A South Bronx barber takes on a new role
New York One by one, Brian Mcfadden opened three padlocks, lifted the graffiticovered roller gate and turned the key to reopen his shop for the first time since mid-march. He surveyed his workplace, tucked into an impoverished block of the South Bronx. In the window was a poster of a black boy and the words “Don’t
Shoot. I want To Grow Up.” Mcfadden sprayed the glass before wiping it with a squeegee.
“All set?” said Antonio Cortes, an octogenarian cook who walks with a cane.
“I’m not going to make you wait, papi,” his barber replied. “Come on in. Bring your third leg with you.”
In the 107 days since Mcfadden and other local businesses were forced to close, this community of Mott Haven has been ravaged by the coronavirus and roiled by unrest. There were marches against police brutality, looting on Fordham Road, a week of curfew, endless late-night fireworks and a spike in shootings.
Mcfadden, whose family has served the neighborhood for nearly half a century, wondered how and when it would end. As he finally reopened up in late June, he took note of the toll. Many of his clients are essential workers who had few options during the lockdown. He already knew of more than a dozen who’d succumbed to the disease caused by the virus.
“What is the condition of our humanity?” he said. “People were fighting over toilet paper. What if it ever comes to food or water? Where the hell are we?”
The cynosure of Cypress Avenue considers Bee’s Famous Barbershop to be part confessional, part comedy lounge. But he’s assuming an added role these days. He snaps on rubber gloves, slips on a face mask over his graying beard and vigorously wipes down his chair after each cut. He offers single-use masks to anyone who enters without one. He suggests that a mask be removed only when he presses the razor behind a customer’s ears or shaves a beard.
The cost is $20, cash only. On each person’s way out, Mcfadden preaches against the urge to relax, directing young and old alike to use the bottle of hand sanitizer by the door. Cognizant of the virus’s devastating impact on the African American community, he pushes back against those who claim they are impervious to COVID-19 and warns that a second wave may be on the horizon.
“You get the test?” asked Tyrone Miller, 49, who was lucky enough to snag a cut on the shop’s first day back.
“No, you?” Mcfadden said.
“Had to for work,” said
Miller, who drives a private sanitation truck. “Both the stick up the nose and the antibody.”
Daily now, Mcfadden negotiates new restrictions as well as curl patterns. Accustomed to accommodating walk-ups, he limits his five-chair shop to 10 customers at a time. All service is scheduled, whether for him or his two other barbers and hair stylist. At 54, he has health concerns of his own. He was diagnosed nearly a decade ago with congestive heart failure and so lives with a defibrillator in his chest. He battled a bad cold in January that he believes may have been an early coronavirus infection.
Mcfadden inherited the shop from his father, Famous Mcfadden Jr., and the elder man’s 2011 funeral notice remains affixed to the wall. Famous Jr. cut an inimitable figure in the South Bronx, first as muscle for the mafia before picking up a razor and cutting Grandmaster Flash’s hair while listening to Marvin Gaye. He had 11 children, and Brian, his fourth, was born in Manhattan but bounced around the outer boroughs during his childhood. He was raised Christian, singing and stomping through Baptist church services as a boy while attending Catholic schools all the way to St. John’s University.
His first barbershop shift came at 14, when an older brother failed to show one Saturday. Brian earned his chair, nine doors down from the New York Police Department’s 40th Precinct. It was an era when crack-fueled crime waves rolled through South Bronx streets.
Father and son worked well together — too well, as it turned out. They were eventually co-defendants in a 1990 heroin case that sent the father to federal prison for eight years and the son for six.
“It’s very hard to be in and around the beast without the beast actually touching you,” Mcfadden said.
He keeps his father’s license and collage of photographs taped to the mirror by his old chair. Images and messages span generations back to the 1970s. A bumper sticker says, “Hey Kids, No Hope in Dope!” A leaflet on the cork bulletin board reminds minorities about slavery’s history.
Yet a Ramadan calendar is by the register, a reflection of Mcfadden’s conversion to Islam while in prison. On a humid Tuesday in June, he greeted Muslims in Arabic, welcomed back the owner of the Chinese food store next door in Chinese and spoke Spanish to a 10-year-old Honduran, whose mother did not speak English. Mcfadden guided the pair to a poster on the wall that features 38 hairstyles. They pointed to what the boy wanted.
His last customer was Mcfadden’s second born, Edward, who is 32 and oversees a youth basketball league. Father pinned back his son’s twisted locks and trimmed his beard.