There is No Steve without Brian

From Sokushinbutsu

Brian thought of himself as simple. He found himself occasionally to be in extraordinary circumstances. These circumstances asked him to change his thoughts about the ideals of law enforcement. He came into The Bureau from the ROTC in college. He went to a recruitment booth at a job fair and the guy engaging with college kids didn't have a flat top.

Now, the flat top hung on for a long time in the parts of America that were a little more traditional. The perception that all of the good schools in the south are trade schools and military academies isn’t entirely wrong.

Nobody hangs on to their traditions like the subculture of a military that lost in a big war by surrender. I could bring up a lot of examples and they might all seem racist or belittling because of how we clue in, so I’ll skip that entire deal and focus on the function of the flat top in the culture of a post surrender military tradition.

In the military if you are a grunt you are treated the same by the barber as all the other grunts. Your hair is nearly completely removed on as regular a basis as can be afforded given your circumstances. A grunt who has been in battle for a long time has some hair, the length of which clearly indicates say, how long you have been so busy fucking shit up that you cant make it to a barber. There is currency to that. A soldier with hair that falls on his brow has been at it a while. His type of service and length of engagement he wears on his head.

Officers get to wear their hair the way they want to a certain extent. It’s likely even a drill sergeant will have a relationship with a barber that the troops he yells at will not have. He can have a flat top.

It's the tiniest, most inconsequential status symbol of all time. It’s the indication of middle management. ‘I still get a five minute haircut, but mine is better than yours.’

Of the jobs that offered any sort of step up in gratitude for Brian's ROTC service, the guy at the booth for the Federal Bureau of Investigation drew Brian's attention because he did not have a flat top and they had an office in Biloxi. He Liked Biloxi. He had looked at going to college down there. But it was too far from home for him when he was 17. Now he was a man- 21.

A buzzed off haircut is something a man with some change in his pocket can have done once a week. A man who had enough hair to brush, but was obviously still getting his hair cut looked ever so slightly more like Brian's uncles who got their hair cut off if they had to go to town for some form of respectable business, but had never been inside a barber store. People read magazines in there, and smoked. It was obviously a place of wealth and sin. It is amazing how clearly the Bible affords poverty as righteous Holiness and defines the rich as sinful. It's a comfort and a team to be on if you have nothing. It's a five minute haircut that is flat across on top if you have change.

That FBI recruiter sounded like he might could get a job on the radio. His voice was a strong, smooth baritone and he had a pack of Raleigh straights in his shirt pocket and no uniform on. Nobody wanted Brian on their team before, but this guy was ready to have Brian down to Biloxi to see if he was the kind of man they wanted. He offered, but didn't just give Brian a position on an imagined team. Brian went.

He had recalled the CIA getting a lashing by the Congress and the Church committee and a lot of the detective-style, catching-the-bad-guys stuff the CIA had done during and after the war had turned a corner into some dark places. The FBI seemed like regular guys doing the kind of police work that needed to be federal. All of these were details Brian took into account the way a man of 21 can take things into account. He thought about girls and the bars in Biloxi and having a job with some action, but also a desk. Brian liked to sit down.

Brian was not a traditionally attractive young man. His body type could be described as dumpy. He wasn’t fat but he was at 21 nearly as wide at the hips as he was at the shoulders and he was substantial there. His mother chided him for having child bearing hips. He was amazingly strong, but not athletic in any way. If his bones were found somewhere an archeologist would assume he was a worker of some kind, but he was more of an academic social climber. He had come from nothing and done just well enough in school to go on. He tested well. He gathered well. He didn’t have the kind of distractions that athletic or attractive young men had so he was able to apply himself. And it was good enough. He got academic scholarships that were intended for white folks of his background to utilize to rise.

He was born in the same share copper’s shack his mother was born in and eventually died in. The weather was mild. The earth was flat and there were enough hills so it didn’t just blow all the time, but it wasn’t in the hills. It was good farmland.

There was an old man who lived on the road he grew up on with six fingers on each hand and the brightest blue eyes. Brian didn’t know until a couple Christmasses after his freshman year at Oxford that Barrel, everyone called the old man Barrel, was the leader of a fife and drum band. Barrel was the color of pitched pine that had sat out.

The band marched down the dirt road Christmas morning when Brian was 20 playing hymns and carols, all wearing mismatched union army soldier caps and they danced. It was amazing. Brian could feel the spirit. He had held the notion that Barrel was some kind of witch his whole life. Now he was feeling the real feelings of Barrel’s magic.

Brian didn’t stay at home long for Christmas that year. He had this kind of repulsion to how connected he felt to that place, to that dirt road, to that fife and drum band he had never seen before that morning and to the gravity of the whole thing. He loved his momma and daddy, but he had a monologue, “I ain’t gonna end up like these people here.” playing on a loop in his head.

He was wearing a set of footy pajamas he had outgrown as a teenager with his calves pushed out through the ends of the legs where the feet used to be and the zip-up top tied around his waist like a belt. It was 60 degrees and he liked the cold on him. He looked down his front with the band bopping past and wondered what any of his college friends would think if they walked down the road to get him that morning.

He had parked the Dodge Dart he bought with his ROTC money down at the store and walked home.

He was in between worlds just then. He didn’t want his family to know he was rich. He knew he wasn’t, but the standard on the dirt road being what it was, he was. And he didn’t want his friends at college to know he was from this- even though he felt complete in it. He was filled with a love for life that opened his vision of himself in the future. He didn’t see himself on this road.

He saw himself doing something important for the world.

As he got older he’d think back on this Christmas morning as being a turning point in his life. He rarely went home after that Christmas. Sometimes he would send a post card.

He remembered postcards from people he knew as a child coming to the road and being passed around and read aloud when they did. He could hear his parents’ voices reading his words as he wrote them down to send. He could imagine the faces of the other people on the road. He remembered them the way they looked when he was twenty, when he did because that’s when he stopped imagining them as part of his every day and started to think of them as being part of his past, part of where he was from, the part he left behind to make a better life.

There were times when he found himself thinking, hunkered behind something sturdy with a pistol in his hand, or boarding some old man’s boat to take thousands of dollars that he knew was there for The Bureau that his life was better. He never wanted for some food he couldn’t have. He wore dress shoes because he liked how they looked. He liked to look nice and he could afford clothes. It was so simple to determine how much better his life was for having left home.

The world might not be like that anymore.