MIKE
Had an all-American childhood. Enlisted in the Marines straight out of high school and shipped out to Vietnam. Survived, but not quite fully intact. While he was consciously aware that his experiences had dramatically and permanently altered his outlook on life, he was nonetheless unable to fully grasp what it was that had made him, ever since his return from the war, uncomfortable in practically all social situations, particularly those involving women. What he does not grasp is that while he has managed to confront the terror, horror and death of his experiences, he has completely repressed the conclusion that his All-American self came to in the trenches: that if this is what life is about, then life is ultimately meaningless and futile. As a result of his being unable to confront this conclusion of his pre-war self and integrate it with his post-war self, Mike is a man divided against himself.Mike's primary disability being social communion, his decision to open and run a barbershop (having learned the trade in the Marines) has been a saving grace, allowing him to create a community of regular customers with whom he has a specific, defined relationship; providing him with the social contact he needs in such a form that, being the dictator of the terms and more or less feeling in control of the interactions, he can be comfortable enough to relax his grip on himself just enough to feel a part of the greater whole of the community, despite his overall feelings of self-proscription.
There is only one person with whom he has ever allowed himself to fully lower his guard and bare his inner turmoil. His mirror, as he is hers, Velma is the unstoppable force directed at the immovable object that is Mike. On those erratic and infrequent occasions, the determining factors of which are more than likely an occult mystery of great dimension, when Mike and Velma allow their respective selves to be dissolved in an ocean (the quantities consumed on these occasions can be astounding) of alcohol and merge into a single amorphous entity, Mike experiences complete release from his self-constructed emotional prison. Yet inevitable as the morning-after hangover, is the horrible depression of having to face the emptiness of his pre-war self as it lays there uncovered yet unconfrontable in his still foggy consciousness, and the unpleasant duty of having to escort it back to the dungeon within himself. A pall is cast over the days following these trysts with Velma, during the course of which he swears to himself never to “weaken” again. And life goes on as before.
Will Mike integrate? Can he do so with Velma? Stay tuned.