In the Freedom Barber Shop, Tony Bravo helps fellow veterans heal

They amble in with overgrown manes and beards, looking as if they’ve spent the night on the street. Some of them have.

Eyes downcast, they climb three metal stairs, duck through the doorway and sink into the black vinyl chair, where the proprietor begins to snip. By the time he has brushed their necks with talc and patted their cheeks with clove-scented after-shave, they could pass for anyone’s impeccably coiffed father or brother or uncle.

In reality, they are veterans whose haggard faces reflect the psychic scars of service in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan and of their ongoing battles with addiction, grief and pain.

Audio slide show: Helping vets heal

The Freedom Barber Shop, a star-spangled trailer anchored in a parking lot on the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs campus, is their haven. Barber Tony Bravo, a.k.a. the Dreamer, is their shaman, helping to heal them with clippers, corn-pone humor and Patsy Cline.

Few people understand the plight of homeless veterans the way he does. Like many of them, he served in the military. And, although he owns what he describes as a 200-acre cattle ranch in Benson, Ariz., the Dreamer lives several days each month on the street, voluntarily, in Los Angeles — in solidarity, he says, with the rootless vets he meets and in memory of his unfettered youth.

“Don’t let them know you’re hurting,” he advises his fellow gypsies. “The key is to stay invisible.”

Apples and oranges

Starting in the 1970s, Bravo owned a succession of San Vicente Boulevard salons that catered to a different clientele: the Westside elite. Political movers and shakers, venture capitalists and film honchos shelled out $100 or more for a cut and styling. Today, the Dreamer is much more likely to take payment in apples or oranges, or a ball made of rubber bands.

Outside his 1950s-vintage Terry trailer, a barber pole stands before an American flag. The 28-foot vehicle is painted with red, white and blue stripes and blue stars. Camouflage spatters and netting decorate one end.

“Command Post” reads a sign over the door. “NO SMOKING. EXPLOSIVE AMMUNITION” says another. A blue awning shades a couple of picture windows, one of which showcases a sign featuring two neon peace symbols and proclaiming “Peace! Victory!”

The trailer’s interior is an ever-evolving exhibition of objects, many of them mystically or patriotically themed and donated in lieu of tips. A poster shows Native Americans cradling weapons: “Homeland Security, Native Americans, Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.” There’s also a life-size cardboard cutout of Elvis Presley in his Army uniform.

Bravo’s typical work ensemble includes a western-style navy shirt with white piping and stars (naturally) and the word “Dreamer” embroidered across the back in hot pink. He wears cuffed and faded jeans over polished two-tone wingtips that resemble spats, like something Fred Astaire might have worn. The shoes are two sizes too big, to allow for multiple pairs of socks for comfort and warmth as he makes his nighttime rounds.

His black, wavy hair is slicked back and combed close to his scalp over his brown, weathered face. To amuse himself and his customers, he sometimes wears yellow-lens goggles and a black Billy Jack hat — after all, he says, he’s half Yaqui and half Apache.

On a recent afternoon, Tom Walton stepped into the Freedom Barber Shop wearing a red straw cowboy hat over long, straggly hair. The 62-year-old Navy veteran had spotted a flier for free haircuts at the VA and stopped by without an appointment. It was his lucky day. The Dreamer was in.

“I don’t want a Marine haircut,” Walton said as he settled into the barber’s chair.

With the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” playing over the sound system, the Dreamer went to work.

Walton, a self-described alcoholic with missing teeth, told the Dreamer he once worked in the mortgage business, making as much as $12,000 a month, before the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s.

In 1975, he said, he watched as a friend on the deck of an aircraft carrier “got squeezed like a grape” when a helicopter toppled onto him. Today, Walton lives on about $3,100 a month from a military pension and payments for post-traumatic stress disorder. He has been homeless for much of the last eight years.

The Dreamer put the finishing touches on Walton’s haircut and turned the chair so that he could see his reflection.

“When you look in the mirror, what do you see?” the Dreamer asked him.

“Tom Cruise,” Walton replied.

A life under the stars

Anthony Bravo Esparza was born in 1944 in Corona. As a youngster, he said, he picked tomatoes with his father, napping under oak trees, bathing in canals and sleeping under the stars at night.

“To me, it was like heaven,” he recalled. “I was good for $10 a day, 40 boxes of tomatoes by 2 in the afternoon.” One day truancy officers called a halt to his outdoor lifestyle, saying it was cruel and inhumane for a child. “To this day I have contempt for that observation,” he said. “It was a beautiful time and place.”

Unable to read or write, he entered school, wearing scruffy, oversize clothes from an Army surplus store. Children toting Hopalong Cassidy and Flash Gordon lunch boxes made fun of him.

According to California National Guard records in Sacramento, he joined the guard in 1965, training at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., where as a private he received a citation for “outstanding accomplishments in physical fitness.” He was among the troops called up to help bring order to Watts during the 1965 riots. After six years of service, he was honorably discharged as a specialist in 1971.

After Bravo established himself as a stylist in Brentwood just blocks from the VA campus, he began getting visits from vets. Word spread that he gave free haircuts to those in need. Several years ago, he contacted Marianne W. Davis, chief of voluntary service for the West Los Angeles VA, and said he was a semi-retired veteran who wanted to give back.

It was kismet. He arrived as the VA was struggling to find funds to cover its $35,000-a-year contract for barber services. Each month, the Dreamer provides 100 to 150 free cuts to veterans. In exchange, he gets to park his trailer on campus and take in paying members of the public, including many of those well-heeled fellows who frequented his San Vicente salons.

“He’s an awesome fixture on campus,” Davis said. “The vets all come out of there feeling kind of uplifted … and looking so cool. He listens to them and lightens their burden a little bit.”

The trailer’s down-home atmosphere works its magic on the wealthy guys, too.

“He treats everybody exactly the same, whether millionaire or homeless,” said Berge Kipling “Kip” Hagopian, a venture capitalist who migrated from Bravo’s salon to the trailer.

“He’s a very good barber,” said director-producer Roger Corman, who was thrilled to rediscover his old stylist from the boulevard at the VA campus.

Not all of the Dreamer’s clients are ambulatory. Some are confined to the VA hospital. When they can’t make it to the trailer, he packs his shears and goes to them.

One recent morning, the Dreamer visited Victor A. Goldbaum, 54, of La Puente in his four-bed room at the VA hospital. Cancer in Goldbaum’s spine left his legs paralyzed. The Dreamer leaned over the back of the former Army specialist’s raised hospital bed and began to clip Goldbaum’s locks. “How about the eyebrows and ears?” the Dreamer asked. “That’s one thing guys in captivity don’t see. Nostrils, eyebrows, ears. Engineers have hairy ears.”

Goldbaum smiled at his barber’s banter.

“President Lincoln said: ‘Never underestimate the power of a haircut,’” the Dreamer said. “Intellectuals say he never said that. Well, he should have.”

‘Staying invisible’

When he locks the trailer each evening at dusk and ventures out to the boulevards of Brentwood, the Dreamer wears layers of denim and fleece topped by his “New York coat,” a long, dark wool garment that falls almost to the ground. “It’s going to be a long night, a cold night,” he said one recent unseasonably chilly evening. “This is the time of the evening where it’s hardest.”

He sleeps no more than an hour at a time on a stoop or behind a tree, striving to stay out of sight of all but the other sidewalk ramblers.

If he wants to hang out undisturbed in a 7-Eleven parking lot, he wears a shirt bearing the convenience store’s logo. “People think I’m an employee,” he said. “It’s all part of staying invisible.”

To keep onlookers guessing, he alters his gait. “There’s the old-man gait, the wounded-warrior gait, the power gait,” he said. “If people see a guy limping, it can be a defense. They figure he’s already messed up.”

At a coffee shop on San Vicente at Barrington Avenue, he greeted Jon Wyninegar, 63, a homeless veteran who had lost half his tongue to mouth cancer. The Dreamer asked how he was doing and offered some encouraging words.

“We look out for each other,” the Dreamer said. “Regiments need to stick together.”

Audio slide show: Helping vets heal

martha.groves@latimes.com