A Prime Cut : A Man’s Place Is in the Chair at Pete’s Barber Shop

Only a thin membrane of wood and glass separates Pete’s Barber Shop from the anxious current of time outside its windows.

Inside, as in a backwater just out of reach of the torrent, is a tiny pool of calm where men and boys can secure a moment of clarity, however briefly, and fix on distant dreams.

Wherever the eye roams in the cramped Thousand Oaks barbershop--front wall, back wall, the sides--it takes in the glossy skin of thousands of spent lottery tickets handed over by scores of customers.

All losers, the tickets are tacked or stapled to the walls in neat, categorized rows, as if to bring a trace of order to a runaway world and salute dashed hope as much as endless effort.

Scattered among them are posters of beautiful women who are as far from the men’s reach as lottery jackpots--and provide as much grist for oratory.

“It’s the last bastion of masculinity,” Larry Golding said as he rose from the barber’s chair, the skin around his ears a raw pink from a fresh hairline shave.

A fixture at 2811 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd. for three decades, Pete’s has long served as a fleeting refuge where customers can drift back to a time when life was simple and hair was cut, not styled.

“We don’t do any of that,” snorted barber Louie Nocera, 57, whose rough humor acts as a sort of gatekeeper for new customers.

Endure this rite of passage, this harmless fusillade of quips and cuts, and you are what Nocera proudly calls “a customer for life.”

Fail it, and you can go somewhere else.

“It’s a hole in the wall, but we do OK,” said owner Pete Torres, 59, a soft-spoken man of many words and even more loyal customers.

Whether retiree or high-school football player, stone-cutter or surgeon, each customer is offered the same options--you want talk, fine; you want silence, fine. No one gets special treatment, not even such celebrities as Sam Elliot, Bob Denver or Mickey Rooney.

“This is not going to look pretty, so don’t laugh,” Nocera said as he handed a mirror to Irmo Tiritilli, 83, of Westlake Village.

Taking the barber’s teasing in stride, Tiritilli said: “Very nice.”

Then his eyes lit up with mischief when Nocera said he hoped he, too, could reach 83.

“Yeah, but I can’t do a lot of what I used to, you know,” Tiritilli said, and he winked.

Torres, a genial man with snow-white hair who can trade barbs with the best of them, said, “It’s an old shop, but that’s usually what people come looking for. . . . I don’t want to speak for the other old-fashioned barbers, but I have a feeling we’re the ‘Last of the Mohicans.’ ”

Free of pomp and frill, an afterthought that even a bicyclist might miss with the blink of an eye, the driftwood-gray storefront has largely escaped the notice of the 1990s.

It is small, not much larger than a walk-in closet of the privileged, and its world is just as insular, defined by dogeared Playboy magazines, football pennants for the Bears and Broncos, and the requisite game trophy, a fat-bellied German brown trout suspended in mute struggle over customers’ heads.

“One guy comes in, waving his hands like this,” Nocera said with disgust, “and he says, ‘You fluff, you layer, you fluff, you layer.’ And I said you . . . go (to a salon) to get your hair styled for $36.”

Properly corrected, the man said, “ ‘No, no, you do what you want then,’ and he’s been a customer every since,’ ” Nocera recounted.

Cuts are cheap, $8 a head, no credit cards are accepted and no one dares ask for such namby-pamby delicacies as manicures or appointments. This is a joint where nose hairs are trimmed, no questions asked, or ear hairs--”or whatever else they want,” Nocera said.

When business surges--which can be at any time--patrons shuffle and jostle for space.

Which they did on a recent afternoon.

A Marine with muscular, tattooed arms, a forklift operator, a sixth-grader--the customers filed in, got their hair cut with time to spare and returned to the afternoon, their heads and necks suddenly exposed to the chill air. The ebb and flow of men and boys was much like the conversation, steady and unhurried, spiced with innuendo.

“What do we talk about?” Nocera repeated.

Golding said, “We talk politics, sports, sex.”

“Mostly sex,” said part-time barber Leo Kleinert, 56, who was filling in for Torres.

Nocera chuckled. “And jokes.”

“Mostly dirty jokes,” Golding said.

All three barbers’ chairs were full. So were the six waiting chairs. Tufts of hair littered the black-and-white checkered floor. There was no steady chatter under the milky fluorescent lights, only terse sentences, a little laughter here, a little silence there. The wind freshened outside. Colors gained that crisp hue, that sense of promise--or maybe even warning--that comes with fall.

“Going to be cold tonight,” observed Steve Henkens, glancing outside as the conversation gusted and died like the wind.

Nocera said, “ ‘Sposed to rain, I hear.”

“At about 9, they said,” said barber Tony Frageorgia, 52.

“I look bald,” 8-year-old Colby Henkens said. He was looking into the mirror while Nocera was shaving his head, giving him a “buzz” haircut.

His father, Steve, said: “Remember the picture you saw of Yul Brenner?”

“He was totally bald.”

“At least you have hair,” the father said.

“Yeah.”

The father smiled. “Maybe you won’t some day.”

Looking at the shrine to broken dreams on the walls--or maybe simply the hubris of the dreamers--Colby Henkens asked Nocera if he had bought any of the lottery tickets.

Jesting, the barber said, “That’s Pete’s doing. Do I look that stupid?”

The boy mumbled something inaudible.

“Don’t talk like that,” Nocera said in feigned rebuke. “That way, I won’t give you a lollipop.”

Then he did just that. “Now get out of here.”

For all his bluff and bluster, Nocera is an unwavering reflection of Torres, whose gentle presence lingers even in his absence. People always ask about him.

“Where’s Pete?”

“Is Pete staying out of trouble?”

Always skilled with his hands, Torres helped mend downed fighter pilots while serving as a Navy corpsman on the aircraft carrier USS Princeton during the Korean War. He remembers standing on the giant ship’s decks in the depth of night, nearly drawn backward by the vault of stars that reached out toward infinity.

“It was beautiful, my friend,” he said, revealing the sense of awe and kinship that has bound him to so many people.

That he would end up giving haircuts named after carriers like the Princeton--flattops--never occurred to him at the time, he said.

He added: “There’s not a lot of hairstylists or hairdressers out there that can cut a nice flattop.”

After the war, Torres returned to his native Colorado and then emigrated with his young bride to work at an aerospace firm in Santa Monica. There, he conducted stress tests for plastics on the Saturn rockets, which were used to launch the Apollo missions to the moon in the 1960s. After work, he would cut hair at a barbershop across the street.

“I had three young children those days,” Torres offered in explanation.

In 1964, he and his wife bought their dream house in Newbury Park and Torres went to work at Casey’s Barber Shop, which had occupied the former post office space since the early 1950s.

In 1965, Torres bought the business and renamed it.

Of his customers, he said: “They’re all nice people. I love them all.”