Booker’s toupee was an exaggerated version of Frankie Avalon’s pompadour in the 60’s film, Beach Blanket Bingo. It was an odd-looking hairpiece that perched on Booker’s head like a renegade dust bunny, curled up for an afternoon nap. Booker liked to rattle-off names of Texas vegetation: “Bluestem, switchgrass, purpletop and drop seed.” Just when you thought he was finished, he’d let out a long sigh and continue with “scurf peas, prairie clover and Englemann daisies.”
When he was younger, Booker wanted to be a barber, but the only job he could get was barbering in a nearby asylum where manic depressives, old folks and autistic children were warehoused like rolls of cheap carpet.