Don't cut the chatter: At C-Bo’s Barber Shop in Richlands, the haircuts are traditional, but the talk is always in style

STORY AND PHOTOS BY EILEEN BRADY
THE DAILY NEWS OF JACKSONVILLE, N.C.

The wooden screen door slams against its frame, announcing the arrival of the next customer. The noise doesn’t break C-Bo Brinson’s concentration on the head at hand. Not until the haircut is finished, anyway.
His customers don’t mind waiting. For some, getting a haircut is their secondary mission. They’ve really come to sit among other men and catch up on the latest scuttlebutt. They wouldn’t dare call it gossip. That’s the stuff of beauty parlors.
Soon, another customer is announced by the slamming door. “How’s C-Bo?” he asks.
“He’s kickin’,” C-Bo answers,

his eyes still focusing on the customer in the chair.

“I didn’t know if you were working long hours or half-days,” says the customer at the door. “With all that money you got, I know you got to take some time off to spend it.”
Then he plops down on one of the sofas to enter the conversation. 
The shop itself is as homey as a living room. Customers don’t squirm in hard plastic chairs lined against the wall. Instead, soft couch cushions invite them to stay awhile. There’s a recliner in the corner just for C-Bo, in case he gets a break from his scissors. He just puts up his feet and reads the paper.
“Most of ’em feel as comfortable here as they do on their front porch,” C-Bo says. “They just sit around and talk.”
There aren’t many topics that aren’t given airtime in C-Bo’s shop, but bad news is No. 1 on the hit parade.
“They come in here talking trash — I talk it back,” says C-Bo, who has cut hair for 40 years. “All of us take the floor.”
Customers discuss current events. (“People were talking ’bout the O.J. trial — everybody talkin’ ’bout he was guilty.”)
Farmers talk about the weather. (“Needin’ rain, too much rain.”)
Men talk about women. (“Oh, the way they shop. When men go down to a place, we know exactly what we want. We’re there three or four minutes. With women, one’ll say, ‘Oh, isn’t this nice?’ The other’ll say, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”)
Some discuss religion. (“They come in preachin’ a little bit. They’ll tell what the Lord’s done for ’em, then they’ll tell a joke.”)
But those are the public topics. 
Privately, like the proverbial bartender, C-Bo gets an earful about the confidential lives of some of his customers. Their secrets are safe with C-Bo. He’s just there to listen. He’s not about to start spreading the news.
“They know I won’t mention nothing,” C-Bo says. “Some things is just one-time talk.”
People are just bursting to share their secrets, C-Bo says. He just happens to be the one they choose to tell.
“Especially take a man in his 60s or something who is married and got a girlfriend,” C-Bo says. “They got to tell somebody. They’re like little kids sometimes.”
C-Bo’s Barber Shop is a throwback to the days before unisex hair salons — when men had barbers, women had hairdressers and people appreciated conversation more than television.
The shop is right off U.S. 258 in Richlands, but it may as well be miles from the interstate traffic. Two doors down from a grain store, the overhang in front of C-Bo’s is almost as big as the shop itself. Underneath it, a white wooden chair and a Coke machine decorate the front. 
C-Bo remembers the building being Winzell Jarman’s gas station when he was a boy. That was back when people started calling him C-Bo. He rode his bike without fenders to deliver newspapers.
“They’d say, ‘Here comes old rag mop and C-Bo,’ ” he says. “That’s all I go by now.”
Later, the building became a fish market operated by Mildred Brown. Before it became C-Bo’s, it was Jarman Cap Co.
C-Bo bought the place after he retired from a civil-service job cutting hair for 20 years at Camp Lejeune. He was tired of the commute to French Creek each day, and he wanted to work closer to his home in Richlands.
Yep, C-Bo is quite familiar with cutting military hair, so it tickles him when a Marine asks if he does military cuts. When the same Marine is smiling into the mirror admiring his fresh haircut, C-Bo usually asks, “Now ain’t you sorry you asked me could I cut a Marine’s hair?”
When he first opened his shop, almost 40 percent of C-Bo’s business was military. Now it makes up only 5 percent. Deployments keep his customers away from home more often with the downsized military, C-Bo says. 
Marines get a break on the cost of their cuts, which occasionally rankles a few civilian customers.
“I stop that conversation right away,” C-Bo says. “I tell ’em, ‘Where you might get your hair cut every six weeks, they’re in here once or twice a week.’ ” 
And most of C-Bo’s customers are repeat customers.
“Once I cut ’em, I generally keep ’em,” he says. “But I’m not saying that in a bragging mode.”
Besides, there’s always the added benefit of being able to find out what’s going on in Richlands.
“Yeah, they come back,” C-Bo says. “Once they come in here and hear that bull that’s going around.”