A few blocks from my sister’s apartment, I found the blue and red spinny wheel of a barbershop. I yanked the door and it only budged slightly. It was heavy, and locked. I stepped back and saw a man inside, on his way to unlock the door. I saw his tall figure with treelike limbs through the shop’s front windows; he was old, and so was his barbershop. The store took up the street level of a brown brick apartment building, one with more concrete than windows. Across the street were freshly built apartments and more on the way. In the window I could see the reflection of lit-up signs: the Lydia and the Lyric were high-rises with doormen and twenty-four-hour receptionists. Each had dimly tinted glass faces, through which I saw bright white lights and uncomfortable modern chairs. The door opened, and I stepped into the barbershop. I followed the man across discolored yellow tiles to a chair, where he sat me down and began cleaning his clippers in slow motion.

            We were the only ones there. The shop was quiet except for subtle blues music turned down enough so that it was unrecognizable, but you knew it was there. It was lunchtime on a Monday, drizzling outside under pillowy clouds. I watched my barber’s reflection in a mirror. He looked ancient, spoke slowly and in stanzas. He had wrinkled, caramel-colored skin that shone slightly. On his head were white, curly, puffy hairs, like the loose strands of cotton balls you can’t put back together. He turned his back to reach his tools, and I saw dark spots on the back of his head. A very subtle man, my barber reminded me of the grandfather I never got to meet. He seemed to be living at the end of a life, running the clippers up and down the side of my head with shaky hands. I saw his fingers through the corner of my eye, their skin so thin it could tear off at any time. He had a body that might’ve collapsed at any moment, but a voice that always spoke with something to say. He grinned with white teeth, small and light like a child’s but square and split like crooked gravestones.

Facing the back of the shop, I stared at a portrait of Barack Obama, who was smiling with his arms crossed, superimposed in front of the capitol dome. My barber took my head, then spun me to reach my left side. Now I faced the street and those brutal apartment buildings, the juiceries, banks, and build-your-own bowl restaurants that lined the sidewalks below. I asked my barber about them. He hadn’t heard of the word gentrification but “yes,” he told me, “people get priced out.” Above the barbershop windows hung plastic white roll-up blinds, under which I watched a sleepy street that glittered in the morning mist. I pressed him more.

“That’s the question,” he murmured, then paused. “Where do they go?”

I asked him what he liked about D.C., and without hesitation in his slow cadence, he replied, “This city’s got money.” That’s why he’d come here from a small town with no jobs. He was a man who liked to make money. The back door opened. A woman dressed crisply in post-carrier blues beamed at my barber, tossing mail on one of the barber chairs. They greeted each other as if carrying on yesterday’s conversation, laughing about a running joke. “Take care, Blade,” she chuckled, and Blade said he’d see her tomorrow.

Blade told me he’d been a barber since he was twelve. A caddy before that. A pool shooter ever since. He worked to make money. He did all things to make money.

“Money’s not everything, right?” I asked, attempting to sidestep his prophecy. I felt like he was trying to teach me something.

“No, money isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”

I gave him a strained smile.

He drove the clippers over the side of my head again, then paused and shut them off. “Everything in the world costs money. Even dying.”

I said nothing, just listened. He said he didn’t do much that was “just sociable.” His fun came from making money, because “making money is fun.” He gambled. And he was damn good at it. He told me he was a “damn good gambler” and a “damn good pool shooter.” In just a night, he could make a couple grand shooting pool. He played poker too, but not spades. People didn’t gamble on it. He had friends, but preferred to gamble alone. Didn’t like anyone else’s hands in his pockets.

            I asked him what he disliked most about D.C.. He said the crime, and that things had changed. “Bad morals,” he sighed: crime came from bad morals. Bad morals came from bad guidance. Bad guidance came from bad parents or no parents, no father or too much TV, too much TV or too much phone…or too much fast food. I watched his hands in the mirror as he stopped cutting, and threw them up resignedly. In his day, “kids wouldn’t rob somebody for their sneakers or their jacket.” My eyes followed his hands up the wall to a black and white portrait of M.L.K., who stared solemnly at us both. In his day, Blade clarified, “we went out and worked for it.” And work was never fun.

He didn’t gamble for fun. He didn’t do anything for fun. He did it all for money. And making money, or “separating a fool from their money” could be fun. It still was fun for him: he still played pool, and he was still damn good at it. He said he won eighty-five percent of his games. He told me stories of his best shots, stopping the clippers and mapping the cue ball’s flight with his hands on the edge of a rusty bronze mirror. He could hit the cue and spin the eight in a circle, or launch a stripe and stop it on a dime. In the pool room, he always looked for white men, any age. They had all the money. They didn’t think a black man could beat them. He beat them, though. And he took their money.

Blade lined my forehead with trembling hands, then wiped my edges with alcohol. I checked the mirror to look for mistakes, but there were none. Stepping outside into the mist, I told him I’d come back if I ever visited again. Eying a sandy construction site on the corner of the block, I began walking. A sign that hung from a chain link fence boomed back at me: “Luxury Apartments Coming 2024.”

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