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I have been cutting the same man's hair every three weeks for twenty-six years, and one Tuesday morning he sat down in my chair and asked me, very politely, what my name was. I have known his wife's birthday since 2003. I cut his son's hair before that boy's voice changed. I gave him a Christmas card every year with my own handwriting on it. He has sat in the same chair, the second one from the door, twelve hundred times, give or take. It was March of 2024, on a Tuesday around ten, and he came in wearing his usual brown coat and his glasses pushed up on his forehead, and he eased himself down into that chair like he always did. I draped the cape over his shoulders and pumped the foot pedal twice to get him up to my working height. I picked up the comb. He looked at me in the mirror, and his eyes were friendly the way a stranger's eyes are friendly at a gas station when you're both buying coffee. He said, "I'm sorry, I'm having one of those mornings. What's your name again?" I told him my name was Curtis. He said, "Curtis. Right. Curtis. I'm Bill." I had been cutting his hair for twenty-six years, and he was introducing himself to me. I finished the cut. I did not say anything about it. I walked him to the register and rang him up for twenty-two dollars, which is what I have charged him for a haircut for the last seven years, and he paid me in cash like he always did, and he tipped me three dollars like he always did, and he said, "Thanks, Curtis," and he walked out the door and got in his Buick and drove the three blocks home. I stood in the front window of my shop and watched his taillights go up Main Street. Then I walked back to my station, opened the drawer under my clippers, took out a small green notebook I had bought that weekend at the Dollar Tree because some feeling in the back of my head had told me I might need it, and I wrote down the date and what had just happened. That was the first entry. I have been writing in that notebook for two years now. I want to tell you about a man named Bill Hennessey, and what happens when a doctor watches a number and a barber watches a person, and the number says everything is fine and the person is disappearing in front of you. I want to tell you what I figured out, because I figured it out, eventually. I'm not a doctor. I'm a barber. I am fifty-eight years old and I have been cutting hair in a two-chair shop on Main Street in Greenville, South Carolina, since 1998. I cut my first head of hair when I was nineteen, in my uncle's shop in Spartanburg, and I have been doing it ever since. I have watched this town's necks since the Clinton administration. I know who's eating and who's not. I know who's drinking too much and who quit. I know whose marriage is failing because of how they hold their shoulders. I know who's about to have a baby before the wife does, sometimes, because the husband gets a particular kind of quiet. A barber knows. People don't think we know, because we're just the guy with the scissors, but we know. And what I am telling you is that I watched Bill Hennessey go away over the course of about seven years, and his doctor told him his cholesterol was perfect the whole time, and the day Bill came into my shop with no pants on, I decided I was going to figure out what nobody else was going to figure out, because nobody else was going to. That's what this is about. Stay with me. Bill Hennessey is seventy-one years old. He was born in Greer, South Carolina, in 1953. His daddy worked at the textile mill and his mama taught Sunday school at the Baptist church on Hampton Avenue. He went to Greer High School, then he went into the Army for four years, then he came home and married a woman named Janet who he had known since the eighth grade. He worked at the post office for thirty-eight years. He retired in 2016 as postmaster. He has one daughter, Marie, who is forty-four and lives over in Travelers Rest with her husband and two boys. Bill walked into my shop for the first time in the fall of 1999. He had just moved to Greenville from Greer because Janet got a job at the hospital here. He was forty-six years old. He had a full head of brown hair with a little gray coming in at the temples, and he asked me for a regular short back and sides. He told me he was the new postmaster down at the Augusta Road branch. We talked about the Clemson game while I cut his hair, because it was a Saturday and they had played Florida State the night before, and Clemson had lost by twenty-one. When I finished, he looked in the mirror, and he said, "Curtis, you and me are gonna be friends." He was right. Every three weeks for twenty-six years. Twelve hundred haircuts. You can do the math. Here is what I knew about Bill Hennessey before that Tuesday. He drank his coffee black. He took his eggs over medium with bacon, never sausage. He liked the Steelers because his uncle had played for them in the fifties for one season before he blew out his knee. He read three books a week, mostly history, mostly about the Civil War, and he was full of facts about every battle in Virginia. He could tell you the exact regimental movements at Chancellorsville. He had a way of leaning forward in the chair when he was about to make a point, and his eyes would get small and bright, and he would say, "Now, here's what most people don't understand about Stonewall Jackson..." and you knew you were in for ten minutes. His wife Janet was a nurse. Pediatrics. He was proud of her in the way that only men of his generation are proud of their wives — quietly, devotedly, never bragging but never missing a chance to mention her either. Janet's birthday is February 18. I have known that since he told me in 2003, when he came in three days before and asked me what I thought he should get her, and I told him he should get her a weekend in Asheville at a bed and breakfast, and he did, and she loved it, and he told me about it for two months afterward. His daughter Marie was thirty-one when I met her. She came into the shop one Saturday in 2002 to drop off something for him on her way through town, and Bill introduced us, and he said, "This is my Marie. She is the best thing I ever did." Marie had brown hair like his and she had her mother's eyes, and she shook my hand and called me Mr. Curtis and I told her just Curtis was fine. She would stop in to say hello once or twice a year after that, if she was passing through. Bill was the kind of man who would tell you what his wife made for dinner. Every visit. Every haircut. He'd sit down in the chair and within about thirty seconds he'd say, "Janet made pork chops last night, Curtis, the kind with the apples. I tell you what." Or, "Janet's got a chicken in the oven for tonight, and she's making her cornbread, and I'm gonna die a happy man." He told me about his meals for twenty years. I knew Janet's recipes by reputation. I never ate any of them, but I knew them. The pork chops with apples. The chicken and dumplings she made on Sundays in winter. The peach cobbler she made every Fourth of July with peaches from the orchard out on Highway 14. He told me about books he was reading. He told me about the Steelers. He told me about a feud he had with his neighbor over a fence line for about eight months in 2009, and he told me about every step of it, and I had opinions about the fence line by the end of it, and we resolved that fence line together over the course of those eight months, both of us, while I cut his hair. That was Bill Hennessey. The man who sat in my chair that Tuesday and asked me my name was not that man. He had been not-that-man for a long time, and I had been watching it happen, and I will tell you exactly how it happened. The first thing I noticed was in the spring of 2018. Bill had just turned sixty-five. He came in for his regular cut, and he sat down, and there was a pause before he started talking about Janet's meals, and I noticed the pause. It was maybe four seconds longer than usual. Four seconds is not much, but I had been listening to this man talk for nineteen years at that point, and I knew his rhythms. He eventually said, "Janet made spaghetti last night." That was it. No story about the sauce. No mention of whether she had used Italian sausage or ground beef. Just spaghetti. I asked him what kind. He said, "Just spaghetti, Curtis. With the sauce." He waved his hand, like the details didn't matter, which was not a thing Bill Hennessey ever did. The details always mattered. About a month after that he told me his doctor had put him on a cholesterol pill. He said it like it was nothing. He said, "Doc said my numbers were a little high, so he wrote me up for the Crestor. Janet's been after me about my eating, so I guess this'll keep her quiet." I said, "You feel okay on it?" He said, "Sure. Don't feel a thing." That was 2018. In 2019, the thing I noticed was the armrests. Bill had a habit, ever since I'd known him, of resting his hands loosely on the armrests of my chair. Loose hands. Open. The hands of a man who is comfortable. Sometime in the spring of 2019 — I want to say it was April — he started gripping them. Not tight, but tight enough that I noticed. His thumbs would press down on the wood. When he got out of the chair he would push himself up with his arms instead of just standing. I asked him once, that summer, if his hip was bothering him. He said, "Oh, you know, it's just getting old. Everything starts to hurt a little." That was the first time I ever heard Bill Hennessey use the phrase "getting old." Bill was sixty-six. He told me he'd been to the doctor for his physical. He said the doctor had looked at his bloodwork and said his cholesterol was, in his own words, "perfect." LDL was down to one-twenty-something from the one-eighty it had been before the Crestor. Triglycerides were down. The doctor had given him a thumbs up and told him to keep doing what he was doing. Bill was pleased about it. I didn't say anything. I was a barber. The doctor said his numbers were perfect. Who was I. In 2020, with the pandemic and all, I didn't see Bill for a couple of months because we were shut down. When we opened back up in May, he came in, and I noticed two things. The first was that he had lost about fifteen pounds, and not in a good way. His shirt collar was loose on him. His face had gone a little hollow around the cheekbones. The second was that he didn't ask me how I was doing. Bill always asked me how I was doing. It was the second thing out of his mouth after he sat down. "How you been, Curtis?" Every time. For twenty-one years. That day he just sat down and put his head back against the rest and closed his eyes, and we did the whole cut in silence except for me asking him questions and him answering them in two or three words. When he was paying me at the register, he forgot his wallet. He had to drive home and come back. He apologized about six times. He said, "I don't know what's wrong with me today, Curtis. I had it in my hand." That summer he told me Janet had taken him to a different doctor, a specialist, because she was worried about him. The specialist had run a full panel. The specialist had looked at his bloodwork and told him his cholesterol was "exactly where we want it." LDL was at one-eighteen. The specialist had told Janet not to worry. Bill quoted the specialist to me. He said, "He told Janet, 'Mrs. Hennessey, your husband's numbers look like a healthy fifty-year-old's. He's doing great.'" Janet had asked the specialist about the weight loss, the tiredness, the forgetting things. The specialist had said, and I am quoting Bill quoting the specialist, "That's just aging, Mrs. Hennessey. Some of this is normal at his age." Bill was sixty-seven that summer. He had run a post office. He had been at his daughter's wedding three years before and given a toast that made everybody cry laughing. He was not a man whose mind was supposed to be aging. But the numbers were perfect, so what could anybody say. In 2021, the thing I noticed was that he stopped talking about the Steelers. The Steelers played that fall, and I asked him what he thought of their quarterback situation, and he looked at me for a second like I was speaking French. Then he said, "Oh, the Steelers. Yeah. Yeah, they're doing okay, I think." That was it. No analysis. No opinion about the receivers. Bill had once explained the Cover 2 defense to me for the better part of a haircut. That fall he could not have told you who the Steelers were playing on Sunday. He also stopped reading. He used to bring books with him sometimes. Just to flip through while he waited if I was running a few minutes behind on the previous customer. That stopped. He started just sitting in one of the waiting chairs with his hands in his lap, looking at nothing. He went to his regular checkup in November of 2021. Janet went with him. She told me about it the next time she came in to pick him up from his haircut, because she had started driving him by then. She said the doctor had spent ten minutes looking at his bloodwork and three minutes looking at Bill. The doctor had said his cholesterol was excellent, his triglycerides were excellent, his blood sugar was a little high but nothing to worry about, and that the Crestor was, and this is the phrase she used because the doctor had used it, "doing exactly what it's supposed to do." Janet had said to the doctor, "He doesn't seem like himself." The doctor had said, "Some cognitive changes are normal at his age." Janet had said, "He's sixty-eight. He was sharper than me a year ago." The doctor had said, "Have you considered that you might be noticing things now because you're around him more, since he retired?" Janet told me this in my shop, while Bill was sitting in the waiting chair looking at his hands, and I watched her face while she told me, and I saw her decide right there that she was never going to bring it up with that doctor again. Not because she was satisfied with the answer. Because she was tired. That was the doctor's job, I started to realize. The doctor's job was to tell you the numbers were fine. If you came in with a person who was not fine, but the numbers were fine, you went home. That was how the system worked. In 2022, Bill stopped telling me what Janet had made for dinner. I want you to understand what that meant. For twenty-three years, the man had told me about every meal his wife had cooked the night before, sometimes about the meal she was planning for that night, sometimes about a meal she had made the week before that he was still thinking about. He had told me about pot roasts and meatloaves and chicken and dumplings and pork chops with apples and cornbread and peach cobbler and biscuits and gravy and ham steaks with red eye and shrimp boils on the porch and oyster stew at Christmas. Twenty-three years. In 2022, he stopped. I noticed it after three or four visits. I started asking. I would say, "What's Janet cooking these days, Bill?" And he would say, "Oh, you know. Same old stuff." And he would not name a single thing. Marie called me on the phone in the summer of 2022. I had never given her my phone number, but she had looked the shop up. She said, "Mr. Curtis, this is Marie, Bill Hennessey's daughter." I said, "Hi, Marie. Just Curtis. Everything okay?" She said, "I wanted to ask you. You see my dad every three weeks. Is he okay?" I sat down in my own chair. I said, "Marie, I don't know what you're hearing, but no. He is not okay." She told me she had been worried for a while. She told me Janet had stopped saying anything because Janet was scared. She told me she had taken him to a different doctor, a third one, in Asheville, because Janet had asked her to. The doctor in Asheville had run the same bloodwork. The doctor in Asheville had said his cholesterol was excellent. The doctor in Asheville had said, "Mr. Hennessey, you're doing great for a man your age. Keep doing what you're doing." Marie had asked, "But Doctor, he doesn't remember what he had for breakfast. He stopped reading. He forgot my mom's birthday this year, and he has never forgotten her birthday in fifty-one years." The doctor had said, "Mrs. Brennan, your father is sixty-nine. Some memory loss is normal at his age. His numbers are pristine. The Crestor is working perfectly. I would not change anything." Marie said to me on the phone, "Curtis, what is happening to my dad?" I said, "Marie. I don't know. But I'll tell you this. I have been cutting hair in this town since 1998, and your dad is the third or fourth person I've watched go like this in the last few years, and every one of them had a doctor telling them their numbers were perfect." There was a long silence on the line. Then she said, "Thank you, Curtis." She said, "Thank you for telling me the truth." In 2023, Bill stopped pushing himself up out of the chair. He needed a hand. I gave it to him without making a thing of it. I would just stick my hand down and he would take it and I would help him up like he was an old friend, which he was, and he would say, "Thank you, Curtis," and that would be the most words he would say to me that visit, sometimes. His hair started thinning out, but not the regular kind of thinning. It was patchy. Some weeks I would cut him and there would be a spot above his right ear that was thinner than it had been three weeks before. I would just blend it. I never mentioned it. His skin changed. He got these little brownish spots on his temples that hadn't been there before. His ears looked bigger because his face had gotten thinner. The skin on his neck had gone soft, like it had given up holding itself in place. His hands were cold every single visit, even in August, and when I would take his hand to help him up out of the chair it felt like taking hold of something that had been left out in a garage. I knew the difference between a man aging and a man being starved from the inside. I had watched both. Bill was not aging. Bill was being starved. His doctor told him, in March of 2023, that his bloodwork was "honestly enviable for a man of seventy." The doctor told him he was a model patient. The doctor told him to keep taking his Crestor and not to change anything. Janet stopped coming to the shop with Bill. Marie started driving him. She would drop him off, sit in the parking lot for forty-five minutes, and pick him up. She would walk him in and walk him out. She would not stay in the shop because she could not bear to watch. I would sometimes look out the front window during his haircut and see her in the driver's seat of her Honda, looking at the steering wheel. That was 2023. In 2024, the year of the pants, I started noticing that he didn't remember which chair was mine. He would come in the door and stop and look at both chairs like he didn't know which one he was supposed to sit in. Tony, who had the other chair — Tony has been with me since 2008 — would say, "Bill, your boy Curtis is over there." And Bill would look at me and his eyes would clear for a second and he'd smile and say, "Oh, Curtis. Right." And he'd come over and sit down. He stopped tipping me. Not on purpose. He just forgot. I never said anything about it, because the man had tipped me three dollars a haircut for twenty-five years, and that meant he had given me a tip on roughly twelve hundred haircuts, which is over three thousand six hundred dollars in tips, and if a man forgets to tip you for a few months after twenty-five years of tipping you, you do not say a word about it. You let it go. That is what you do. In February of 2024, he came in for his cut and the conversation went like this. He sat down. I said, "How you doing, Bill?" He said, "Pretty good, Curtis, pretty good." I said, "Janet okay?" He said, "Oh, Janet. Yeah." There was a long pause. I said, "Anything new?" He said, "Not really. Not really." That was the entire conversation in the chair that day. About forty seconds of talking spread over a thirty-minute haircut. His Crestor was, his doctor had said two months before, "still doing exactly what it should do." In March of 2024, on a Friday morning around nine, Bill came in for his haircut. And what happened that morning is what made me start the notebook. I want to tell you about that Friday in detail, because that Friday is when I stopped being the guy who watches and started being the guy who figures it out. Every word of what I am about to tell you is exactly what happened. It was March 22, 2024. It was a Friday. The weather was cool but it was supposed to warm up later. There had been rain the night before, and the gutters out on Main Street were full of leaves and water. Marie dropped Bill off at the shop at 8:55. I saw her car pull up. I watched her get out of the driver's seat and walk around to the passenger side and open the door for him and offer him her hand. He took it and stepped out. He was wearing his brown coat, the same one he had been wearing all winter, and his black dress shoes that he had owned since 2014, and he had on a button-down dress shirt that I recognized because he had worn it three weeks before to his previous haircut. He had not changed his shirt in three weeks. That was the first thing I noticed, looking through the front window. But I had noticed things like that before with Bill in the last year. I figured Janet was wearing out and not catching everything. I did not yet realize what I was looking at. Marie walked him to the door. She caught my eye through the glass and gave me a tight little smile that meant something I couldn't fully read yet. Then she went back to her car and got in and sat there. Bill came in. He stopped just inside the door and looked at the two chairs. Tony was in his chair finishing up a young guy who works at the auto parts store, and I was empty. Tony said, "Hey, Bill, your boy's over there." Bill turned and looked at me. He smiled. He walked over. He sat down in my chair. He sat down differently than usual. He sat down without taking off his coat. I usually had him take off the coat first because the cape doesn't hang right over a winter coat. I said, "Bill, let me take that coat for you." He stood up halfway and let me slide the coat off his shoulders. That is when I saw that Bill Hennessey was not wearing pants. He was wearing boxer shorts. White boxer shorts with little blue diamonds on them. He had on his black dress shoes and his dress socks, pulled up to mid-calf, and his shirt was tucked into the waistband of the boxer shorts, and he had been walking around outside in the cold March air and sitting in his daughter's car and walking into my barber shop, and he was not wearing pants. I will tell you what happened in my head in the half second after I saw this. I felt my face go hot. I felt my stomach drop. I felt a kind of grief I had not felt since my own daddy died in 2009, which is a particular kind of grief that has nothing to do with the moment you're in. I felt rage at his doctor. I felt rage at the second doctor. I felt rage at the doctor in Asheville. I felt rage at the post office for letting him retire without anyone noticing what was already starting in 2016. I felt a kind of love for Bill Hennessey that was so big it scared me, because I am not a man who feels love for his customers in a way that scares him. I felt all of that in about half a second. And then I did what I was going to do, which was finish the haircut. I draped the cape over him. I made sure the cape covered him all the way down to his knees, where it normally fell. I tightened it at the neck. I tilted his head down a little, the way you do, and I said, "All right, Bill. Same as always?" And he said, "Same as always, Curtis." And I started cutting his hair. I cut his hair carefully. I did the back first. I did the sides. I did the top last, the way I always did. I was talking to him about nothing the whole time. I was telling him about the weather. I was telling him a story about my nephew who had just bought a truck. I was telling him whatever came out of my mouth. He was nodding along and saying, "Mhm. Mhm." His eyes in the mirror were calm. He had no idea he was not wearing pants. I made the cut take longer than it needed to. I wanted to give myself time to think. I cleaned up the back of his neck with the straight razor twice when I usually only do it once. I trimmed the eyebrows even though they didn't need it. I asked him if he wanted the ear hair done and he said, "If you think so, Curtis," and I said, "I think so," and I did it. While I was doing all of that, I was figuring out how to get Bill out of my shop without anybody seeing he was not wearing pants. Tony was at his chair. Tony's customer was still in the chair, with about ten more minutes to go on a beard trim. The front window of my shop faces Main Street, which has people walking past it all morning. The front door is right at the front of the shop. If I walked Bill out the front door, somebody on the sidewalk was going to see him walking to his daughter's car with no pants on, and Bill Hennessey, postmaster of Greer for the better part of forty years, the man who carried himself with the dignity of a small-town federal employee for his entire adult life, was going to be the guy in Greenville who walked down Main Street in his underwear. And that was going to be his thing for the rest of his life and after he died. And I was not going to let that happen. The back of my shop has a door that goes out into a little alley between my building and the one next door, where I keep my trash cans. The alley comes out onto a side street. I finished the cut. I took my time brushing the loose hair off his neck. I held up the hand mirror and showed him the back, the way I always did, and he nodded the way he always did and said, "Looks good, Curtis." I undid the cape, slowly, and gathered it carefully so I held it in front of him as he stood up, blocking the view. I said, "Bill, let me grab your coat for you, buddy." I went over and got his coat. I held it open and I held it low so it would cover him as he put it on. He shrugged it on. I buttoned the top two buttons myself. The coat came down to about mid-thigh on him. I said, "Bill, you know what, I left something out back. Come on out with me for a second." He said, "Okay, Curtis." I walked him to the back of the shop, my hand on his elbow, like we were old friends taking a walk together, which we were. We went through the little hallway past the bathroom and out the back door into the alley. The alley smelled like the dumpster from the Chinese place on the corner. There were puddles on the ground from the rain. I closed the back door behind us. I leaned against the brick wall. I pulled out my phone. I said, "Bill, you wait right here for me one second, okay? I'm gonna call Marie real quick." He said, "Okay, Curtis." He stood in the alley in his coat and his boxer shorts and his dress shoes. He looked perfectly content. He was looking up at a piece of fluff caught in the gutter. He was not cold. I called Marie. She picked up on the first ring. She said, "Curtis?" I said, "Marie, honey, I need you to drive around to the back of the building. He's not wearing pants." There was a long, long silence. Then she said, "Oh my god." Then she said, "Oh my god, Curtis, I'm so sorry. I didn't even — he came down the stairs ready to go. He had his coat on. He always — I just —" I said, "Marie. Marie. It's okay. I got him. He's standing here with me. He's fine. He's calm. He just needs to come home. I want you to drive around to the back. Take the alley off of Pendleton. You'll see us standing here. Pull right up to the door. We'll get him in the car." She said, "Okay. Okay. I'm coming. I'm coming right now." I hung up. I put the phone in my pocket. I leaned against the brick wall. I looked at Bill Hennessey standing in the alley in his boxer shorts looking up at the gutter. I said, "Bill, you doing okay?" He said, "I'm good, Curtis. Real good." I said, "Marie's coming around to pick you up here in just a minute. Easier than walking around the front. Okay?" He said, "Sounds good, Curtis." I waited. I felt my eyes go hot. I did not cry. I have not cried since 2009. But I felt my eyes go hot and I felt something break in me, in the alley behind my shop, and I made a decision that I want you to understand. I decided that I was going to figure out what was wrong with Bill Hennessey. I was not going to trust a doctor to do it. The doctors had told him for six years his numbers were perfect. The numbers were perfect and the man was standing in an alley in his underwear with no idea he was not wearing pants. I was going to figure out the gap between the numbers and the man, and I was going to do it because I owed it to him, because I had been cutting his hair for twenty-six years and he had told me about his wife's pork chops and his Civil War books and his Steelers and his fence line, and now he could not remember my name, and the doctors said his cholesterol was perfect. Marie pulled up. She got out of the car. She was crying. She had a pair of his sweatpants over her arm. She had grabbed them on the way out the door. She helped him into the back seat. She got the sweatpants on him in the car, sitting beside him in the back seat, while I held the door open from the alley. She looked at me. Her face was wet. She said, "Curtis, what do I do?" I said, "Marie. You drive him home. You sit with your mama. You give yourself a day. And then you call me. Because I am going to look into something. I have an idea. I'm not promising anything. But I'm going to look. And when I know something, I will call you." She nodded. She closed the door. She walked around to the driver's side. She got in. She drove away. I stood in the alley for about five minutes after she left. Then I went back inside. Tony was finishing up his customer. He looked at me when I came in. He said, "Bill okay?" I said, "Bill is not okay. Bill is in trouble. But he's gonna be okay because I'm gonna figure it out." Tony said, "Curtis, what are you gonna figure out? You're a barber." I said, "Tony, I am the only one looking. So I'm the only one who's gonna find it." That night I went home and I sat at my kitchen table with my notebook open in front of me, and I started a list of everything I knew about Bill, every change I had watched over six years, and I wrote down a question at the top of the page. I wrote, "If his numbers are perfect, why is he dying?" That was my question. And the next morning I started looking for the answer. I want to tell you about Mr. Haru and Mr. Kenji, because they are the first reason I started looking in the direction I started looking. Mr. Haru and Mr. Kenji own the little Japanese restaurant two doors down from my shop. Eight tables and a counter. They have owned it since 2004. Mr. Haru is seventy-eight. Mr. Kenji is seventy-five. They are brothers. Sato is the last name. They came over from Japan in the seventies and they ran a couple of restaurants up in Charlotte before they moved down here and opened this one. They cut each other's hair, which is a thing I have given them grief about for twenty-one years, and every so often they give up and come see me instead. I want you to understand who Mr. Haru is at seventy-eight. He runs a restaurant. He is behind that counter five days a week. He does the books himself. He drives himself to work in a 2019 Toyota. He plays cards on Thursday nights with three other men from the Japanese church over in Spartanburg. He reads two newspapers every morning, one in English and one in Japanese. He goes fishing every Saturday morning with his grandson out at Lake Hartwell. He remembers everyone's name who walks into that restaurant. He remembers the names of their kids. Mr. Kenji is seventy-five. He runs the front on weekends when Mr. Haru takes off. He is a little quieter than his brother, but he is just as sharp. He won a chess tournament at the cultural society up in Greenville last year. He won it. At seventy-five. The morning after Bill came into my shop without pants on, I went down to the restaurant. I stopped in before I opened up. They weren't open yet, but the door was unlocked, and Mr. Haru was sitting at the end of the counter with his English newspaper in his hands and his breakfast in front of him. His breakfast was a little bowl of brown beans. I need to tell you about the beans, because I have been smelling those beans for twenty-one years. Every morning of his life, Mr. Haru eats a small bowl of fermented soybeans. They are called natto. They smell — and I want to be honest with you because I am going to ask you to believe some other things I say — they smell like a gym sock that got left in a wet paper bag. And when he stirs them with his chopsticks, they string. They pull up out of the bowl in these long, glossy, sticky threads, like melted cheese except thinner and stranger, and they hang in the air, and he wraps them around his chopsticks and eats them and reads his paper. I have watched this man eat those beans, at that counter, every morning, for twenty-one years. Every time I have ever walked in there before eleven o'clock in the morning, there has been a bowl of those beans in front of him. Every time. Twenty-one years. I sat down on the stool next to him. I said, "Mr. Haru, I want to ask you a question." He folded his paper. He smiled. He said, "Mr. Curtis. Of course." I said, "Mr. Haru, you are seventy-eight years old. You work five days a week. You read the paper. You remember everyone. You go fishing. You drive yourself." He said, "Yes." I said, "How many people you know your age that are like you?" He thought about it. He said, "Many. Many people my age. My friends. My brother. The men I play cards with on Thursday. All sharp. All working still, most of us. My friend Mr. Ito still runs his market up in Charlotte. He is eighty-three." I said, "Mr. Haru, in this town, the men your age that I cut, I am watching them go away. I have known some of them twenty-five years. They are all on cholesterol pills. Their doctors all tell them they are doing great. And every single one of them is fading. Their wives drive them to the shop. They don't remember my name. They don't remember what they had for breakfast." He listened to me. He nodded slowly. He picked up his chopsticks and stirred the beans, and the strings came up. I said, "Mr. Haru, what do you do that they don't do?" He looked at me for a long time. Then he lifted the bowl about two inches off the counter. He said, "Mr. Curtis. We eat the beans." I said, "The beans." He said, "The beans. All my life. From a little boy. My mother gave me natto. My grandfather. Every morning. All my life. In Japan the old people eat it every day, and they say it is for the blood. That is what my grandmother told me. It is for the blood. It is what we do." I said, "For the blood." He said, "Yes, Mr. Curtis. For the blood." I sat there for a minute. I thought about it. I thought about all the mornings I had smelled those beans for twenty-one years. I thought about how many times Mr. Haru or Mr. Kenji had offered me a bowl and I had said no thank you and laughed about the smell, and now I was sitting there at fifty-eight years old wondering if I had been laughing at the wrong thing for twenty-one years. I said, "Mr. Haru. Could I have a bowl of that?" He laughed. Really laughed. He got up and went in the back and came out with a little bowl and set it down in front of me with a pair of chopsticks and a small packet of mustard and a small packet of soy. I ate it. I am not going to lie to you and tell you I loved it. The smell is the smell. The strings are the strings. It was salty and deep and a little sweet underneath and completely unlike anything I had ever put in my mouth, and I got it down, and Mr. Kenji came out of the kitchen halfway through and stood there watching me with his arms folded, grinning like a man who has waited twenty-one years for exactly this. I said, "Mr. Haru, where do you get this?" He said, "We get it from a family in California. But now you can get it anywhere. Or —" and he waved his hand — "the Americans, they take the part that works out of it and put it in a pill. My daughter takes the pill. She won't touch the beans." He laughed again. I said, "The part that works." He said, "The enzyme. There is a name for it. My daughter knows it." I said, "Thank you, Mr. Haru." I went back to my shop. I opened up. I cut hair all day. But I was thinking the whole time. That night I went home and I sat at my kitchen table again with my notebook. I wrote at the top of a new page, "Mr. Haru = sharp at 78 = eats fermented beans every morning of his life." I wrote underneath, "Bill = falling apart at 71 = coffee, Crestor, doctor every 6 months." Then I got out my laptop and I started reading. I want to tell you what I read, because I am going to lay this out the way I figured it out, step by step, because I think you need to understand it the way I understood it, because once I understood it everything made sense and I had been confused for six years. The first thing I learned is that cholesterol — the thing the doctor tests, the LDL number, the thing the Crestor brings down — is not the thing that closes your arteries. I want to repeat that because I had to read it three times before I believed it. Cholesterol is a fat molecule that is supposed to be floating around in your blood. It is part of how your body works. Every cell in your body needs it. Your brain is mostly cholesterol. Your hormones are made from cholesterol. Without cholesterol, you die. So why does the doctor want to lower it? Because of plaque. Plaque is what narrows your arteries. Plaque is what causes heart attacks and strokes. Plaque has cholesterol in it. The doctors decided, decades ago, that if cholesterol is in plaque, then lowering the cholesterol must lower the plaque. So they built a drug — the statin, like Crestor — that lowers the cholesterol number. The number goes down. The doctor is happy. The patient gets a thumbs up. But here is what nobody tells you at that appointment. Here is the thing I read at 11:30 at night in my kitchen that made me sit back in my chair and go, "Oh." Plaque is not a puddle of grease sitting on the wall of a pipe. Plaque is a structure. It is built. And it is built on a frame. Here is how it actually goes. LDL gets into the artery wall. The wall gets irritated and inflamed. And your body — which is not stupid, and is trying to help — treats that irritated spot the way it treats any injury anywhere else in you. It patches it. It lays down a web of stringy protein fibers across the damage, exactly the same material it uses to scab your knee when you fall on the driveway. That material is called fibrin. Fibrin is a mesh. It is a net. It is sticky and it is stringy and its entire job is to catch things and hold them in place so a repair can happen. And that is exactly what it does. It catches. It holds. More gets caught in the net. The net gets thicker. It gets patched again, and again, and the whole mess hardens around that mesh over years and decades, and what you end up with is plaque — cholesterol and cells and calcium and debris, all of it locked into a scaffold of fibrin, packed into the wall of an artery that used to be smooth. The cholesterol is the material. The fibrin is the frame it gets built on. And now I want you to hear the part that made me put my head in my hands at my own kitchen table. The statin lowers the material. It does not touch the frame. Nothing they gave Bill Hennessey for six years touched the frame. The Crestor took his LDL from one-eighty down to one-eighteen and did exactly what it was designed to do, and I am not going to sit here and tell you it did nothing, because it didn't do nothing. It slowed down the delivery of new material to the site. That is real. But every bit of scaffolding that was already built in that man stayed built. And his body, which had been laying down that patch material his whole life, and which lays it down faster and clears it slower the older you get, kept right on laying it down. And nobody was looking at that. Nobody measured it. There is no line on the standard panel for it. It does not show up at your physical. The doctor pulls up a screen with the number on it, and the number is beautiful, and the man in the chair is disappearing, and there is nothing on that screen that can see it. It is like — and this is the comparison I came up with at my kitchen table, and I am going to use it the rest of my life — it is like unplugging the smoke alarm instead of putting out the fire. The alarm stops going off. You think the problem is solved. The house keeps burning. That is what six years of "your numbers are perfect" did for Bill. It unplugged the alarm. Nobody ever went and looked at the fire. Then I read the part that explained Bill specifically, and this is where I stopped being angry and got scared instead. I read about what actually happens downstream when the frame keeps building and the blood itself gets stickier with age. The big arteries can lose a lot of room before you feel anything. The heart is a big pipe. The legs are big pipes. You can narrow those a long way and just be a man who gets winded on the stairs. But the smallest blood vessels in your body are the ones in your brain. There is a word for them. The microvasculature. Some of those capillaries are so fine that a red blood cell has to fold up and go through them single file, one at a time, like people going through a turnstile. Those are the first ones to go. They don't rupture. They don't give you a stroke that lands you in an ambulance. They just get less. Less flow, less oxygen, less of everything, to the tissue that holds your memory and your reasoning and your words and your judgment about whether you have put your pants on this morning. It happens slowly enough that everybody around you calls it aging, and the man it is happening to is the last person on earth who could tell you it is happening. I sat back. I thought about Bill's hands being cold in August. I thought about him forgetting his wallet. I thought about him losing the Steelers, and then the books, and then Janet's cooking, and then my name. I thought about him standing in an alley in his underwear looking up at a gutter. And I thought: they were watching the wrong thing the entire time. Not a wrong thing. THE wrong thing. For six years. Then I went looking for what actually clears fibrin, and this is the part I want you to read twice. Your body already has something that dissolves fibrin. It is an enzyme called plasmin. It is the cleanup crew. You lay a patch down, the patch does its job, plasmin comes along and takes it apart and hauls it off, and that is how it is supposed to work — build it, then clear it. The problem is that the cleanup crew slows down. It slows down as you get older. It slows down when you are inflamed. It slows down when you sit still, and when you are stressed, and it slows down all on its own for a lot of men in their sixties and seventies for reasons nobody can do anything about. So you get an old man laying down patch material at full speed with a cleanup crew working at half speed. Every year the balance tips a little further the wrong way. Every year a little more of the frame stays up. That is the fire. Not the number. The frame going up faster than it comes down. So then I asked the obvious question, which is: fine, what helps the cleanup crew? And here is what I found, and here is why I want to lay the failures out one at a time, because I had personally recommended half of these things to men in my chair over the years and I want to own that. The statin lowers the material. It does not take apart the frame. Fish oil thins things out a little at the edges. It does not take apart the frame. Red yeast rice is a weaker statin wearing a health-food label. Same lever. Same miss. CoQ10 on its own is a good idea for a man on a statin, because the statin drains it out of him and that is part of why his legs ache. It is a repair for a side effect. It does not take apart the frame. The baby aspirin — and this one matters, because half the men in my chair are on one and they think it is covering them — keeps platelets from clumping together and starting NEW trouble. It is a bouncer at the door. It does not go inside and clear out what is already in there. It does not take apart the frame. And the diet and the exercise, which are good and which you should do and which I am not going to say a word against, do not dissolve a mesh of protein that has been sitting in an artery wall for fifteen years. And for a big chunk of these men, the ones with it on both sides of the family, the ones who eat clean and run and still get handed a bad panel every single time — the diet was never going to be the answer anyway, and they have been carrying that failure around like it was their fault. It was not their fault. They were aimed at the fuel. Every one of them was aimed at the fuel. Not one of them was aimed at the frame. And then, at about one in the morning, I found the thing Mr. Haru's grandmother told him when he was a boy. In 1980, a Japanese researcher named Dr. Hiroyuki Sumi was working in a lab in Chicago, studying exactly this — how the body dissolves fibrin. He was hunting for something in ordinary food that could do what plasmin does. He tested a hundred and seventy-three different foods. He would take a dish with a fibrin clot in it, drop the food on it, and wait to see if anything happened. A hundred and seventy-two of them did nothing. Then he dropped on a spoonful of the stinking, stringy fermented beans he had grown up eating for breakfast. He came back and the clot was gone. Dissolved. In about eighteen hours, on a lab bench, at body temperature. He had been raised on the stuff. His grandmother had told him it was for the blood. And he was standing in an American laboratory looking at an empty dish. He isolated the enzyme that did it and he named it after the food. Nattokinase. It is the strongest fibrin-dissolving thing ever found in a food. Not a drug. A food. It has been eaten every single morning for over a thousand years by the people on this earth who live the longest, and the American food safety people signed off on it as safe back in 2003, and I would bet you the twenty-two dollars I charge for a haircut that your cardiologist has never once said the word to you. Do you want to know why? Because you cannot patent a bean. There is no drug company on earth that can own a fermented soybean that a Japanese grandmother has been putting in front of her grandson for a thousand years. There is nobody to pay for the billion-dollar trials. There is nobody to send a rep to your doctor's office with lunch for the whole staff. So it sits out there, on the shelf, in the aisle your doctor doesn't walk down, being the one thing anybody ever found that goes after the frame instead of the fuel. And then I found the population numbers, and I want to give them to you plain. There is a study out of Takayama, in Japan. They followed twenty-nine thousand, one hundred and thirty-two people for sixteen years. Sixteen years. And when they sorted them by how much natto they ate, the people eating the most had roughly a quarter fewer heart attacks and about a third fewer strokes than the people eating the least. Twenty-nine thousand people. Sixteen years. Beans. I sat back in my kitchen chair. I thought: this is Mr. Haru. This is Mr. Kenji. This is Mr. Ito who is eighty-three and still running a market in Charlotte. These men have been helping their cleanup crew every single morning since they were little boys. For seventy-eight years, somebody has been taking the frame apart in there while it was going up. That is why he is sharp at seventy-eight. That is why he still drives. That is why he remembers the names of my customers' children. That is the thing Bill Hennessey never had. Then I went looking for a brand, and I am not going to make you sit through the three weeks it took me. I read labels. I read about how it's made. I bought a few of them. I sat at that same kitchen table with four bottles lined up and read every panel with my glasses on, and I ended up learning four things that I think you should know before you spend a dollar on this, because most of what is on the shelf is not worth what you'd pay for it. Here is the first thing. Nattokinase is not measured in milligrams. It is measured in something called FU, fibrinolytic units, which is a measure of how much the enzyme actually DOES, not how much of it there is by weight. A company can put a big milligram number on the front of a bottle and it can mean almost nothing. The number that the human research is built around is 10,000 FU a day. Below that, you are buying a story. Second thing. Almost nobody gets you there in one capsule. They get you to three or four thousand and then the serving size on the back says "take three capsules" or "take four," and a man who is seventy-one and already swallowing five pills in the morning is going to take one of them and forget the other two by Thursday. I know that for a fact. I watched it happen to Bill with his own prescriptions. Third thing, and this is the one that made me throw one of the bottles out. Nattokinase is an enzyme, and enzymes are not minerals. They are fragile folded-up things and heat destroys them. If a company ferments the beans and then blasts them with high heat to dry them fast and cheap, they still get a powder, and the powder still goes in a capsule, and the label still says nattokinase — but the thing that does the work is not in there in any amount that matters anymore. You would never know. You would take it for six months and feel exactly nothing and decide supplements don't work. Fourth thing, and I would not have known to look for this if I had not read for three weeks. When you go after the frame, calcium gets loosened up in the process, and calcium that has nowhere to go can walk right back into the artery wall. There is a vitamin — K2 — whose entire job is to route that calcium into your bones where it belongs instead. A natto supplement with no K2 in it is doing half a job and stopping. The real beans have K2 in them naturally, because that is what the fermentation makes. Most of the capsules don't. The one I settled on is called Noverly. It is 10,000 FU — the full clinical amount from the research — in ONE capsule. Not three. One, in the morning, with food. It is fermented and dried at low temperature specifically so the enzyme survives the process instead of getting cooked on the way into the bottle. It has the K2 in it, so the calcium gets routed to bone instead of back into the wall. And it is not just the enzyme by itself — there are six other things in there working alongside it, the aged garlic and the CoQ10 and the bromelain and the turmeric and the pine bark and the grape seed, which is the whole crew rather than the one guy. That is what I ordered. That is what I still take, every morning, at fifty-eight years old, before I open the shop. I called Marie. I told her I had figured something out. I told her to come by the shop on her way home from work. I told her everything I just told you. The frame. The fibrin. The cleanup crew that slows down. The smoke alarm. Mr. Haru and the beans and the man in Chicago in 1980 with the empty dish. Noverly. And then I told her the two things I want to say to you now, and I said them in this order, and I meant them. I said, "Marie. Before you do anything — before you order it, before you give him one — I need you to call his pharmacist or his doctor's office and ask them. I am going to be firmer about this than I have been about anything else I have said to you. This enzyme works on fibrin. Blood thinners work on clotting. Warfarin, Eliquis, Plavix — and yes, the daily aspirin, the one nobody thinks to mention because it came from the same aisle as the vitamins. It is not necessarily anything at all. But it depends on his medication and his dose and what else he is taking, and the people who have his chart in front of them will tell you in two minutes. Make the call. Do not skip it because it's a supplement." She said she would. She did, that week. They told her it was fine for him. And then I said the second thing. I said, "Marie, I am not telling you to take your daddy off his Crestor. Do not do that. That is between you all and his doctor and it is not my business and it is not yours either. What I am telling you is that the Crestor was never designed to do this job. It is working on the material. Nobody has ever worked on the frame. Nobody has even looked at it. So let's look at it." She said, "Curtis, do you really think this could help him?" I said, "Marie, I have watched this town's necks for twenty-six years. I am telling you what I see. The men who have been doing this their whole lives don't end up like your dad. Get him on it. One capsule, every morning, with his breakfast. Give it ninety days. It comes with a ninety-day money-back guarantee — if nothing changes, you send it back and you get your money back. You are not risking anything except the ninety seconds it takes to hand a man a capsule with his coffee." I wrote the address down for her on the back of an appointment card. https://noverly.shop/products/nattokinase-10-000-fu-clinical-strength-heart-circulation-complex She put the card in her purse. She hugged me. She left. That was March 28, 2024. I am going to tell you what happened over the next twelve weeks, because I want you to understand that this is not something I am making up. This is what I watched, from my own chair, every three weeks, as Bill Hennessey came in for his haircuts. I have all of it in the notebook. I am reading from the notebook as I write this. The first visit after Marie started him on it was April 12, 2024. Three weeks after the pants. Marie dropped him off and walked him in. She caught my eye from the door and gave me a little look that I read as, "Maybe." Bill sat down in my chair. I draped the cape. I said, "How you doing, Bill?" And he said, "Pretty good, Curtis." And then he said something I had not heard him say in over a year. He said, "How you been?" That was it. Three words. "How you been." But I wrote it down in the notebook that night. Because Bill had not asked me how I was doing in fourteen months. He didn't have much else to say in the chair that day. But he had asked me how I was doing. That was something. And one other thing, which I did not write down until later that week because I did not trust it at the time. When I took his hand to help him up out of the chair, his hand was warm. The second visit was May 3, 2024. Six weeks in. Marie dropped him off and this time she came in with him and stayed in the waiting chair. I noticed her sitting there. I had not seen her sit down in my shop in over a year. She was watching him. Bill sat down. I said, "How you doing, Bill?" He said, "Doing all right, Curtis." Then he said — and I have this written down word for word — "Janet made meatloaf last night. The kind with the brown sugar on top. It was real good." He had not told me what Janet made for dinner in more than two years. I almost dropped my comb. I looked at Marie in the mirror. She was looking at me. She had her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wet. I said, "That sounds real good, Bill." He said, "Yeah. She put a little Worcestershire in the brown sugar. First time she's done that. Real good." I cut his hair. He told me a few more things. He told me his grandsons had come over Sunday. He told me one of them had lost a tooth. He told me that his neighbor — the one he had had the fence line fight with back in 2009 — had moved away last fall, and there was a new family in the house now, and he didn't know them yet but they had a yellow Lab puppy. He had not given me that kind of information in over two years. Marie walked him out. As they were leaving she squeezed my arm and didn't say anything, because if she had tried to say anything she would have cried and Bill was right there. I just nodded at her. That night I wrote in the notebook: "Six weeks. Meatloaf. The grandsons. The puppy. Something is happening." The third visit was May 24, 2024. Nine weeks in. Bill walked in by himself. I want you to read that again. Bill Hennessey walked into my shop by himself. Marie was not with him. He had driven himself. He came in the door and he saw me and he said, "Hey, Curtis," and he walked right over to my chair without stopping to look at Tony's chair or hesitating about which one was mine. He sat down. He took his coat off himself before I had to ask. He folded it over his lap. He looked at me in the mirror and he smiled, and his eyes were the eyes of Bill Hennessey. He said, "How you been, Curtis? How's the shop?" I said, "Shop's good, Bill. How you been?" He said, "I've been better than I've been in a while. I don't know what it is. I've just been feeling better. Sleeping better. I've been reading again. I finished a book about Lee at Gettysburg last week, and I have to tell you about it, because there's a part about the second day I had never read anywhere before." He talked for the entire haircut. He talked about Lee at Gettysburg. He talked about Janet's cooking. He talked about the new family next door with the yellow Lab and how he had gone over and introduced himself and the husband worked at the Michelin plant and they had three kids. He talked about the Steelers and their quarterback situation. He talked about a fishing trip he wanted to take with his grandsons that summer. He talked for the entire haircut. When I was done I held up the hand mirror. He looked at the back. He said, "Looks great, Curtis. Same as always. Thanks, buddy." He stood up out of the chair by himself. He walked to the register. He counted out the cash himself. He tipped me four dollars instead of three. He walked out the door. He got in his Buick. He drove away. I stood at my register for about a minute and did not move. Tony, in the next chair, said, "Curtis. What just happened." I said, "Tony. I just got my friend back." That night I called Marie. I said, "Marie. He drove himself today. He talked the whole haircut. He told me about Lee at Gettysburg for ten minutes." She was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Curtis, he went to the doctor yesterday." I said, "And." She said, "His cholesterol is still great. The Crestor is doing its thing, same as always. But the doctor kept going back and forth between the screen and my dad, and finally he put the chart down and said, 'I don't know exactly how to write this up. His color is better. His blood pressure came down eleven points and I didn't change anything. His inflammation markers are down. His hands are warm. He's sitting up. He looks ten years younger than he did at Christmas.' And then he said, 'What have you been doing?'" I said, "What did you tell him?" She said, "I told him a barber figured it out." She said the doctor laughed, and then he stopped laughing, and then he took out a piece of paper and wrote the name down. That was two years ago. Bill Hennessey is seventy-three now. He still comes in every three weeks. He drives himself every time. He takes one capsule every morning with his breakfast, and he still takes his Crestor, because his doctor still wants him on it and nobody in this story ever told him to stop. He is not twenty-five. He is a seventy-three-year-old man and he has bad knees and he complains about them Now I want to talk to whoever is still reading this. I am a barber. I want to be clear about that one more time. I do not have letters after my name. I am not going to sit here and tell you this is a cure for anything, and I am not going to tell you what happened to Bill will happen to you, because I don't know you and I don't know what's going on inside you. But I know what I watched for six years, and I know what I have watched for the two years since, and I know that not one single doctor in this story ever looked at anything except a number on a screen. So here is who I am talking to. If you are fifty-something or sixty-something and it runs in your family. If you watched your daddy go down in a driveway or a hallway or a parking lot and you have quietly assumed for thirty years that the same thing is coming for you. If your last panel came back and the number was fine and you did not feel fine. If you got a scan and a score and they told you the hard stuff never goes away and you have been carrying that around ever since. If you have done the diet and the walking and the fish oil and the red yeast rice and your body ignored every bit of it, and some part of you decided the problem must be you. The problem was not you. You were aimed at the fuel. Nobody ever handed you anything aimed at the frame. If that is you, here is exactly what I would do, in this order. Call your pharmacist first. If you take warfarin, Eliquis, Plavix, or a daily aspirin, that call is not optional, and I would rather you close this and never buy anything than skip it. It takes two minutes. They have your chart in front of them. Do not stop your statin. Do not change anything your doctor put you on. This is not a replacement for it and I am not fighting with your doctor. Your statin is working on the material. This is the other job. Get the real amount. 10,000 FU. Not four thousand, not "a proprietary blend." And get it in one capsule, because the supplement you actually take every morning beats the better one you quit in April. Give it ninety days. Not two weeks. Ninety. Your body has been building that frame for thirty years; give the cleanup crew a season to work. And be honest with yourself about what you're watching for, because it will not be dramatic. It was not dramatic with Bill. It was three words in a barber chair. It was a warm hand. It was a man remembering meatloaf. If you are waiting for fireworks you will miss it. Watch for the small things coming back. It's here: https://noverly.shop/products/nattokinase-10-000-fu-clinical-strength-heart-circulation-complex Ninety-day money-back guarantee. If you give it a season and nothing comes back, you send it back and you're out nothing but the ninety seconds a day it took to swallow it. I would not have written eleven pages about it if I thought you were risking something. One more thing and then I'll stop. They sell out. I don't know the ins and outs of their business and I am not going to pretend I do, but the fermentation takes as long as the fermentation takes — you cannot rush a thousand-year-old process to meet demand — and twice now I have gone to reorder for myself and had to wait. If it's in stock when you go, and this is for somebody you love, get theirs too. I wish somebody had told Bill Hennessey about this in 2018 instead of telling him his numbers were perfect.