The letter came by certified mail, which is how my grandfather knew it was bad news. Good news, in his experience, came in person and wanted a haircut.
His name is Salvatore Deluca. He is seventy-one years old. He has run a barbershop called Clips on Fennimore Street in Harwick Falls since April of 1979. He has never once changed the name, the chairs, or his opinion about anything.
I was there the afternoon it arrived because it was a Tuesday. I am thirty-three, and I had been a lawyer for exactly eleven weeks. Before that I taught middle-school band for seven years. I went to law school at thirty because I wanted a job where nobody played the recorder at me.
Most Tuesdays I ate lunch at the shop. The firm was four blocks away, above a pharmacy. Nobody there noticed when I left, because the firm had four lawyers and I was the one who did not count yet.
Clips is one room. It has two chairs, one of which Grandpa Sal uses and one of which he keeps "for emergencies." In forty-seven years there has never been an emergency. The second chair holds the newspaper.
The sign in the window is hand-painted. It was hand-painted in 1979 and touched up in 1998, when a pigeon took a position on it. It reads:
CLIPS — EST. 1979 NO APPOINTMENTS. NO PHONES. NO NONSENSE.
He means all three. There is no phone in the shop. There has never been a phone in the shop.
If you want a haircut, you come in and you wait. If you want to tell Sal something, you come in and you wait for that, too.
When anyone walks through the door, he says the same thing. He does not look up from whatever head he is working on.
"Sit. We'll talk."
He said it to the mail carrier that Tuesday. The mail carrier, a woman of about forty named Doreen, held up a clipboard.
"I can't sit, Sal. You have to sign for this."
"Sit. We'll talk."
"It's certified."
He finished the neckline on Benny Szabo, wiped his hands on the towel over his shoulder, and signed. Doreen left. Grandpa Sal put the envelope on the emergency chair, on top of the newspaper, and went back to Benny.
Benny is sixty-six. He has been coming to Clips every Tuesday since the week it opened. He comes whether or not he needs a haircut. Most weeks he does not need one, so Sal trims nothing for ten minutes while Benny reads the obituaries aloud.
"Harold Pell," Benny said. "Eighty-nine. Beloved husband." He turned the page.
"Not me. Not yet."
"Not you," Sal agreed.
"You going to open that?" Benny asked.
"After the Number Four."
I should explain the Number Four.
Everyone who sits in Sal's chair gets the Number Four. It is short on the sides, a little longer on top, and tidy at the back.
You can ask for something else. You can bring a photograph. You can describe, in detail, a haircut you saw in a magazine.
You will get the Number Four.
"There used to be a One, Two, and Three," he told me once. "I tried them. They were worse."
Rafi Mendez was sweeping. Rafi is twenty-four, works at the shop three afternoons a week, and calls himself an apprentice. Sal calls him "the broom." Rafi has a phone, which he is allowed to keep in his pocket as long as Sal never sees it.
Rafi looked at the envelope on the emergency chair. Then he looked again. He leaned the broom against the wall.
"Grandpa Sal," he said. Everybody calls him Grandpa Sal. He is my grandfather and nobody else's, but he has never corrected anyone. "That return address says clips.com."
"Okay."
"Clips.com, Grandpa Sal."
"I heard you. I'm old, not deaf."
"Do you know what clips.com is?"
Sal combed Benny's hair down, studied it, and combed it back. "Is it a barbershop?"
"It's the biggest video site in the world. Four hundred million people use it."
"Use it for what?"
"You post short videos. Clips." Rafi held up his hands, as if framing something. "Little clips."
"Of what?"
"Of everything. Cooking. Dogs. People falling off things."
Sal thought about this. "Why would people want that?"
"I don't know," Rafi said. "I've watched about nine thousand hours of it."
When Benny was finished, he paid twelve dollars in cash, as he had every Tuesday for a long time. Sal opened the cash drawer. Then he opened a large green ledger that lives on the counter next to it.
He wrote, in pencil: Benny S. The Number Four. $12.
He writes down every customer. He has done it since the first day.
I asked him why when I was twenty-one, and he said, "So I remember." I asked him again when I was thirty, and he said the same thing. He does not repeat himself often, so I took it seriously.
Then he sat down in his own chair, which he never does during business hours, and handed me the envelope.
"You're the lawyer, Gina," he said. "You open it."
The letter was two pages on heavy cream paper. The letterhead was a small blue triangle, like a play button, and the words CLIPS.COM, INC. — LEGAL DEPARTMENT.
I read it once fast and once slowly. I am a careful reader. It is the one thing band and law have in common.
"Well?" Benny said. He had not left. Benny never leaves when something is happening.
"It's a cease-and-desist," I said.
"What does it want me to cease?" Sal asked.
"Being called Clips."
I read them the key paragraph. It said that clips.com owned a federally registered trademark for CLIPS in connection with "video, entertainment, and related consumer services."
It said Sal's use of the name was "likely to cause confusion." It said that clips.com "respectfully demands" that he stop using the name within thirty days. It mentioned "all available remedies."
"What's a remedy?" Benny asked.
"A lawsuit," I said.
"I thought a remedy was soup."
Sal looked at the window. From inside, the sign read backward. 9791 .TSE — SPILC. He had been looking at it backward for forty-seven years.
"They want me to change the name," he said.
"Yes."
"To what?"
"They don't say. Anything else."
He was quiet for a long time. Sal can be quiet in a way that fills a room. Rafi stopped sweeping. Benny folded his newspaper.
"Sit," Sal said finally. Nobody had come in. He was talking to the letter. "We'll talk."
I carried it back to the firm in my bag like it was radioactive.
The firm is Pruitt, Lowe & Dagher. Harriet Pruitt is sixty-four. She founded it in 1991 and has a large glass jar of sunflower seeds on her desk. She eats them one at a time while you talk, which makes every meeting feel like an interrogation by a very calm bird.
I knocked on her open door. She waved me in. I put the letter on her desk.
"My grandfather got this," I said. "I'd like to take it. Pro bono. On my own time."
She read it while eating four seeds. Then she looked up.
"You know this is trademark."
"I took trademark."
"You took one semester of trademark."
"I got an A-minus."
She cracked a seed. "What do you know about the company?"
"Clips.com. Video platform. Registered their mark in 2011, according to the letter."
"And your grandfather?"
"Clips. Barbershop. 1979."
She stopped chewing. Harriet Pruitt stopping chewing is the most dramatic thing she does.
"Prior use," she said.
"Thirty-two years of it."
"Can you prove it?"
"Everyone in Harwick Falls knows that shop."
"Everyone in Harwick Falls is not a document." She pushed the letter back across the desk. "Is it in writing?"
It was the question she asked about everything. Lunch orders. Holiday schedules. Whether the coffee machine was broken.
Is it in writing? It had become, for the whole office, a kind of greeting.
"I'll find out," I said.
"Then take it." She pointed a sunflower seed at me.
"Your first real case is against a company with four hundred million users. Congratulations. That's either a very good story or a very short career."
I called Rafi from my desk that evening, because Sal did not have a phone to call.
"I need you to tell Grandpa Sal something," I said. "Tell him not to talk to anyone about the letter."
"Okay."
"Not reporters, not anyone. We keep it quiet. We handle it with letters, like adults."
There was a pause on the line. It was a guilty pause. I had taught middle school for seven years. I know a guilty pause the way a doctor knows a cough.
"Rafi."
"So, about quiet," he said.
"What did you do?"
"I may have been filming. When he read it. Just the part where he talks to the letter."
"Filming for what?"
"For clips.com."
I closed my eyes. "How many people have seen it?"
"When I posted it, nobody. When I left the shop, about forty thousand."
I heard him refresh something. "Now it's two hundred thousand. Gina, it's at the top of the trending page."
"Of which site?"
He did not need to answer. We both knew.
Up next: Trending
Continue to Part 2 →