One time I gave my barber a hand-me-down jacket because he was a fellow Oddsize McLongboi like me and I knew well what a fucking pain in the ass it was to find jackets that were neither too short nor too baggy even with the magical power of internet commerce and plentiful disposable cash at my command.
It was a tan technical softshell, made of a miracle fabric that was simply too expensive to produce for it to have survived very long outside of a bleeding edge textiles mill that would be plunging along to the Next Big Thing soon regardless of its merit. Outer space shit. The zipper failed on me long after I was surprised or upset about it doing so, and even though I sent it off for mending with the local petty crimes bellboys, I decided to be a filthy consumer whore and order a new one, too, since it was shitty season and I didn't want to get caught out with no decent shell if the bellboy's cousin's sewing machine ate my shit or they put a purse zipper on it or god knows what was going to come back. I knew I would be leaving Kabul soon, but not exactly when, and I didn't want to risk it.
I sent out some mission scrubs with the bellboys once and what came back was doggedly serviceable but extremely gnarly looking. My chest rig went back once or twice for revisions/further alterations and it is fucking scandalous. Combat fashion victim shit, with the closest-he-had-on-hand colormatching on the velcro, snaps, pulls, etc.
So, to my surprise, the softshell came back very nicely refurbished. If you looked at it hard you could tell that it wasn't factory, but if you didn't, or weren't obsessed with technical garments, you would never really know. The wonderfabric had remained remarkably intact, and although it was clearly used, anything is eventually and you'd never guess how many miles it had on it.
I already had my new new in hand, and even though the tan seemed good to go for another long ride, I didn't want to have to drag around two shells. The next time I got a beard trim, I stuffed it in my bag and when I went to pay up it started raining as if on cue. I slipped on my new new, a hooded contraption the color of wet cement. I didn't know it yet, but one of the chest zippers was going to blow out at the worst possible time, and the seams on the pockets would delaminate within a year of use beyond the cover of a catalog.
There was nobody else in there, but I still pantomimed looking around so he would see me do it.
"You are a long boy, like me," I said, knowing full well that the statement as expressed was grammatically correct but contextually completely out of control. We had been grunting Pashto at each other during my visits, strictly for fun. Since I didn't want to put him through the exercise of having to try to figure out what the fuck I was talking about, I pointed down my arms and down my waist.
"Clothes no good - too short or too big."
As soon as it registered, there was a "YEAH!" moment. I pulled the tan out of my bag and held it out to him. He unflopped it and held it up. "Yours?"
"Yeah," I said, "Very ugly, but the rain runs away from it."
He tried it on, zipped the zipper, and looked in his barber's mirror while he reached above his head to check the waist. He stuffed his hands in the pockets, checked the zippers on them, and then looked at me and said, "How much?"
I thought he was asking me how much it originally cost, and coupled with the tone of voice it seemed to me to be a comically judgmental question until I realized that he was asking me how much I wanted for it.
"No, man, if you want it, it's yours. It's super American and I know you maybe don't want to wear that at home, but at least around here it will definitely keep you dry."
What he said next translates literally as "You're eating shit!" which might lead a person with sterile, brittle Book Pashto worrying that they might have given offense somehow, but colloquially we would say, "No fuckin' way dude!"
A couple weeks later, we were grunting at each other while a couple of Americans sat like statues on the waiting bench in the barbershop container.
He said, "Oh, I wanted to thank you for that jacket. It is too difficult to find one that keeps the Kandaharis away when I sit down," and when I laughed he laughed and we laughed the laugh of two people who know that the other three are convinced we are talking bad about them, because they had been excluded from a terrible joke. (Kandaharis are well known by Kabulis for their predilection to buggery, and fellow longboys understand that a medium will always ride up when you sit and get your ass wet in the rain, but a large fits like a bodybag.)
Once, when I was in there, I spotted a face in the crowd that I had only ever seen once or twice from across the room and on recognition displays. I sat down and I told him, "Hey man, give me a regular cut. I need to make sure I look good in front of the important boss."
"Yes sir, I will give you the American beard. Are you sure? It was so much waiting."
"It's OK," I said, "It will grow back. He already saw me walk in here like this, I don't think I am in trouble but just in case, this will fix it."
For months, this man had been grooming my head towards a very specific look.
I had always cut my own beard, but after I'd been in there for him to buzz my head, I asked him if he knew Mullah Saheb.
"Which Mullah Saheb?" he asked, hands frozen mid-snap of my bib.
I looked him in the eye through the mirror and said, "Mullah Omar."
"Taliban Mullah Omar?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, as flatly as possible.
"No, I don't know him and my family doesn't know his family. He is a Kandahari, and I am Kabuli, and " - a person who realizes he may be dealing with a person who is both dangerously incompetent (interrogating the barber about Mullah Omar) and also able to probably cause an inordinate amount of trouble before a person of competence is able to contain the damage (a dipshit foreigner of the occupying forces).
"But do you know what he looks like?"
Nobody knew what the fuck Mullah Omar looked like. Everyone who knows who Mullah Omar is knows that nobody knows what he looks like. There was a single grainy, washed-out ancient photograph of the guy and then he probably didn't have another camera in his presence until he died, and the only single person on planet Earth that had more heat gunning for him than Mullah Omar was Osama bin Laden.
"Well sir, no, I-"
"Can you cut my beard like Mullah Omar's beard?"
There was a very long pause. He switched to English, by far the strongest of our shared languages.
"You are asking me to make you look like Mullah Omar?"
"Yes," I said in English, "I think it will be funny, and I think I might have the right face for it."
He combed through my beard, which was over a year of wild growth, fluffled it and poofed it a little, and said, "It will take time, I have to cut a lot and then it will come."
"Okay," I said. And it took about five or six months, but eventually a bunch of the Afghans started catching on. I was talking shit in the long hallway before an Afghan boss guy's office suite. We had about half an hour to kill and I had learned that if I let him set the walking pace from wherever we met up at, the tea would be magically ready ten seconds after we sat down. When we got there, the deputy was already posted up in one of the guest seats.
"Sir," he said to his boss as the door closed. "We should immediately call the Americans. Tell them we have found a senior Taliban."
"A fatwa against you," I said, tossing a pack of Dunhills at him, the fanciest shit I could get mail ordered to my parcel forwarder.
& & &
I used to ride a motorcycle. Hell, I learned to drive a bike before I could drive a car. My shithead grandpa had this little Suzuki out in the shed and after the first summer of supervised use only, he let me kick it on and blast around the back field any time I wanted, so long as I wore a helmet and let it cool down before I put it back in the shed full of highly flammable crap. When I was big enough to hold it up, he even let me take his Gold Wing up and down the farm road sometimes.
Summers at his place were bigtime shitty balls. He was a real tool, and his woman-thing, my evil step grandma, was extremely abusive to me and my sister in ways that my mother didn't believe for years. My sister and I laugh about it now, but we've learned that those stories are the kind that other people don't think are the kind for laughing.
The only real place I had to myself was on the dirtbike, looping and criss-crossing the old rutted hayfield, jousting with the treeline and spending the first week of each summer finding where too-early tractor ruts would give me the opportunity to goose it to catch a little air.
"I don't want to catch you out there digging jumps," grandpa had said, "I make good money leasing that field out and if Farmer Brown complains I'm going to know who dunnit."
Well, I wasn't digging shit, and with hindsight I sort of doubt Farmer Brown would have noticed, given what he was doing to the fucking place himself with his too-big tractor with the loaded tires. But I sure did appreciate the mess he made on the backside, cutting it short and sloppy along the edge of the woods with the mower and baler.
One year, probably the last year before I got to be too big for the little 100CC to be any kind of serious thrill, I lost it trying to skip across a series of deep ruts, and ended up tumbling with the bike chasing me. It was sky-ground-sky-ground-sky-ground, and then it was just the bike on top of me, muffler burning against my pant leg and the serrated footpeg buried deep in the earth along my other leg. I was miraculously unharmed, and after picking up the bike to make sure I hadn't broken anything (the amazing little machine was still running even), I hopped back on for another few laps just to prove I wasn't scared.
& & &
Fresh haircut, brandy new rain shell, and I'm out in the mountains with a crew of Afghans via uparmor -> C-130 -> Mi-17 -> fucking mule team. We're here for as long as it takes to get a pilot program set up for the American base, a tin can full of Afghans and weird gear meant to give everyone a heads up when the Boy Scouts start lobbing mortars and a way to find them fast when they do. Based on a map survey there are a couple of candidate sites for the tin can, most promising of which is of course at the highest American controlled point on the grid square. It's a long way up a bunch of brutal switchbacks, time is tight for the local escort team, and the Gator is down for maintenance. It's a longass run, let alone hike, so my local contact asks if I want to take the quads.
"Sure," I said, "That'll be fine."
I'd never driven a quad in my life, but how much different could it be than a bike? I hadn't ridden in a few years, but still, right?
The answer is "significantly different you stupid ass, if you are not maximum cool you are going to shit your pants". But I found that out later.
I woke up early-ass to eat, caffeinate, and suck down a couple of smokes before they led me to the pack of machines lined up for the ascent. Suzukis, 750cc four wheel drive behemoths, exactly the kind of thing you want if you're doing bad shit to bad people in bad places where nobody gives a fuck about anything but moving a guy and his shit as quickly as possible across anything wide enough to fit, and maybe even some places where it doesn't quite.
As soon as I got up close and realized how enormous and bulky it was compared to a hot little KLR650, I knew I was going to be having a learning experience.
"Ah fuck it," I thought. "Let's do it."
And I thought back to Great Plains thunderstorms and a shitty little Honda frankenbike.
& & &
Before the Longboi Barber, the last time I'd let anyone cut my hair had been the Bangladeshis in Qatar. About ten minutes into the military I'd realized that paying someone $15 every week for a ten minute clipper job was stupid, so for $39.99 at the AAFES I'd picked up a set of clippers that, by market value, delivered me thousands of dollars in haircuts in the privacy of my own communal bathroom.
I didn't go to the Bangladeshis because I needed them to cut my hair - I went because it was a way to kill time that only came around every so often, i.e. when I hadn't had a haircut in a week or so. They'd do the works - cut, lotion, oil, and then the bonus round. You never had any idea what the hell you were going to get out of the bonus round.
A million variables - who you got, how the guy felt, how long the line was, how much you seemed to be enjoying it, whether you were a good tipper, and whether he knew you had the constitution for it. Maybe it was gonna be a solid minute of hard, tight circles with the balls of his thumbs all over your head and face. Maybe it was gonna be the thousand karate chops of doom on your temples and neck. Maybe he was gonna get out some kind of weird unguent, smear it on anything that looked like a freckle above the collar, and then get after some portion of the hairline at the nape of your neck with tweezers while the unguent melted in or whatever it did.
A lot of GIs would cry out, "No massage! No massage!" as they approached the chair, whitebread corn-fed chickenshits who were absolutely petrified by the thought of non-clinical male touch. And you could always tell when it was someone's first time there, sitting nervously and watching the procedures take place, wondering what in the fuck was going on and why everyone else seemed to think it was perfectly normal to have a guy with a day laborer badge climbing around on you like Bugs Bunny doing the barber scene on the Fudd.
& & &
Any time I was in Omaha, as opposed to the war, it was more time killing. Eating up the couple months before it was time to pick up my bags exactly where I left them in the gear locker or on the floor of my empty bachelor apartment and get right back on an unfortunately familiar airplane.
There was literally nothing for me to do at work other than, occasionally, deal with some stupid extra detail or volunteer to read a book all night behind a watch desk on some family oriented holiday I didn't give a shit about. I spent most of my time shamming, because technically I was supposed to go sit in a room and be legally present, unless I was taking care of some administrative, financial, legal, or other authorized task.
Over the course of about six months of Omaha time (including a good many days spent supposedly at the finance office or at the gym), I managed to acquire two non-matching Honda motorcycles that didn't work, and turn them into one motorcycle that did work (plus a pile of parts and a stripped frame). It was an abomination, pieces and parts of two bikes that themselves were pieces and parts, but it was road legal, started when I kicked it, had good tires, and moved eagerly upon receiving control inputs.
The thing about the Great Plains is, if you want to, you can go far and fast with nothing to stop you except the size of your fuel tank, the long dick of the law, or orders to go back to the fucking desert.
& & &
A long time after I quit riding bikes and intentionally didn't transfer my motorcycle endorsement, it's the day before I meet with the guy I call my boss and I realize I've left my clippers at home. My facial topiary is looking pretty ragged. The mutton chops are growing into the Yosemite Sam/double goat beard, the lipline looks like shit, and the overall effect is that I managed to get a long hillbilly/neglect beard wrapped up in some kind of machinery with fast rotating parts and a lot of warning labels. It's the only oversight of the trip and a relatively minor one to be sure, but I check the sky brain for likely local barbers. I find my best bet, and get there when they open in the morning.
I'm far from the only one trying to get a jump on the early bird walk-in, but one of the staff picks me out of the crowd of gangling old men and motions me to her chair. I show her the lines I want cleaned up - down to skin here and here, fade the top of the chops into the sidewalls, and clean up the lip line on the moustache - and she gets to work. As soon as she realizes I know how to get my hair cut, she cranks up the headrest on the chair, grabs a handful of my topknot, and pins me down with one hand while she gets to work with the clippers in the other.
She asked me about halfway through if I had a hairdresser at home, and I told her I absolutely did - there was no way I could possibly maintain my stupidass Millenial undershave without creeping the line up every time, but I always did my beard myself. I didn't tell her that the only other guy I ever let touch my beard had probably been tortured and executed as a perfidious collaborator to the kafiran when Kabul fell.
When she was done, far too late for any objection, she spins me to the mirror and asks how it looks.
"Perfect," I said, "It looks like I don't answer any questions from anyone that I don't want to."
She paused for a moment, looking in the mirror with eyes that were perhaps for the first time not so focused on the details.
"Yeah! It sure as Hell does!"
A barber's trick of confidence or not, it gave me the juice I needed to creep out into the increasingly oppressive Florida air and swivel my head on a lap around the island in my Appalachian assault vehicle, reflexively scouting ahead of the scheduled meeting.
The place was an open-air Alzheimer's asylum, or like they had opened a whole new sector of Disneyland called Oldfuckistan, right next to Frontierland and Toontown. A pack of dentists and surgeons dressed up as motorcycle outlaws blew through at 1100 to get to the margarita bar the second it opened. I dismounted from the truck and scouted on foot, and after so long in the Yankee mountains the place felt not just like an extruded plastic money pit, but foreign.
Despite the fact that the place was probably the safest place in the state to walk around in public, to include on the sidewalk in front of the Sherrif's office, I couldn't help but running the routine, build a mental map of the space, observe the activity, identify the likeliest places for ambush, build an itinerary that would let me look down as many side streets and alleys as possible without looking like I was looking for one-ways to dash up, deep entryways to cover in, recurring objects and features, slopes, overwatch positions.
I had a couple artisanal donuts. They were fucking delicious and almost worth the $16.
The boss arrived a couple hours after I did, and he gave me a hug when he saw me. The last time I'd seen him had been before the last job.
"This place needs a Triumph garage, man," he said. "You ride?"
I shook my head. "Not anymore."
"You should," he said, and I hoped I'd never have to tell him why.
& & &
I had about a week of non-accountable time in Omaha and I was strongly considering violating the regulations regarding travel outside of the designated duty area. I probably wasn't going to be that far outside of it and the odds that I would get recalled were slim to none. The idea was that I would blast out on 80 West until I hit Ogalalla, then cut North to South Dakota and ride until it was time to head back.
I had my bag packed and I decided to check the weather before I dipped out. I watched the radar and realized there was a fat wall of thunderstorm racing right along my path, and a bunch of stuff up in the Dakotas blowing South and getting bigger as it went. The kind of stuff that breeds supercells.
"Ah fuck it," I thought. "Let's do it."
I was halfway to the bike and stopped in my tracks when I realized that I knew exactly well what a terrible idea it was to intentionally drive into three days of thunderstorm on a piece of shit motorcycle, and that I was doing it anyway because I wanted to see if I could still make the circuit I had planned for sunshine. A good deal of that circuit assumed I would be doing 85 on dry roads.
I stood there for some time, thinking hard about thinking hard about thinking hard about it. I sighed, and took my bag inside.
A week later I sold the bike. When I moved out of state a few years later, I told the clerk at the DMV to drop the bike chop on my license.
& & &
I climbed up on the quad and spent one second looking for a kick before I saw the electric start. It fired right up and I snaked out third in the four man, doing my best to get a feel for the machine as quickly as possible before we got to the base of the switchbacks.
"We're not going to go too fast," my contact said, "But we have to go up the exposed face and we try to minimize time there. They know we're coming up top so they'll keep watch, but if they start taking shots at us from across the valley the best thing to do is get to the top as quickly as possible."
"Alright," I said, and did my best to leave the same gap between me and second man as he did between him and first man. I could tell they were taking it easy on me, but I could also tell that they weren't annoyed. The quad was way different than a bike, and it was even an automatic. It wasn't until about halfway up that I started feeling a little tight on the switchbacks as the path tapered gradually but inexorably the farther we got up the face, the turns getting ever so slightly sharper every time we pulled around one, the incline steeper and steeper, like some slow building exponential function.
Right around the time I started to think I might be getting nervous, I realized we were almost there. The top of the path terminated abruptly at the gate of the compound wall at the peak, every possible square foot of the extremely scarce real estate being used for the FOB. There was no fence or guardrail, just a slightly wider continuation of the ascent path with a personnel door on one side and the abyss on the other.
I watched the first and second park their quads opposite the gate, and realized that there was just about exactly enough room for two more without obstructing the pax door.
I had literally never parked the thing before, and I couldn't see the front wheels over or around the fenders. I took a good look at the jagged rock edge as I approached, swung around towards the pax gate, and eyeballed the closest parked machine so I could guess where my front wheels were. The other three watched me with hard eyes, absolutely ready to yell stop or even dash forward and pluck me off the machine as it tumbled over the cliff.
I got where I figured was good, put it in park, killed it, and got off ready to make adjustments. A quick glance before my other foot even hit the ground told me I had managed to stuff it exactly as close as the first two, and I played it cool as hard as I possibly could as I walked to the pax gate as the fourth parked next to me with plenty of room.
My contact gave me a ghost of a nod, and I winked back.
It took me about two seconds once I got inside the pax door to realize there was no possible way to fit the can up there between the mortar pit and the sleeping pit, that there was no way to power the gear without having to haul fuel up the switchback all the time, and that if the right selection of adults (one of which was me) had simply talked a little more about it, it would have been obvious that there was no reason to even go up there and look.
I could see the local militia assembling to greet the distinguished guest, namely my dumb ass, and I mumbled an apology to my contact.
"Yeah man, so uh, I don't want to waste anyone's time, this ain't gonna work. No room."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah man, no way, I'm talking like a CONEX box."
"Oh," he said. "Yeah that's not gonna happen."
"Fuck, I'm really sorry I wasted your time."
"It's all good bro, we like it up here. We used to hang out here all the time until they figured out we were basically shamming."
I spent the next three hours drinking tea and doing card tricks for the militia. Somewhere there's a picture of me smiling in the mountaintop sunshine, the Konar river a tiny blue line below, an itsy bitsy rifle slung around my neck and a ratty deck of Bicycle playing cards stuffed down the front of my plate carrier.
When it came time to leave, my contact told me to keep it in low gear on the way down, and to save the brakes for the turns.
Every time the switchbacks pointed North, I could see the gathering of black and purple clouds headed our way, lit by the afternoon sun from my back and jumps of lightning inside.