It was seven p.m. Bravo – garrulous Tony Bravo, called The Dreamer on the cock fighting circuit, my barber for thirty five years – was cutting my hair. Tony is stocky, swarthy (light brown complexion), black hair still thick and oily. His brows bear down on his eyes, compressing them into hard little black marbles, and when he laughs he looks like an overweight Hispanic Mephistopheles with a comb and scissors in hand. No facial hair.
This was the latest ever I’d had my hair cut. Bravo was working only three days a week and taking off a couple weeks every month.
He said, “I appreciate you being flexible, man.”
I said, “Either I adjusted or I had to find myself another barber. What are you doing those other two weeks?”
“Usually I’m driving down to this off-highway town near Phoenix, Arizona. I have business interests there,” he said. “I refinanced my house. You knew that I’ve been living north of the San Fernando Valley, near Magic Mountain? I used to take my birds to fight down there in Arizona. I seen these dirt cheap store fronts for sale. I took some of the money I got from the re-fi and bought the properties. Little by little I’m fixin’ them up.”
Spanish and a Native American tongue were his natural languages; he had been born in the southwest to uneducated Mexican-Indian parents. He grew up picking vegetables alongside his father and brothers but he spoke English grammatically. He got the sense of a better life when he was in the army. He never returned to work in the fields. In Texas, he apprenticed as a barber. In L.A., he studied under the G.I. Bill, got licensed, and made himself a career. He married, had kids, scraped together a down payment on a stucco house at the edge of a field in the northeast Valley, and erected a chicken barn in the area out back. He put up a shed adjoining it and dug a pit in there. He erected a couple of rows of grandstand benches around the pit. He ran cock fights there. He kept telling me how those events should be perceived – not as barbaric rites but communications with the spirits which were all around us. He never explained how that might be but years earlier invited me and my wife to visit his place one Saturday and see for ourselves. There were several grizzled-looking Hispanics in work clothes on the benches, totally engrossed. The more fiercely the birds attacked each other, blades lashed to their feet, the more satisfied the avid audience seemed. On the way back, I apologized to my wife, but she waved that off. She would never return but she was glad that she had been privileged to witness that kind of thing first hand.
Sometimes Tony’s birds won, sometimes they lost; sometimes he got arrested, sometimes he talked the cops into forgetting they had raided the place. But at last came a time in California that cockfighting wasn’t only against the law but no longer being tolerated. He stopped fighting the birds in California but continued raising them and taking them to Arizona and New Mexico and other places where cock fights remained lawful. He sold that first house with its property improvements and sank the proceeds into a near-mansion in Valencia. He could not afford the new place and – planted out there in the middle of nowhere – the developer never should have built it.
But Tony had married a Mormon woman, and they had made a couple of girls and a boy, and he wanted to show his family and his wife’s relatives that he wasn’t just some gringo-kissin’ wetback. That was hard to sustain at first; he raised his prices and started giving haircuts seven days a week. Then he got lucky. Real estate boomed. The vacant land in Valencia was being settled with new communities, and it wasn’t but a few years before The Dreamer had one of the best houses in a thriving town out there. There are several Bravo stories to be told, and I may tell them elsewhere at another time; but in April, 2007, seven p.m. on a Wednesday night, he was barbering because that’s what he did, and he still could use the few hundred bucks a week it netted him, even if he didn’t actually need it anymore. Bravo, the cock-fighting dreamer, had come to be worth north of a million bucks.
Many of his clients were wealthy west side folks – Brentwood, Bel Air and Pacific Palisades people. By now he was into third generations. All along, he had maintained a schizophrenically cynical/adoring attitude towards his customers, and generally they indicated admiring/patronizing attitudes towards him. That probably included me, to some extent, I’ll confess. Daily, he has chatted with real estate moguls, doctors, movie stars, legal hotshots, financiers, educators. In the first years he encouraged and listened admiringly to their pontifications. In the later years he began himself to pontificate. He said he was a shaman – an Indian medicine man. Some of his patrons were into alternative medicine, and were turned on by Tony’s talk of his direct access to the spirits. One of them got sick, and the guy’s family invited Bravo to shaman over to the guy’s private room at U.C.L.A. hospital. In full Indian regalia Bravo went and did a midnight medicine dance there, importuning the gods to look down healingly. The patient survived long enough for years more of haircuts. So, as I said, Bravo had come to consider himself an authority – on life, on religion, on morality, on race relations, on politics and economics.
He also retold dirty jokes (and slapped your arm when he hit the punch line, and guffawed hard). He also exchanged movie reviews.
But what got Tony into feverishly serious grooves would be his recurring venting of opinions about all us white “homo sapiens.” Brows knit, he leaned in and spouted off about the hypocrisy of whites, about the free-loading wetbacks (with whom he wanted no kinship), lambasted the lack of opportunity for Mexicans and other poor people, and called down a pox on Democrats and Republicans, leftists and rightists; he was a libertarian but would not be suckered into voting. “America,” he snarled, “is for the white man!” (But, by the way, Bravo had enlisted and fought as a uniformed American soldier in the Korean War).
He probed for my philosophy of life and my opinions on varied weighty subjects, but only so that then he could further expound on his own – based on that most profound yet delicate body of wisdom, beyond the ken of white men, the wisdom in the winds of the people of forever. “Know what I mean?”
Well, not exactly. Sort of. Indians, he meant?
My kids and my wife knew him, and he knew them. He knew and was known by the families of dozens of other customers. He had cut their hair for decades. Bravo was ornery and kind, appreciative and arrogant, and people felt kindly about him.
Having at 7:05 delivered a time-worn tirade on the worthlessness of his people and the homeless and the poor working class, he looked around and lightened up. “I’m a conservative,” he announced to me and the guy sitting in an adjoining barber shop chair, the 7:30 appointment, waiting for Tony to be done with me. “And I told the guys so at the banquet over there at the Beverly Hilton Hotel last week,” he said, nodding his head as he snipped away.
“Banquet?”
“Yeah, all of ‘em conservatives, I’m pretty sure,” he giggled. “Supporters of the V.A. Hospital over there,” and he stopped with the scissors to point across the top of my head.
Just a mile away, between Brentwood and Westwood is a huge Veteran’s Administration facility, including a major V.A. hospital and a vast cemetery with rows of white headstones for service men, veterans of America’s wars, who had died and chosen to be buried there.
“You know, guys at an affair like that had to have made big money. They were donating big money that night. Yeah, but they were the kind of rich people who want to honor soldiers, not like you pinko liberals.” He giggled. He pointed at me.
“Tony, you say you were addressing them?”
“I was a guest of honor.”
I don’t know what McPherson, the guy waiting his turn, knew, but now that Tony said that, I recalled something that suggested a rational possibility here. Tony Bravo, the arch-conservative, the Libertarian, had for more than fifteen years been traipsing over to the V.A. hospital a couple days a week, and cutting hair gratis – giving away haircuts to his fellow vets. And this banquet was feting him.
A wonderment, as the King of Siam said.
But that wasn’t yet the point of Bravo’s story. “I’m tellin’ ‘em, ‘Most of you guys are conservatives, I know. But don’t think I’m different. I’m like you. I don’t have any use for poor jerks. I say, if someone’s makin’ less than twenty thousand dollars a year he don’t deserve to be in this country, throw’m out!’” McPherson and I smiled wanly; Bravo had a long razor in his hand.
Bravo, his face a sincere, self-confident, smiling devil’s mask, hadn’t stopped.
“‘But there’s a time you got to be human,’ I told them.” He set the blade down on his work table and now approached with a comb and brush. We breathed easier.
“You and Phil McPherson here know, but I had to explain to those guys there, that I had business interests in Arizona. Because of that I drove across the desert pretty often. This one time, I told ‘em, a few weeks ago, I had my dog, my miniature pincer with me, and a lot of food and water because being a Native American, I know how emergencies crop up in the desert. Right?”
McPherson and I signaled that we did understand.
“Well, I found a spot to pull over and get out and let the dog do his thing. All of a sudden the mutt is yapping. I look over and it looks like something may be moving in a clump of brush weed on a little rise there. I picked up a couple of stones and tossed ‘em. Up pops a scruffy lookin’ kid, a boy, dirty, wearin’ rags, hands in the air. I says to him in Spanish, ‘what’re you doin’ out here, kid? Where’s your family?’ Up pop a couple of women, worse-looking than the kid. Their hands cupped, each woman, ‘Dios-ing’ this and ‘Dios-ing’ that, their chins up to heaven. ‘Where’re the men?’ I asked ‘em. They were shaking. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told them. I’m not Border Patrol.’”
Bravo glanced down at me and over at McPherson. Brows-knit, he wasn’t telling us jokes. “You know, of course, they’d come over the border,” he went on. “‘The men didn’t make it,’ one of the women said, and now their hands and arms were hanging down at their sides. They were nearly dead themselves. They would have been if their men had not died first, forgoing what water or food could be found, so the women and the kid could have it.” Bravo paused. His facial expression changed. A look of resolution came over him.
“I couldn’t take ‘em in my car. The INS guys and the Border Patrol would stop us, and they’d think I’d come over the border with ‘em and we’d all land in jail. But I got them to squat in the shade of the car and sip water. I loaded ‘em up with all my supplies and pointed them over a little hill beyond, and told them there was a little town there, and people would take care of them.”
Tony stopped and took a step back. A puzzled expression came across his countenance now. “I says to these guys, ‘You can be conservatives in general, but when you find someone helpless, you have to be human.’”
For maybe ten seconds neither McPherson nor I said a word. Finally, I asked. “How did they react?”
“They were standing at their tables. They were clapping their hands.”
He looked blankly at us. Then he smiled. He finished the haircut. I paid him. I left, thinking that maybe the Wisdom in the Wind had something. Maybe Bravo’s was the religion that counts. All of us might benefit by standing in that breeze. I’m glad he’s rich finally.
BB
