The Victors

I began this series of memory-based biographical writing from my childhood and adolescence some months ago with the post My Moment of Godliness . I wouldn’t exactly say they just poured out on the page, but they did keep coming regularly and with a certain ease. For a while. They came so quickly I stored up posts to publish at regular intervals rather than bombard you, which I felt could erode your willingness to read and engage. This is the last one in the vault. Maybe more will come, maybe not. Maybe I should work harder, maybe not. Thanks for reading, this one is quick and dirty, hope you enjoy. Love to hear your comments and thoughts.

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Mr. Victors’ smiles were quick, tight, and transmitted nothing. They were a learned mechanism, a navigational tool. See, I smiled. He taught phys-ed in high school. Small in stature, leanly muscled, thick jet black hair with matching eyebrows and a forehead like a storm cloud. He brought to my mind the villainous Bill Sikes as played by Oliver Reed in the musical Oliver! My parents drove me and a bunch of my friends into the city to see Oliver! for my seventh birthday. I guess they didn’t know Bill Sikes would beat his prostitute girlfriend to death in the movie.

Once Mr. Victor had a chuckle when a kid flew off the parallel bars and broke his wrist. Maybe he did have a bit of the Bill Sikes in him. He was divorced and their house was next door to my best friend’s. Mrs. Victors still lived there and cut hair in her basement.

My Mum sent me to Mrs. Victors for a haircut once. It wasn’t set up like a salon, it was just a basement. No mirror, no special chair. A bunch of cardboard boxes of this and that haphazardly stacked on the uneven concrete floor. A furnace, a lawnmower. Mrs. Victors had a big crown of brassy copper-coloured hair and I guess she’d been in the backyard tanning because she came to the door smelling of coconut tanning lotion, glistening, wearing a canary yellow bikini and plastic sandals with a small heel.

She sat me down, asked me about school and made small talk as she began to clip and cut my unruly mop. She bent forward, she leaned in, and her breasts, barely covered and contained by the canary yellow bikini top, swung and swayed, bobbed and bounced tantalizingly close to my face. I saw the tan line on her tits. And beyond. Instantly I had a boner so hard it hurt. When she stood up straight to trim the top, her tanned torso, shiny with coconut lotion was at eye level, practically in my face. My loins throbbed. I swallowed. I sweated. She knew. I knew she knew. She knew I knew she knew.

Suddenly it was over, locks of my thick curly hair lay scattered on the concrete floor. I paid her the money my Mum had given me for the haircut. Mrs. Victor put on a terry towel robe and saw me out.

                                                   Thoughts, stories of your own?