember. But days after his birthday, the state put him on that bus for Roanoke.

“I thought I’d hit the jackpot when I stepped out there on Jefferson Street and saw all those buses and trains, and all those fancy-dressed people.” He’d landed a job at the epicenter of little Roanoke.

With a population of ninety-two thousand and at its all-time industrial peak, Roanoke was a three-ring circus to a restless young man. It put on a giant fair his first week there. Roanoke had seven movie theaters and more drive-ins than that. It had eateries crammed into every corner, a good public library, record stores, cute secretaries streaming by at lunchtime—Ronnie was in the catbird seat.

Europeans first called the place Big Lick for the salt marshes that conveniently drew game for them to shoot. Sodium, iron, calcium, and other nutrients in those natural “licks” strengthened animals’ bones and muscles. Roanoke eventually became a manufacturing hub when railroads developed the very same trails blazed to the salty waters first by mastodons, then bison, then native people, then white settlers.

Roanoke, though a small city, was an urban oasis in the vast rural swath that is the western half of Virginia. Heading east to west across the state in the 1950s, after the capital of Richmond, you had to drive hundreds of miles to Louisville, Kentucky, to find a city bigger and livelier than Roanoke.

* * *

RONNIE’S BARBERING TEACHERS had shipped him off to work at the long-standing four-seat American Barber Shop at the corner of Jefferson Street and Campbell Avenue, Roanoke’s busiest intersection. Western State didn’t officially discharge Ronnie from the hospital until March 1954 when it declared him “improved.” The Roanoke job must have been granted on only a trial basis, but Ronnie stuck. He was at the American more than three years.

Though he was draft bait, he never served in the military. In October 1953, weeks after he turned eighteen and clenched that first job, the Selective Service System sent a postcard to Ronnie’s rented room. The card provided him with a ten-digit identification number for the draft and directed him to notify the local draft board whenever he moved, which was often. The United States had signed an armistice that ended the Korean War slightly more than two months earlier, in late July. Either Ronnie slipped by—too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam—or his stay in a mental hospital and his electroshock there rendered him ineligible.

Fatherless Ronnie suddenly was surrounded by men of several ethnicities eager to advise the scrawny teenager on clothes, cars, money, and women. Jewish pawnbrokers, Lebanese sandwich makers, Greek hot dog vendors, Scots-Irish pool hustlers with their custom-made cue sticks—they all reached out to the solitary boy. A blend of their New York accents mixed with some Southernness—I heard it in Ronnie’s voice when I finally got to know him.

A Jewish clothier with a store near the barbershop snappily outfitted Ronnie in corduroy sport coats and sharply creased gabardine slacks. Ronnie dated the daughters of downtown merchants and bragged to me that he was invited “to all the best dances.”

Police took advantage of greenhorn Ronnie. “One cop liked his little nip, so I went to the liquor store for him. . . . They all got their haircuts free, and you had to buy their tickets to the Policemen’s Ball.” Some leaned on him to be a snitch. “I didn’t care too much for that.”

He still called himself Slim, a nickname coined by the boys back at Miller School. Ronnie Overstreet was that poor bastard kid. Slim Overstreet, now, he was a man about town.

Without a car at first, he rented a room a ten-minute walk from the barbershop. The widow of a railroad machinist charged him five dollars a month for a spare room in her house. Ronnie could sit up in bed and look out across a park to the grand Tudor-style Hotel Roanoke a half mile away on the other side of the railroad tracks.

Downtown Roanoke teemed with thousands of male heads crying for regular trims. Offices in every direction from Ronnie’s shop held insurance men, lawyers, railway clerks, coal dealers, telegraph operators, stockbrokers, accountants, tailors, tobacconists, real estate brokers, watch repairmen, doctors, dentists, jewelers, bankers, elevator repairmen, and shoe salesmen.

His first weekly paycheck was $35.60. After he paid for his room and for food, he had plenty of money left. “Went in the sock”—his savings. A grilled ham and cheese was $1.05 at People’s Drug. He’d wolf down two. He spread his meals around town, strategically making new friends and customers. In turn, the short-order cooks, spying his thin frame, ladled on extra gravy.

In the spring of 1954, the barbershop’s shoeshine guy tipped Ronnie off to a three-year-old colt running in the Belmont Stakes. The odds were fourteen to one. Ronnie went to the bookie upstairs in the pool hall and placed a week’s wages on High Gun. The horse won. Thirty years later, Ronnie still was savoring the memory of his good fortune. “I left out of the pool hall that day with a grocery sack full of money.”

He went car shopping. The first used-car dealer called him a hayseed, so Ronnie moved on. At the next place, he discovered a ’49 Buick, a preacher’s car, jet-black, spotless. He paid $1,300 for it, most of his winnings. “A cigarette had never been smoked in it, and along comes Slim.” Now, not only could Ronnie peer out his bedroom window and admire Roanoke’s finest hotel, he could look down on the street and see his very own car. He washed it weekly and faithfully changed its oil.

As he stood on the corner outside the barbershop during a break one day, old tycoon J.J. McIntyre cruised by. Ronnie’s boyhood pal Buddy McIntyre, a teenager by then, couldn’t get his granddad to stop. For years after, Ronnie relished the memory of Buddy, ecstatic to see his old friend, waving like mad and leaning halfway out the window of “that goddamned Mercury.” Ronnie’s new roots in Roanoke were not only fattening him up and making him smile but also healing old wounds.

* * *

THE BARBERSHOP WAS the scene of one of the most dramatic events in Ronnie’s life. I heard two versions.

As Ronnie recalled, it was around lunchtime when a thin brown-haired man slipped into his chair for a cut. Within seconds, Ronnie realized he was intimately familiar with that head. He glanced in the mirror and saw the long face of his foster father, Roy Hall. Ronnie hadn’t seen Polly and Roy for more than ten years, not since he left Boys’ Home.

In an undated letter I found in Ronnie’s file at the orphanage, Polly wrote, “My dear little boy, guess you think I am not going to ever answer your sweet letter but it has been so hot and everything that I just haven’t felt like writing. I surely hope you are being extra nice so you can come over next week for your vacation. Please try to be good and not get any bars,” which were Boys’ Home’s version of demerits. She signed off, “Love always, Mother.”

Ronnie often left Boys’ Home to spend holidays back in Blacksburg with Polly and Roy. But once he checked out of the orphanage at age eight and joined Mom at Bridlespur, Polly and Roy decided to butt out and to let Ronnie settle in with her. Little did they know how badly that was going.

Ronnie thought for years about reconnecting with Polly and Roy. But he was afraid. He never understood why he had to leave them in the first place. Had he done something wrong? Had they stopped loving him? He had no idea that they’d begged Mom for years to let them adopt him.

As Ronnie scissored Roy’s hair, Roy began to chat about this and that. Ronnie, so tall now that Roy didn’t recognize him, was about to pop with excitement. Finally, Ronnie casually remarked, “Didn’t you have a little blond-headed boy years ago?” Roy blanched and asked, “Hey, yeah. How’d you know that?” To which Ronnie replied, “Because you’re talking to him.”

Roy leapt up and wrapped Ronnie in his arms. After a minute, Roy wagged his finger at Ronnie, just like he was his little boy all over again. Now, you wait right here, okay? I’m going to go get Polly. Don’t you go anywhere! Roy sped the fifty miles home and was back with Polly by two o’clock. There was so much hugging and kissing that the whole barbershop was celebrating with them. So, as Ronnie recalled fondly, “There was nothing to do but take the rest of the day off.”

Polly’s memory was that Ronnie had cut the hair of a friend of Roy’s who told Roy about this young Roanoke barber named Ronnie who knew all about Roy. “Roy came home. He was all upset. He told me, ‘We’re going to Roanoke tomorrow.’” She rode along and they were all reunited at the barbershop.

Regardless of how exactly it happened, that day reassured Ronnie of Polly and Roy’s affections, and if he had any lingering doubts, they were dispatched the following Sunday, when Polly’s whole family welcomed him back into their fold. The clan put on a feast and mounted a banner out front: “Welcome home, Ronnie.” He found old pictures of himself in every room of Polly and Roy’s house, and a fat album of his childhood photos set out on a table. It was one of the happiest days of his life.

For the next five years, Ronnie drove his Buick to Blacksburg most weekends. He wasn’t much of a churchgoing fellow, but for Polly and Roy’s sake he tagged along with them to services. Ronnie’s father figures back in Roanoke had advised him to find his girlfriends in church, not bars. “Church,” they’d counseled him, “is where you’ll find the clean girls.”

Polly became his mother all over again. He complained to her about how my folks spoiled me and neglected him. “We shamed him about being jealous of you,” she told me. “We told him, well, that you were his mother’s only girl and he was her boy that had been away from her so much and had taken other people into his life. That was all right; she still loved him too.”

About 1957, Ronnie left Roanoke. The American Barber Shop, in business downtown since the twenties, disappeared from city directories. So did the building it inhabited. Ronnie moved a couple of counties away to Buck’s Barber Shop on Main Street in Lexington, Virginia. With two nearby colleges associated with Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee’s Washington and Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Virginia Military Institute, Ronnie could snip hair all day and absorb history from Lexington’s patriarchal old guard. He rented a room above Main Street.

As in Roanoke, mentors popped up, prime among them the late Leon C. Johenning, a nationally known turkey-hunting writer and producer of handmade wood-and-metal turkey calls, tiny boxes that in the hands of a deft user could cluck, purr, and cackle just like a hen to draw a big, prize tom. From him, Ronnie learned about turkey hunting.

Ronnie began buying guns and renting hunting lodges with other men to hunt turkeys and other wildlife on the weekends. Leon eventually shot more turkey pictures than actual birds. Under his tutelage, Ronnie bought a camera and became a nature lover like Leon, exploring the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia, often alone, on his days off.

He was most intrigued by the oldest forests, where sycamores once measured forty-five feet around and where the wood from just one of those mammoths might fill an entire log train. Ronnie hiked alone into a national forest and waded across a river to an abandoned lumber camp and emerged with a prize—one of the numbered metal discs immigrant lumberjacks pinned to their clothes or wore on leather thongs around their necks as identification. At back-roads shops along his drives, Ronnie snapped up McGuffey Readers and other old books and antiques for a song and sold them at a profit to collectors.

In 1958, Ronnie pocketed a handsome raise when he moved to George’s Barbershop in Buena Vista, a small industrial town set against the Blue Ridge Mountains a few miles from Lexington. He began campaigning for Polly and Roy to let him return home. Neither were feeling well, and one visit became particularly strained. “He begged the whole weekend to come back, and we told him, well, he could always come whenever he wanted to [but] that he was a grown man now and could take care of himself . . . But just to give up his job and come, I said, ‘Don’t do that.’” Polly was caring for her mother, who was blind, and babysitting a niece. She had all she could handle.

Back in Blacksburg in March 1959, Roy Hall dropped dead in his garage. Ronnie went to his funeral, and there, among the friends and neighbors who came by the Halls’ bungalow after the service, Ronnie met his first serious girlfriend, a seventeen-year-old high school senior Polly and Roy knew through their church. Ronnie was twenty-three. He would date the girl for more than a year, but he lost touch with Polly. He felt her Christianity was turning too strident.

He’d heard that an old barber in Vinton was looking for a second-chair man at Phillips Barber Shop. Vinton was an easygoing little town of eight thousand hitched to Roanoke’s eastern hip. It was a working person’s quiet Mayberry, with a textile mill and lots of guys in need of conservative haircuts. The shop, in the heart of town, had a classy feel, with lots of light and ten-foot ceilings in patterned plaster. Ronnie earned his highest wages yet and rented a room nearby, where he’d serve his girlfriend lunch and fizzy nonalcoholic drinks.

Old Man Phillips, as Ronnie called Hubert Phillips behind his back, disciplined Ronnie professionally and otherwise. He pushed Ronnie to attend his Methodist church for Sunday school and worship. Ronnie and his girlfriend sat in the front row at eleven o’clock services. Soon, though, Ronnie and the girl split up, a hurt that remained lodged in Ronnie’s heart for the rest of his life.

Early in the 1960s, he rented a bedroom and adjoining kitchenette on Vinton’s hilltop Halliahurst Avenue. It was where the higher-ups lived, except that in Vinton, with few truly rich people, the higher-ups were bookkeepers, salesmen, an accountant, a teacher, a cafeteria manager, and a welder. For Ronnie, it was the Vinton equivalent of moving into the big house.

A widow named Maggie Booth rented two of her thirteen rooms to Ronnie. With her children gone, she treated him like a son and a helpmate. He did chores and feasted on Maggie’s home-butchered chickens and pigs, her homemade butter and biscuits, and apple butter and cherry jam made from her orchard. Maggie died, and all of a sudden, Ronnie was sharing the house with one of Maggie’s daughters-in-law, Maxine, a short, vivacious weaver at the textile mill.

I’ll never know the full nature of Ronnie’s relationship with Maxine, but Ronnie adored her. He called her Max—or Keys, she had so many of them. Sixteen years Ronnie’s senior, Maxine was like a generous big sister. She made banana splits for them. She caught the breeze with him on the front porch summer evenings and watched The Love Boat and The Dukes of Hazzard with him winter nights. He mowed her grass, changed her oil, and made her feel secure. If he wanted to draw closer, he was reluctant. He could risk losing his cozy home if things went sour, and being a pessimist, he figured they would. He’d better play it safe.

Instead, he dated Annie, that tall telephone operator he’d brought to the farm that one time I’d seen him when I was a teenager. She had a son from an early marriage, and Ronnie mentally compared his childhood with that of Annie’s little boy. The child had all the attention, toys, and food Ronnie never got from Mom, yet the kid wasn’t satisfied and, when grown, rolled in and out of prison for thefts and other crimes.

Annie, jealous of Maxine, pressed Ronnie for a commitment. “She wanted more.” He’d spend a day and most of a night with Annie, then go home to Maxine’s. Annie wanted to marry him. He briefly moved out of Maxine’s and in with Annie, but he wasn’t able to give himself fully to her. He felt more comfortable keeping one foot out the door in case somebody was about to boot him. He moved back in with Maxine, and Annie married another man.

On a solitary hike one weekend, Ronnie ran across a hermit living high in the mountains of Botetourt County, near Roanoke. Long before his choices became socially acceptable, even hip, Will Sloan lived off the grid, ate native plants to cure his ills, feasted on wild game, and grew his black hair and beard halfway down his chest.

Privacy-prizing Will nearly shot Ronnie’s head off the first time Ronnie stumbled onto his log house on Garden Mountain, a rocky three-thousand-foot summit slithering with rattlesnakes. Thereafter, when Ronnie was coming up, he’d mail a postcard in advance. Will earned a living digging up the fleshy roots of ginseng, a reputed aphrodisiac popular around the world. His outdoor easy chair was a fat log into which he’d chiseled a depression for his butt. He attached wooden arms to his mountain throne and sat there entertaining Ronnie with stories about how to domesticate a bear cub and how to tenderize the meat of the uncooperative ones. Will was wise, hilarious, tough, and thoroughly independent, just like Ronnie dreamed of being.

In 1967, Ronnie’s boss retired at sixty-five. For $647, Ronnie acquired the business, a revolving barber pole, barber chairs, an adding machine, a gas stove, a water heater, mirrors, lights, a snow shovel, and an awning over the door. He renamed the rented place the Sportsman Barber Shop.

Ronnie possessed serious spending money now. He squired girlfriends around a rustic nineteenth-century lake resort atop a peak near Blacksburg. He’d learned his way around the place through his friendship with the stable man, who gleaned a case of beer from Ronnie on every visit.

Down in Vinton, the town’s male muckety-mucks—lawyers, bankers, state legislators—all streamed into the Sportsman, along with highway pavers and garbage haulers. It was one of the few places in town where a guy could find the Wall Street Journal. One of Ronnie’s all-time favorite “heads,” as he called his customers, was Homer Hopper, an up-by-his-bootstraps executive who traveled the world setting up textile mills. Every Christmas for years, Ronnie had dinner with Homer and his wife, Bertha, who made sure there was a jar of homemade jelly or a little something under the tree for him.

The Hoppers’ son, Al, became one of the few close friends Ronnie ever had. Ronnie was at his best with Al and got to rattle around like a big dog, something like the powerful Keswick pooh-bahs he’d once envied. Ronnie and Al bought tickets to golf tournaments at the Homestead and Greenbrier resorts in the Appalachian Mountains, where prosperous people had been gathering for two centuries and where the two guys joked their way into the VIP lounges, replete with cigars, shrimp cocktails, and rich women.

Eventually, Al moved away, first to Houston, then to Richmond, and founded a small chain selling architectural and engineering supplies. Two or three times, Ronnie visited Al and his wife at their home in an affluent Richmond suburb. At the end of the day, Ronnie would sleep in his car in the Hoppers’ driveway rather than use their nicely appointed guest room. “I couldn’t get him to come in the house and go to bed,” Al recalled. “He didn’t want to impose on anybody.” Sadder yet, Ronnie probably didn’t feel worthy of the guest room, even at his best friend’s house.

* * *

RONNIE EMBARKED ON a self-improvement course. With the help of librarians and his better-educated customers, he devised a history curriculum for himself. He trudged around cemeteries in Bedford County to the graves of his Overstreet and McLain ancestors. He read thick histories of Bedford County, Mom’s home, and the counties all around. Through history books, he came to understand the haughty attitudes of Virginia’s first English-born lords and ladies and the servility of the indentured Irish, Scottish, and English immigrants who were his forebears.

Many of Ronnie’s readings dripped with white supremacy, and yet he also sought out Black Power writers of the sixties and seventies. He read Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, and Malcolm X. He connected with what they said about how at the root of racial bigotry was a social class struggle that had ensnared poor people of all races since the beginning of this country. Powerful white men had always ruled with an unflinching fist. Ronnie had seen that for himself in Keswick.

He preferred reading about the little guys—the ingenious slaves, hillbillies, American Indians, and frontiersmen who knew this country best and whose knowledge of its natural systems was overpowered by industrial greed. Ronnie considered himself one of those clever survivors. Louis L’Amour’s frontier sagas traced Ronnie’s favorite fictional family, the Sacketts, as they hunted for treasure, mined for gold, fought mountain lions, and dug ginseng, just as Will Sloan still did.

* * *

EACH DAY AT the barbershop, Ronnie absorbed his customers’ stories and those they recalled from their great-grandpas. Even though his heads enriched his knowledge, Ronnie liked to rag on the monotony of how he made his living. “Cuttin’ heads, cuttin’ heads,” was his lament. “I am an ear,” he’d wearily tell his friends, complaining about the more boring stuff he was forced to listen to. But he fell into a slump each time illness or injury barred him from his hair-snipping station at the Sportsman.

Back in the fifties, during his final months at Western State, when administrators were trying to figure out what to do with Ronnie, his therapist told him about the different kinds of state training available to him. Ronnie could have become a welder. He could have been a watch repairman. He chose barbering.

The other trades would have been solitary, but in Ronnie’s otherwise lonely life, barbering fed him a regular, predictable intimacy that was tactile and friendly yet not so intrusive as to be threatening. Except for his customers’ occasional thank-you handshakes or slaps on the back, Ronnie did all the touching, on his terms, dozens of times a day.

By the time Ronnie and I got reacquainted, he’d been barbering more than thirty years. The instant a man or boy plopped down in his chair, Ronnie launched movements that composed a rhythmic song. He’d open his big right hand and, palm-down, whack a vertical hydraulic pump to adjust the chair’s height and lock it into position. Thud-click-bump, Ronnie’s motions sent the man sharply to the left and back in two seconds and said without his speaking, Hey, bub, hold on for the ride. Stay still and don’t mess with Slim Overstreet. He’d swish the brown plastic drape up into the air, toreador-style, so that it fluttered down perfectly over the man’s lap and shoulders. Next, he snapped open a white paper collar and deftly placed it around the guy’s neck so trimmings wouldn’t sift under his shirt. Then came the comb, the scissors, and the chatter. Ronnie was so big, his voice so deep, some men looked a little intimidated.

Ronnie’s prices were on his secret sliding scale, zero bucks to five depending on what you could afford and how much he liked you, and he was attentive to all his heads. He’d cultivated them from the time their mamas brought them in as toddlers. When a boy was getting his first cut, Ronnie softened the trauma by letting him reach into big jars of coins to buy candy and ice cream down the street. The nerviest kids reached into his cash register and grabbed greenbacks. Ronnie always let it go. He figured it was a long-term investment. Sure enough, years later a guy walked into the barbershop and plopped down a twenty-dollar bill. He’d stolen five dollars from his old barber as a kid and wanted to make it right.

Longtime heads wondered why Ronnie looked increasingly odd, but few of them said anything. By the eighties, he was reminding a few heads of the tall, big-browed manservant on the sixties sitcom The Addams Family. Ronnie grunted and scowled when those newer heads started calling him Lurch.