Cobb's Anatomy

I know why a barber in a country town is always learning to play on the guitar and I know why a man with an emotional Adam's apple always wears an open front collar. I know these things, but am debarred from telling them by reason of a solemn oath. But I have not yet been able to discover why every dentist keeps a canary in his office. Nor do I know why it is, just as you settle your neck back on a head rest that's every bit as comfortable as an anvil, and just as a dentist climbs into you as far as the arm pits and begins probing at the bottom of a tooth which has roots extending back behind your ears, like an old-fashioned pair of spectacles, that the canary bird should wipe his nose on a cuttle bone and dash into a melodious outburst of two hundred thousand twitters, all of them being twitters of the same size, shape, and color. For that matter, I don't even know what kind of an animal a cuttle is, although I should say from the shape of his bone as used by the canary instead of a pocket handkerchief, that he is circular and flat and stands on edge only with the utmost difficulty. If you will pardon my temporary digressions into the realm of natural history, we will now return to the main subject, which was your tooth.

The moment the muscular young man starts up his motor and gives the canary its music cue and begins pawing over his tool collection to pick out a good sharp one, you recover. All of a sudden you feel fine, and so does the tooth. Neither one of you ever felt better. The fox terrier must have killed the woodchuck and then committed suicide. You are about to mention this double tragedy and beg the young man's pardon for causing him any trouble and excuse yourself and go away, but just then he quits feeling of his biceps and suddenly seizes you by your features and undoes them. If you are where you can catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror you will immediately note how much the human face divine can be made to look like an old-fashioned red brick Colonial fire place.

There are likely to be several things you would like to talk about. You are full of thoughts seeking utterance. For one thing you want to tell him you don't think the brand of soap he uses on his hands is going to agree with you at all. You probably don't care personally for the way your barber's thumb tastes either, but a barber's thumb is Peaches Melba alongside of a dentist's. Before you can say anything though he discovers a cavity or orifice of some sort in the base of your tooth. It seems to give him pleasure. Filled with intense gratification by this discovery and fired moreover by the impetuous ardor of the chase, he grabs up a crochet needle with a red hot stinger on the end of it and jabs it down your tooth to a point about opposite where your suspenders fork in the back.

You have words with him then, or at least you start to have words with him, but he puts his knee in your chest and tells you that it really doesn't hurt at all, but is only your imagination, and utters other soothing remarks of that general nature. He then exchanges the crochet needle for a kind of an instrument with a burr on the end of it. This instrument first came into use at the time of the Spanish Inquisition but has since been greatly improved on and brought right up to date. He takes this handy little utensil and proceeds to stir up your imagination some more. You again try to say something, speaking in a muffled tone, but he is not listening. He is calling to a brother assassin in the adjoining room to come and see a magnificent example of a prime old-vatted triple X exposed nerve. So the Second Grave Digger rests his tools against the palate of his victim and comes in.

As nearly as you can gather from hearsay evidence, you not being an eye witness yourself, one of them harpoons the nerve just back of the gills with a nutpick—remember please it is your nerve that they are taking all these liberties with—and pulls it out of its retreat and the other man takes a tack hammer and tries to beat its brains out. Any time he misses the nerve he hits you, so his average is still a thousand, and it is fine practice for him. A pleasant time is had by everybody present except you and the nerve. The nerve wraps its hind legs around your breastbone and hangs on desperately. You perspire freely and make noises like a drunken Zulu trying to sing a Swedish folk song while holding a spoonful of hot mush in his mouth.

In time becoming wearied even of these congenial diversions and tiring of the shop talk that has been going on, the second dentist returns to his original prey and the party who has you in charge tries a new experiment. He arms himself with a kind of an automatic hammering machine, somewhat similar to the steam riveter used in constructing steel office buildings, except that this one is more compact and can deliver about eighty-five more blows to the second. Thus equipped, he descends far below your high water mark and engages in aquatic sports and pastimes for a considerable period of time. It seems to you that you never saw a man who could go down and stay down as long as this young man can. You begin to feel that you misjudged his real vocation in life when you decided that he ought to be a boiler maker. You know that he was intended for pearl fishing. He's a natural born deep sea diver. He doesn't even have to come up to breathe, but stays below, knee deep in your tide wash, merrily knocking chunks off your lowermost coral reefs with his little steam riveter and having a perfectly lovely time.

You are overflowing copiously and you wish he would take the time to stop and bail you out. You abhor the idea of being drowned as an inside job. But no, he keeps right on and along about here it is customary for you to swoon away.

On recovering, you observe that he has changed his mind again. He is now going in for amateur theatricals and is using you for a theatre. First thoughtfully draping a little rubber drop curtain across your proscenium arch to keep you from seeing what is going on behind your own scenes, he is setting the stage for the thrilling sawmill scene in Blue Jeans. You can distinctly feel the circular saw at work and you can taste a hod of mortar and a bucket of hot tar and one thing and another that have been left in the wings. You also judge that the insulation is burning off of an electric fixture somewhere up stage.

All this time the tooth is still offering resistance, and eventually the dentist comes out in front once more and makes a little curtain speech to you. He has just ascertained that what the tooth really needed was not filling but pulling. He thought at first that it should be filled and that is what he has been doing—filling it—but now he knows that pulling is the indicated procedure. He does not understand how a tooth that seemed so open could have deceived him. Nevertheless he will now pull the tooth.

He pulls her. She does her level best but he pulls her. He harvests small sections of the gum from time to time and occasionally he stops long enough to loosen up the roots as far down as your floating ribs. But he pulls her. He spares no pains to pull that tooth. Or if he spares any you are not able subsequently to remember what they were. You utter various loud sounds in a strange and incomprehensible language and he lays back and braces his knees against your lower jaw, and the tooth utters the death rattle and begins picking the cover-lid. And then he gives one final heave and breaks the roots away from the lower part of your spinal column to which they were adhering, and emerges into the open panting but triumphant, and holds his trophy up for you to look at. If you didn't know it was your tooth you would take it for an old-fashioned china cuspidor that had been neglected by the janitor.

It was a tooth that you had been prizing for years, but now you wouldn't have it as a gracious gift. You are through with that tooth forever. You never want to see it again.

As for the dentist, he collects the fixed charge for stumpage and corkage and one thing and another and you come away with a feeling in the side of your jaw like a vacant lot. Your tongue keeps going over there to see if it can recognize the old place by the hole where the foundations used to be. You never realized before what a basement there was to a tooth.

As you come out you pass a fresh victim going in and you see the dentist welcome him and then turn to crank up his motor and you hear the canary tuning up with a new line of v-shaped twitters. And you are glad that he is the one who is going in and that you are the one who is coming out.

Science tells us that the teeth are the hardest things in the human composition, which is all very well as far as it goes, but what science should do is to go on and finish the sentence. It means the hardest to keep.

HAIR

As I remarked in the preceding chapter of this work, one of the pleasantest features about being born is that we are born without teeth and other responsibilities. Teeth, like debts and installment payments, come along later on. It is the same way with hair.

Born, we are, hairless or comparatively so. We are in a highly incomplete state at that period of our lives. It takes a fond and doting parent to detect evidences of an actual human aspect in us. Only the ears and the mouth appear to be up to the plans and specifications. There is a mouth which when opened, as it generally is, makes the rest of the face look like a tire, and there is a pair of ears of such generous size that only a third one is needed, round at the back somewhere, to give us the appearance of a loving cup. And we are smocked and hem-stitched with a million wrinkles apiece, more or less, which partly accounts for the fact that every newborn infant looks to be about two hundred years old. And uniformly we have the nice red complexion of a restaurant lobster. You know that live-broiled look?

As for our other features, they are more or less rudimentary. Of a nose there is only what a chemist would call a trace. It seems hard to imagine that a dinky little nubbin like that, a dimple turned inside out, as it were, will ever develop into a regular nose, with a capacity for freckling in the summer and catching cold in the winter—a nose that you can sneeze through and blow with. There are no eyebrows to speak of either, and the skull runs up to a sharp point like a pineapple cheese. Just back of the peak is a kind of soft, dented-in place like a Parker House roll, and if you touch it we die. In some cases this spot remains soft throughout life, and these persons grow up and go through railroad trains in presidential years taking straw votes.

And, as I said before, there isn't any hair; only on the slopes of the cheese are some very pale, faint, downy lines, which look as though they had been sketched on lightly with a very soft drawing pencil and would wipe off readily. That, however is the inception and beginning of what afterward becomes, among our race, hair. To look at it you could hardly believe it, but it is. Barring accidents or backwardness, it continues to grow from that time on through our childhood, but its behavior is always a profound disappointment. If the child is a girl and, therefore, entitled to curly hair, her hair is sure to come in stiff and straight. If it's a boy, to whom curls will be a curse and a cross of affliction, he is morally certain to be as curly as a frizzly chicken, and until he gets old enough to rebel he will wear long ringlets and boys of his acquaintance will insert cockle-burs and chewing gum into his tresses, and he will be known popularly as Sissie and otherwise his life with be made joyous and carefree for him. If a reddish tone of hair is desired it is certain to grow out yellow or brown or black; and if brown is your favorite shade you are absolutely sure to be nice and red-headed, with eyebrows and lashes to match, and so many cowlicks that when you remove your hat people will think you're wearing two or three halos at once. Hair rarely or never acts up to its advance notices.

One of the earliest and most painful recollections of my youth is associated with hair. I still tingle warmly when I think of it. I should say I was about eight years old at the time. My mother sent me down the street to the barber's to have my hair trimmed—shingled was the term then used. Some of my private collection of cowlicks had begun to stand up in a way that invited adverse criticism and reminded people of sunbursts. They made me look as though my hair were trying to pull itself out by the roots and escape. So I was sent to the barber's. My little cousin, two years younger, went along in my charge. It was thought that the performance might entertain her. I was mounted in a chair and had a cloth tucked in round my neck, like a self-made millionaire about to eat consomme. The officiating barber got out a shiny steel instrument with jaws—the first pair of clippers I had ever seen—and he ran this up the back of my neck, producing a most agreeable feeling. He reached the top of my head and would have paused but I told him to go right ahead and clip me close all over, which he did. When he had finished the job I was so delighted with the sensation and with the attendant result as viewed in a mirror that I suggested he might give my little cousin a similar treat. From a mere child I was ever so—willing always to share my simple pleasures with those about me, especially where it entailed no inconvenience on my part. I told him my father would pay the bill for both of us when he came by that night.

The barber fell in with the suggestion. It has ever been my experience that a barber will fall in readily with any suggestion whereby the barber is going to get something out of it for himself. In this instance he was going to get another quarter, and a quarter went farther in those days than it does now. I dismounted from the chair and my innocent little cousin was installed in my place. As I now recall she made no protest. The barber ran his clippers conscientiously and painstakingly over her tender young scalp, while I stood admiringly by and watched the long yellow curls fall writhing upon the floor at my feet. It seemed to me that a great and manifest improvement was produced in her general appearance. Instead of being hampered by those silly curls dangling down all round her face, she now had a round, slick, smooth dome decorated with a stiff yellowish stubble, and the skin showed through nice and pink and the ears were well displayed, whereas before they had been practically hidden. She was also relieved of those foolish bangs hanging down in her eyes. This, I should have stated, occurred in the period when womankind of whatsoever age and also some men wore bangs, a disease from which all have since recovered with the exception of racehorses and princesses of the various reigning houses of Europe. And now my little cousin was shut of those annoying bangs, and her forehead ran up so high that you had to go round behind her to see where it left off.

Filled with a joyous sense of achievement and conscious of a kindly deed worthily performed, I took my little cousin by her hand and led her home.

My mother was waiting for us at the front door. She seemed surprised when I took off my hat and gave her a look, but that wasn't a circumstance to her surprise when I proudly took off my little cousin's cap. She uttered a kind of a strangled cry and my cousin's mother came running, and the way she carried on was scandalous and ill-timed. I will draw a veil over the proceedings of the next few minutes. At the time it would have been a source of great personal gratification and comfort to me if I could have drawn a number of veils, good, thick, woolen ones, over the proceedings. My mother wept, my aunt wept, my little cousin wept, and I am not ashamed to state that I wept quite copiously myself. But I had more provocation to weep than any of them.

When this part of the affair was over my mother sent me back to the barber with a message. I was to say that a heart-broken woman demanded to have the curls of which her darling child had been denuded. I believe that there was some idea entertained of sewing them into a cap and requiring my cousin to wear the cap until new ones had sprouted. Even to me, a mere child of eight, this seemed a foolish and totally unnecessary proceeding, but the situation had already become so strained that I thought it the part of prudence to go at once without offering any arguments of my own. I felt, anyhow, that I would rather be away from the house for a while, until calmer second judgment had succeeded excitement and tumult.

The man who owned the barber shop seemed surprised when I delivered the message, but he told me to come back in a few minutes and he'd do what he could. I drifted on down to the confectionery store at the corner to forget my sorrows for the moment in a worshipful admiration of a display of prize boxes and cracknels in glass-front cases—you should be able to fix the period by the fact that cracknels and prize boxes were still in vogue among the young. When I returned the head barber handed me quite a large box—a shoebox—with a string tied round it. It did not seem possible to me that my cousin could have had a whole shoebox full of curls, but things had been going pretty badly that afternoon and my motives had been misjudged and everything, so without any talk I took the box and hurried home with it. My mother cut the string and my aunt lifted the lid.

I should prefer again to draw a veil over the scenes that now ensued, but the necessity of finishing this narrative requires me to state that it being a Saturday and the head barber being a busy man, he had not taken time to sort out my cousin's curls from among the flotsam and jetsam of his establishment, but had just swept up enough off the floor to make a good assorted boxful. I think the oldest inhabitant had probably dropped in that day to have himself trimmed up a little round the edges. I seem to remember a quantity of sandy whiskers shot with gray. There was enough hair in that box and enough different kinds and colors of hair and stuff to satisfy almost any taste, you would have thought, but my mother and aunt were anything but satisfied. On the contrary, far from it. And yet my cousin's hair was all there, if they had only been willing to spend a few days sorting it out and separating it from the other contents.

In this particular instance I was the exception to the rule, that hair generally gives a boy no great trouble from the time he merges out of babyhood until he puts on long pants and begins to discern something strangely and subtly attractive about the sex described by Mr. Kipling as being the more deadly of the species. During this interim it is a matter of no moment to a boy whether he goes shaggy or cropped, shorn or unshorn. At intervals a frugal parent trims him to see if both his ears are still there, or else a barber does it with more thoroughness, often recovering small articles of household use that have been mysteriously missing for months; but in the main he goes along carefree and unbarbered, not greatly concerned with putting anything in his head or taking anything off of it.

In due season, though, he reaches the age where adolescent whiskers and young romance begin to sprout out on him simultaneously—and from that moment on for the rest of his life his hair is giving him bother, and plenty of it.

Your hair gives you bother as long as you have it and more bother when it starts to go. You are always doing something for it and it is always showing deep-dyed ingratitude in return; or else the dye isn't deep enough, which is even worse. Hair is responsible for such byproducts as dandruff, barbers, wigs, several comic weeklies, mental anguish, added expense, Chinese revolutions, and the standard joke about your wife's using your best razor to open a can of tomatoes with. Hair has been of aid to Buffalo Bill, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Samson, The Lady Godiva, Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy, poets, pianists, some artists and most mattress makers, but a drawback and a sorrow to Absalom, polar bears in captivity and the male sex in general.

This assertion goes not only for hair on the head but for hair on the face. Let us consider for a moment the matter of shaving. If you shave yourself you excite a barber's contempt, and there is nobody whose contempt the average man dreads more than a barber's, unless it is a waiter's. And on the other hand, if you let a barber shave you he excites not your contempt particularly, but your rage and frequently your undying hatred. Once in a burst of confidence a barber told me one of the trade secrets of his profession—he said that among barbers every face fell into one of three classes, it being either a square, a round or a squirrel. I know not, reader, whether yours be a square or a round or a squirrel, but this much I will chance on a venture, sight unseen—that you have your periods of intense unhappiness when you are being shaved.

I do not refer so much to the actual process of being shaved. Indeed there is something restful and soothing to the average male adult in the feel of a sharp razor being guided over a bristly jowl by a deft and skillful hand, to the accompaniment of a gentle grating sound and followed by a sensation of transient silken smoothness. Nor do I refer to the barber's habit of conversation. After all, a barber is human—he has to talk to somebody, and it might as well be you. If he didn't have you to talk to he'd have to talk to another barber, and that would be no treat to him.

What I do refer to is that which precedes a shave and more especially that which follows after it. You rush in for a shave. In ten minutes you have an engagement to be married or something else important, and you want a shave and you want it quick. Does the barber take cognizance of the emergency? He does not. Such would be contrary to the ethics of his calling. Knowing from your own lips that you want a shave and that's positively all, he nevertheless is instantly filled with a burning desire to equip you with a large number of other things. In this regard the barbering profession has much in common with the haberdashering or gents'-furnishing profession as practiced in our larger cities. You invade a haberdashering establishment for the purpose, let us say, of investing in a plain and simple pair of half hose, price twenty-five cents. That emphatically is all that you do desire. You so state in plain, simple language, using the shorter and uglier word socks.

Does the youth in the pale mauve shirt with the marquise ring on the little finger of the left hand rest content with this? Need I answer this question? In succession he tries to sell you a fancy waistcoat with large pearl buttons, a broken lot of silk pajamas, a bath-robe, some shrimp-pink underwear—he wears this kind himself he tells you in strict confidence—a pair of plush suspenders and a knitted necktie that you wouldn't be caught wearing at twelve o'clock at night at the bottom of a coal mine during a total eclipse of the moon. If you resist his blandishments and so far forget that you are a gentleman as to use harsh language, and if you insist on a pair of socks and nothing else, he'll let you have them, but he will never feel the same toward you as he did.

'Tis much the same with a barber. You need a shave in a hurry and he is willing that you should have a shave, he being there for that purpose, but first and last he can think of upward of thirty or forty other things that you ought to have, including a shampoo, a hair cut, a hair singe, a hair tonic, a hair oil, a manicure, a facial massage, a scalp massage, a Turkish bath, his opinion on the merits of the newest White Hope, a shoeshine, some kind of a skin food, and a series of comparisons of the weather we are having this time this month with the weather we were having this time last month. Not all of us are gifted with the power of repartee by which my friend Frisbee turned the edge of the barber's desires.

"Your hair," said the barber, fondling a truant lock, "is long."

"I know it is," said Frisbee. "I like it long. It's so Roycrofty."

"It is very long," said the barber with a wistful expression.

"I like it very long," said Frisbee. "I like to have people come up to me on the street and call me Mr. Sutherland and ask me how I left my sisters? I like to be mistaken for a Russian pianist. I like for strangers to stop me and ask me how's everything up at East Aurora. In short, I like it long."

"Yes, sir," said the barber, "quite so, sir; but it's very long, particularly here in the back—it covers your coat collar."

"Indeed?" said Frisbee. "You say it covers my coat collar?"

"Yes, sir," said the barber. "You can't see the coat collar at all."

"Have you got a good sharp pair of shears there?" said Frisbee.

"Oh, yes, sir," said the barber.

"All right then," said Frisbee; "cut the collar off."

But not all of us, as I said before, have this ready gift of parry and thrust that distinguishes my friend Frisbee. Mostly we weakly surrender. Or if we refuse to surrender, demanding just a shave by itself and nothing else, what then follows? In my own case, speaking personally, I know exactly what follows. I do not like to have any powder dabbed on my face when I am through shaving. I believe in letting the bloom of youth show through your skin, providing you have any bloom of youth to do so. I always take pains to state my views in this regard at least twice during the operation of being shaved—once at the start when the barber has me all lathered up, with soapsuds dripping from the flanges of my shell-like ears and running down my neck, and once again toward the close of the operation, when he has laid aside his razor and is sousing my defenseless features in a liquid that smells and tastes a good deal like those scented pink blotters they used to give away at drug-stores to advertise somebody's cologne.

Does the barber respect my wishes in this regard? Certainly not. He insists on powdering me, either before my eyes or surreptitiously and in a clandestine manner. If he didn't powder me up he would lose his sense of self-respect, and probably the union would take his card away from him. I think there is something in the constitution and by-laws requiring that I be powdered up. I have fought the good fight for years, but I'm always powdered. Sometimes the crafty foe dissembles. He pretends that he is not going to powder me up. But all of a sudden when my back is turned, as it were, he grabs up his powder swab and makes a quick swoop upon me and the hellish deed is done. I should be pleased to hear from other victims of this practice suggesting any practical relief short of homicide. I do not wish to kill a barber—there are several other orders in ahead, referring to the persons I intend to kill off first—but I may be driven to it.

After he has gashed me casually hither and yen, and sluiced down my helpless countenance with the carefree abandon of a livery-stable hand washing off a buggy, and after, as above stated, he has covered up the traces of his crime with powder, the barber next takes a towel and folds it over his right hand, as prescribed in the rules and regulations, and then he dabs me with that towel on various parts of my face nine hundred and seventy-four—974—separate and distinct times. I know the exact number of dabs because I have taken the trouble to keep count. I may be in as great a hurry as you can imagine; I may be but a poor nervous wreck already, as I am; I may be quivering to be up and away from there, but he dabs me with his towel—he dabs me until reason totters on her throne—sometimes just a tiny tot, as the saying goes, or it may be that the whole cerebral structure is involved—and then when he is apparently all through the Demoniac Dabber comes back and dabs me one more fiendish, deliberate and premeditated dab, making nine hundred and seventy-five dabs in all. He has to do it; it's in the ritual that I and you and everybody must have that last dab. I wonder how many gibbering idiots there are in the asylum today whose reason was overthrown by being dabbed that last farewell dab. I know from my own experience that I can feel the little dark-green gibbers sloshing round inside of me every time it happens, and some day my mind will give away altogether and there'll be a hurry call sent in for the wagon with the lock on the back door. Yet it is of no avail to cavil or protest; we cannot hope to escape; we can only sit there in mute and helpless misery and be filled with a great envy for Mexican hairless dogs.

For quite a spell now we have been speaking of hair on the face; at this point we revert to hair in its relation to the head. There are some few among us, mainly professional Southerners and leading men, who retain the bulk of the hair on their heads through life; but with most of us the circumstances are different. Your hair goes from you. You don't seem to notice it at first; then all of a sudden you wake up to the realization that your head is working its way up through the hair. You start in then desperately doing things for your hair in the hope of inducing it to stick round the old place a while longer, but it has heard the call of the wild and it is on its way. There's no detaining it. You soak your skull in lotions until your brain softens and your hat-band gets moldy from the damp, but your hair keeps right on going.

After a while it is practically gone. If only about two-thirds of it is gone your head looks like a great auk's egg in a snug nest; but if most of it goes there is something about you that suggests the Glacial Period, with an icy barren peak rising high above the vegetation line, where a thin line of heroic strands still cling to the slopes. You are bald then, a subject fit for the japes of the wicked and universally coupled in the betting with onions, with hard-boiled eggs and with the front row of orchestra chairs at a musical show.

At this time of writing baldness is creeping insidiously up each side of my head. It is executing flank movements from the temples northward, and some day the two columns will meet and after that I'll be considerably more of a highbrow than I am now. At present I am craftily combing the remaining thatch in the middle and smoothing it out nice and flat, so as to keep those bare spots covered—thinly perhaps, but nevertheless covered. It is my earnest desire to continue to keep them covered. I am not a professional beauty; I am not even what you would call a good amateur beauty; and I want to make what little hair I have go as far as it conveniently can. But does the barber to whom I repair at frequent intervals coincide with my desires in this respect? Again I reply he does not. Every time I go in I speak to him about it. I say to him: "Woodman, spare that hair, touch not a single strand; in youth it sheltered me and I'll protect it now." Or in substance that.