So which? Oh, up to me? Okay. Butch-long. Personally, I think it's better for cruising. It's kinda psychological or unconscious-so many people, they may not think about it, but they see long hair and they unconsciously think about running their fingers through it while having sex. So okay, your old mother'll start to work.

Well, old Paul, so how is old Paul, the old bastard. What a camp!

He says the only reason I set myself up here is so that I can have a private captive audience cause I like to talk so much. Got to admit I do. Just run off at the mouth, Paul says. Always been like that. Diarrhea at the other end, my mother used to say. Said when I left home it wasn't like losing a son but having a long-playing record finally shut off. Do you mind? No? Good!

Well, tellya how it was. I was a hairdresser. Years and years. Damn good, too. But gawd, women! I tellya, the main thing I got against them is that they can't appreciate a beautiful man. I mean, figure-wise. Oh, they like men, all right— money and social crap and all that, and some of 'em like it in bed, too, but it seems like they just like it cause they're being overpowered and having their clitoris or whatever it is being worked on.

A woman is like a mirror. Just like a mirror. All by itself, there's nothing there. Nothing. Like a mirror, a woman only receives and comes to life by receiving. You know what I mean? Maybe that's why they can't be great artists.

Well, anyway, I got to thinking about this mirror business, and it nearly drove me nuts, standing behind these women, looking in the mirror, one after another, all day long. Then I got to thinking it was like working on TWO mirrors cause that's all the woman was, really.

I don't know how to explain it, but it got to be a real creepy feeling. Then one day I went to work and here all these women were sitting in front of mirrors, and it kept running through my head MIRRORS, MIRRORS, MIRRORS. It wouldn't stop. I never had nothing like that before. I got to shaking, my hands got to shaking every time I stood behind a woman and looked in that mirror. So that noon I went and quit.

Then that weekend I was out at the university for a swim meet and a gymnastics meet-I never miss 'em-and I was drinking it all in, and I thought, now why the hell can't I be working while looking at MEN. So I went to barber college and got my license and here I am. Wish to hell I'd done it years before.

Well, old Paul, so how is old Paul, the old bag. What a camp!

We used to live together, that is, I rented a room from him, did he tellya? No? Well, I did. When he had that big Victorian house on the hill. Gawd, those parties. They don't throw 'em like that any more. That was years ago. Mary! I tellya, it was different then. Now, with all this social study crap and being written up in LIFE and all-hell, nobody does anybody anymore without thinking about it, thinking how they're a social misfit or something. Nobody's just plain queer anymore.

Well, old Paul, he throws some doozy of a party. Did he tell you about Hamlet? Well, he was giving a Christmas party for this actor friend of his from England, and it was wild-everybody drunk and out under the camellia bushes around the pool doing each other, and I don't know how it started 'cept everybody kinda had to rest at the same time and were in the house-kinda like an intermission, you know-guess everybody had come at the same time. So Paul, he pulls out that big wicker basket full of drag from the Goodwill and says we're doing Hamlet.

Gawd, you should have heard the screams. All those queens wanted to be either Ophelia or the Queen Mother and nothing else. So Paul, cause he didn't

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