By Wednesday morning, my grandfather was the most famous barber on clips.com. He did not know it, because he did not know what clips.com was.
The video was forty-one seconds long. Rafi had titled it 71-year-old barber gets letter from clips.com. It showed Sal in his chair, reading glasses on, holding the letter at arm's length. It ended with him looking at the page and saying, "Sit. We'll talk."
By breakfast it had four million views. By lunch it had nine.
I am Gina Deluca, Sal's granddaughter. I had been a lawyer for eleven weeks and a band teacher for seven years. Neither job had prepared me for a comment section.
I watched it on my laptop at my desk, with the sound off, the way you look at an X-ray of your own arm.
The comments were mostly kind. This man has never lied in his life. I would die for Sal.
The way he talks to the letter like it's a customer. Someone had made a version with dramatic orchestral music. Someone else had made a version where the letter talked back.
There were also comments that said clips.com is a joke and worse. Those were the ones that worried me. I had wanted to handle this quietly. You do not handle anything quietly once nine million people have watched your grandfather adjust his glasses.
Harriet Pruitt appeared in my doorway holding her jar of sunflower seeds. She does not usually leave her office. She treats walking down the hall the way some people treat international travel.
"My niece sent me a video," she said.
"I know."
"She lives in Portugal."
"I know."
She ate a seed. "Write the response today. Before this gets any louder."
I wrote it in four hours. It was the most careful thing I had ever written. That includes my bar exam and a long apology to the parents of the 2019 trombone section.
The argument was simple. I made it as simple as I could on purpose.
Sal had used the name Clips for a barbershop on Fennimore Street since 1979. Clips.com had registered its trademark in 2011. Under federal law, someone who used a mark first, in a place, before the registration, can keep using it there.
Prior use. Continuous use. Local use. I typed those three phrases so many times they stopped looking like words.
I also wrote that a barbershop and a video platform were not likely to be confused. No reasonable person, I wrote, had ever walked into Clips on Fennimore Street expecting to watch a dog fall off a couch. Harriet made me take that sentence out.
"It's funny," she said, "and funny is how they quote you in the newspaper."
"I want them to quote me."
"No, you don't. You want them to read you." She tapped the page.
"Is it in writing? The 1979 part?"
"Everyone knows the shop is from 1979. It's on the sign."
"A sign is a sign. It isn't proof of when the sign went up."
I sent it anyway, by email and certified mail, to the clips.com legal department in Larkspur Valley. Then I walked to the shop to tell my grandfather what I had said on his behalf. I felt it was the least I could do.
There was a line outside Clips.
I want to be precise about this. Clips has two chairs and one barber, and one of the chairs is for the newspaper.
On a busy Saturday, there might be three men waiting, reading old magazines about boats. On that Wednesday there were forty-two people on the sidewalk on Fennimore Street. I counted them. It is a habit from band, where you count everything.
Most of them were in their twenties. Several were holding phones up at the window. One young woman had driven from two states away and was wearing a homemade T-shirt that said SIT. WE'LL TALK.
Rafi was standing at the door with his broom, acting as a bouncer.
"One at a time," he was saying. "He's working. No phones inside. Those are the rules."
"Since when do you enforce the rules?" I asked.
"Since a guy tried to film the cash drawer." He lowered his voice.
"Gina, I'm sorry. I didn't think it would go anywhere. I've posted two hundred videos. My most popular one before this was my cousin's iguana."
"How many views did the iguana get?"
"Eleven."
Inside, Sal was cutting the hair of a tall young man in a denim jacket. The young man had brought a photograph of a haircut on his phone. He was holding it up, explaining it carefully.
"Shorter here," he said. "Kind of textured on top. A fade at the—"
"Okay," Sal said.
He gave him the Number Four.
The young man looked in the mirror for a long time. Then he said, "That's honestly better," and paid, and tipped twenty dollars.
Sal wrote him in the green ledger. Tall kid, denim. The Number Four. $12. He did not write the tip. He never writes the tip.
Benny was in the emergency chair with the newspaper. It was Wednesday. Benny does not come on Wednesdays.
"I'm here for moral support," he said. He turned a page.
"Martin Ostrowski. Ninety-one. Not me. Not yet."
I sat on the windowsill and explained the response letter to Sal in between customers.
"Prior use," I said. "You were here first. The law says that counts."
"Of course I was here first." He snipped. "I've been here since before that company had a mother."
"The law doesn't say it quite like that."
"The law should."
"I told them a barbershop and a video site aren't the same thing. That nobody would mix them up."
He considered this. He took the reading glasses off his head and put them on his nose. Then he looked out the window at the forty people with their phones.
"Somebody mixed them up," he said.
He was right. That was the part that kept me awake that week.
Every person in that line had come because of clips.com. In a strange way, the video had joined the two names together. Clips.com's lawyers would say exactly that. They would say the confusion was now real.
On Thursday morning, the video disappeared.
Rafi called me at seven. He sounded like he was calling from inside a closet, which it turned out he was.
"It's gone," he said. "They took it down. It just says This clip has been removed for a trademark violation."
"Whose trademark?"
"Theirs. The title had the word Clips in it. Their system flagged it."
He paused. "Gina, clips.com took down a video about clips.com sending a letter about the word Clips. For using the word Clips."
I sat on the edge of my bed for a full minute.
"That's automatic," I said finally. "A program did that. No person would do that."
"I know a program did that. But nobody else knows that."
By nine, there were four hundred re-uploads of the video. By noon, the national news had a segment on it.
The anchor tried very hard to keep a straight face while explaining it, and did not entirely succeed. The phrase on the screen behind her said BARBERGATE.
Harriet came to my doorway again. Twice in one week. People in the office started to whisper.
"They're going to respond in person," she said. "A company that size doesn't let this run for a weekend."
"How do you know?"
She ate a seed. "Because I would."
He came Friday at four in the afternoon.
I was at the shop, sitting on the windowsill with my laptop, pretending to review a commercial lease. The line outside had shrunk to about fifteen.
Rafi was holding the door. Benny was there. It was Friday, and Benny does not come on Fridays.
The man who walked in was about fifty. He wore a gray suit that was exactly the right size. His brown shoes had been polished by someone who loved them.
Over his shoulder was a large leather messenger bag. It was the kind you buy once in your life and expect to be buried with.
He looked around the shop. He looked at the two chairs, and at Benny, and at the newspaper, and at the green ledger on the counter. He looked at me.
"Ms. Deluca," he said. "Desmond Achterberg. Clips.com, legal department."
Sal did not look up from the customer in his chair.
"Sit," he said. "We'll talk."
"I'll stand, thank you." Desmond adjusted the strap on his bag. "Please don't be alarmed by my visit. I'm just the messenger."
He reached into the bag and took out a thick envelope.
"And unfortunately," he said, "I have a message."
Up next: The Messenger
Continue to Part 3 →