“You must come in—and I’ll cut your hair.” This was one of the first things John said to my then-boyfriend, Michael, and later to me, when he met us. It was an offering of benevolence, a proclamation of intent, a declaration of future friendship that would extend three decades. It was 1993. I was twenty-six years old. John was in his mid-thirties, and was living between New York and Los Angeles. He was a successful hairdresser with ambitions of opening his own salon in the city. One of the first stories I remember Michael telling me about John was his earliest childhood memory in rural Ireland. He was born in the village of Ardagh (population: 226) with three pubs, a church, a school, and a couple of tiny grocery stores in County Limerick: John was the fifth boy of ten children, and his older brothers hauled him down to the river to drown him, like a puppy, so there wouldn’t be another mouth to feed.
Later, John would tell us other stories about his youth and his early years in London. And during the summer of 2022, after he was diagnosed with leukemia and underwent a bone-marrow transplant, John emailed me several pages of his own writing. When we talked on the phone, he expressed his desire to write a memoir about his life as well as his doubts as a writer, given his lack of formal education. After reading the entries, I encouraged John to pursue the project—the writing was vivid, his story remarkable. He had hoped to begin writing right away, but his energy and focus were diminished from the surgery and the treatments, so John decided he would begin writing in earnest once he recovered from the cancer.
John Francis Barrett grew up in a yellow house, with three bedrooms (one for the boys, one for the girls, and one for his mother and father), which sat along a winding road. The O’Connors, the Danahers, and the Hogans were their neighbors. Most afternoons, on his way home from school or walking along with his mother, John would encounter Molly Hogan leaning on her gate, smoking a cigarette and waiting for people to come by for a good gossip. “By J, Mrs. Barrett, I smelt a fry there last night when you were at bingo.” Most sentences started with this expression, “by j,” a reference to the ever-presence man himself, Jesus.
The Barrett house was spartan: There was a fire, a four-ring cooker, and a single lightbulb hung from the ceiling. A bucket for peeing was positioned at the end of each bed. A barrel next to the front door collected rainwater, which was used for everything but drinking. Rats rasped within the walls. Most mornings started with burnt porridge and possibly a sandwich wrapped in newspaper to take to school. Boiled potatoes were a staple for many meals. John’s father abandoned the family for protracted spells of time, living in London, sleeping with other women, wanting very little to do with his children, only returning long enough for violent drunken episodes and to impregnate his wife yet again.
John stopped attending school at age twelve. “My mother was always having ideas of how to get rid of me,” John wrote in one of the entries. When he was thirteen years old, his mother sent him away to work as a live-in houseboy at Crescent College, a Jesuit day school for boys in Limerick City, twenty-four miles north of Ardagh. His daily tasks included cleaning up after the priests and the brothers and other domestic chores. At the school, he ate better than at home with regular breakfasts of eggs, sausage, and bacon. Still, John quietly foraged the cupboards and stole boxes of holy communion wafers and greedily ate them (“definitely a mortal sin but I wasn’t concerned”).
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When I first met John at Michael’s apartment on the Upper West Side, I was taken by his striking looks: his pair of deep dimples that punctuated his cheeks, his understated goatee that softened his angular chin, his glacier-blue eyes, his Irish accent tinted with English (an attempt to diminish his origins). He wore a white Izod shirt and a pair of pink Madras shorts and spotless white tennis shoes. His silver-and-pepper hair was cut short, a little longer on the top. His demeanor was warm and kind, as if we had already been friends for a very long time. During this first meeting, I didn’t know John was going to have a profound influence on my life, that he would teach me about the complexities of beauty—inside and out—and help me to grow into my own beauty, and this, in turn, would provide more solid footing for my place, and voice, in the world.
Within months of meeting each other, John and Michael had developed an easy and fast rapport animated with humor and dark wit. Like brothers. They both had arrived in New York City after leaving home at a young age with ambitions to succeed in their respective careers—Michael as a professional actor and John as a popular hairstylist—something that they both realized in their twenties despite growing up in poverty. (Michael’s family lived on food stamps and welfare during stretches of his youth.) Both stopped using alcohol and drugs after it was clear that neither one would survive a precarious existence riddled with violent blackouts and relationships that revolved around varying degrees of self-annihilation and self-hate. They shared these stories with each other. John lovingly called Michael “feckin’ eejit.”
The three of us often went to dinner at a Cuban-Chinese restaurant on the West Seventy-Second Street, where we met our other friends. When we walked through the door, the waiter already knew our orders and would place the dishes soon after we sat down at our favorite table. Lively conversations ensued about spirituality, Catholicism, the latest Broadway hit, and current politics over crackling chicken or pork chops, black beans, yellow rice, and plantains. In addition to these dinners, we enjoyed other times with John. Ocean swims on the eastern end of Long Island (we tried to teach John to water-ski without success). Walks that threaded through the Upper West Side and Central Park (when he first moved to the city we lived on opposite sides of the park). Being together while we celebrated our mutual friends’ weddings (John was my date at a Kennedy wedding), birthdays (John hosted Michael’s fiftieth birthday party at his Midtown apartment), and later, memorial services (our dear friend, Dan Cronin, who died from complications related to AIDS in 2004).
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John moved to London when he was a teenager and lived with a family in Cranworth Gardens before renting a room at Bellfields Road in Brixton. Throughout the city, he found odd jobs—like bussing tables at a restaurant at Lyons Corner House in Charing Cross—before landing a position sweeping hair at Michaeljohn Salon and later as a hairdresser apprentice at Robert Fielding Salon. “Looking back, my main ambition was to keep a job long enough to get vacation pay,” John wrote in one of the vignettes he had shared with me. “This was elusive because I was always getting fired.”
By the mid-Seventies, John managed to secure a position as a full-time stylist and experienced his first encounters with wealthy people. When customers or boyfriends asked him where he was from, John made up a fictional family who never fought and lived in Iver, a town near Windsor (“I chose this town,” John wrote, “because I learned through the gossip press that a member of the royal family lived there”). He often fabricated an entirely new personal history, depending on who he was talking to. A chameleon of many hues. Once he told a woman that he was Jewish because she was. Even his long-term boyfriend, Peter, in London didn’t know the truth of John’s childhood of poverty and hardship. By the time Michael and I met John in New York City, he was in the habit of telling the full truth: It was the nature of our relationship; in fact, John shared about very challenging periods of his life that aren’t mine to share, but he felt comfortable talking about these darker times of shame with us.
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Like a lot of people in John’s world, part of my friendship with him happened when I sat in his chair, with John standing behind me, a pair of slender scissors poised in one hand and a black plastic comb in the other. A swift alchemy occurred within ten or fifteen minutes. It was a sleight-of-hand feat that operated from the outside in, producing a subtle measure of self-esteem or self-acceptance, depending on the emotional weather of your day. This was certainly true for me. And, according to his New York Times obituary, this was also true for the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and President of Bergdorf Goodman’s Dawn Mello (known as Miss Mello in the industry), who was so impressed by one haircut that she offered John the opportunity to set up shop in the penthouse of Bergdorf’s.
Before I met John, I always kept my hair short. At the time, I veered toward androgyny. I felt more comfortable hiding my body, my sexuality, most of myself, really. Until I met Michael, I had never had a serious boyfriend. In college, I often drank to blackout and most of my encounters with men were fueled by alcohol and occasionally drugs (lines of cocaine, magic mushrooms); it was easier to be unconscious than to try and understand the knotted mass of pain and confusion that resided inside of me. This lack of consciousness provided yet another scrim of invisibility; I thought if I couldn’t see myself, no one else would either. Not surprisingly, these alcoholic experiences—and the recovery that followed—also deepened my connection and intimacy with Michael and John. Through long-term sobriety and multiple years of therapy, I came to understand that many factors contributed to my own discomfort and confusion, but it largely stemmed from being raised by a depressed, traumatized mother.
The most difficult years occurred in between my mother’s marriages, when she was working full-time, and attempting to take care of my three older siblings and me. In my school photo from the second grade, a pale blue barrette is clipped crookedly near the center of my part, my hair tangled. My mom had suffered a severe brain injury from a bike accident and slipped into a coma for nineteen hours. After three nights in the hospital, she returned home. “My brain had been jarred, and the world presented itself as a movie,” my mom later told me. This harrowing experience only exacerbated her depression and made it more difficult for her to function. My mom stayed in bed for weeks while demanding that my sister and I fetch $100,000 candy bars from the corner drugstore for her on a regular basis. With no one to take care of us, my siblings and I were left to fend for ourselves.
As I grew into my teens, I began to understand my mother possessed expensive tastes, favoring Oscar De La Renta and Albert Nippon designs and Ferragamo shoes and color-coordinated Belgian loafers, which far outpaced her income as a dental hygienist and later a manager of a health-food store and restaurant. She wasn’t one for handing out compliments or tips about how to embrace one’s own beauty. Instead, she was largely critical, taking me to a salon once with no explanation when I was thirteen years old. Soon, I discovered she had made a waxing appointment for my eyebrows and upper lip. Afterwards, she explained in few words that my thick eyebrows and the tiny population of dark hairs that sprouted near the corners of my lips were unbecoming. I’m glad we took care of that.
I developed late, compared to my peers, and went from being the shortest girl in my class to the tallest one in the ninth grade. I often stood with slumped shoulders, my gaze averted; my mother and father were constantly telling me to stand up straight. As it turns out, several curves warped my lower spine, and for two years, I underwent frequent X-rays, and a spine specialist measured the bends of my vertebrae—I vividly remember the doctor positioning a plastic protractor against the ghostly film on the illuminated lightbox, measuring the angles and marking the shifting degrees with a wax pencil—to see if I was growing into the curves or out of them. Luckily, I didn’t have to get a neck-to-hip brace, like the protagonist of Judy Blume’s Deenie (which I read obsessively, trying to understand what it might mean to live with a brace when it was unclear if I might need to be fitted for one).
This bodily bewilderment was only compounded by my mother’s fierce drunken rages. I hate men! I hate men! she’d yelled after too many glasses of red wine, the walls of our house vibrating with her shrill sorrow, as we ran through the house, unplugging the phones in the kitchen and the bedroom, so our mother wouldn’t call anyone, usually her ex-boyfriends, and have humiliating conversations she wouldn’t remember the following morning as she nursed her debilitating hangovers with pink cans of Tab. As a child and a teenager, I didn’t know what to make of these episodes, but it kept me distant from men. On the other side of the spectrum, my father’s second wife decided I needed to wear clothes that complimented my figure. One winter afternoon during the eighth grade, she announced we were going to Saks Fifth Avenue so she could buy me “a sexy dress to show off your body.” She picked out a red knit number with a trio of beige leather buttons that traveled diagonally across my abdomen. The dress certainly met my stepmother’s objective: It showed off my svelte figure. I wore the dress once. On Christmas Day, at my father’s house for dinner.
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That first afternoon in his chair, John said with unwavering certainty: “Darling, you must grow out your hair.” After several haircuts from John, my hair had grown in—thick, shiny, and healthy. I felt less uneasy when I attracted the gazes of others. I wore skirts and dresses to work. I bought a pair of cowboy boots. I tried my best to accept Michael’s compliments about my attractiveness. Still, I argued that he was the handsome one of the couple with his actor good looks (blue eyes, chiseled chin, and open smile). My insecurities were only amplified by his illustrious relationship history: Michael dated a few women who went on to become wildly successful movie stars. His last long-term girlfriend was a professional dancer for the New York City Ballet. All these women reflected high ideals of beauty and grace. Despite our mutual interests and physical chemistry, I often felt like I wasn’t pretty enough, that it was just a matter of time before Michael would leave me for someone else.
After my hair had grown to my shoulders, strangers stopped me on the street and commented, “You have the most beautiful hair.” Students in salon schools asked if they could cut my hair for practice. I always said, “No.” The transformation was gradual and swift at the same time, like a Polaroid snapshot slowly coming into focus, the positive elements of the metallic silver remaining while the negative is peeled away. Maybe I could step into my self—and see myself more clearly. I went from not knowing I had beautiful hair to only allowing John to cut my hair (he would cut my hair for sixteen years). And I went from having no boyfriend to dating the man who I would eventually marry and spend the rest of my life with.
I knew I was lucky.
Each time I sat in his chair, John was entirely in charge: He would cut my hair with no input from me. After all, he was the expert. I trusted John. When I turned thirty years old, he decided to add a few blonde highlights. (He did the color himself.) At the time, he was renting a chair in an intimate salon on the Upper East Side, waiting for the details to be worked out for his new salon, which would reside high above The Plaza with unbroken views of Central Park—the penthouse at Bergdorf Goodman. I’ll always remember that small salon, mostly because it was John and me alone in the first-floor space. It was calm and peaceful, like a monastic chapel. Watery sunlight sluiced through the brownstone windows. Bright green leaves clattered against the glass. It would be the last time that I would experience this kind of intimacy and quiet with John because his new salon at Bergdorf’s was a relentless hive of activity, one room folding into the next, almost every chair filled with a client, thumbing through the latest copies of Vogue and Glamour, or chatting with their stylist about what event or dinner party they were attending that night or the next destination of their international travels.
John opened his salon at Bergdorf Goodman in 1996. I remember navigating the ground floor to the elevators that rose up to his salon in the penthouse: the atomized clouds of floral perfume and the ever-cheerful model-like salespeople holding silver trays of various samples, the sparkling designer jewelry shimmering underneath the illuminated banks of spotless glass counters, the angular mannequins clad in the latest fashions with price tags equivalent to my monthly salary at Rolling Stone, where I worked as an assistant editor. You never knew who you might ride the mirrored elevator with—Peter Bogdanovich or Judi Dench or a friend of John’s bringing her young daughter to have her hair cut in the salon for the very first time. Within months of opening his new salon, John was styling the hair of some of the most famous women: Jennifer Aniston and other cast members of Friends, Martha Stewart, Beyoncé, Hillary Clinton, and others. Michael and I certainly didn’t fit in with his glamorous clientele, but I think John welcomed us into his chair because we offered him a respite from this unspoken pressure; he didn’t have to put on a show for us.
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The summer of 1997 John got a call to go to the Carlyle Hotel to do Princess Diana’s hair. (She often stayed in the 1,800-square-foot Royal Suite on the twenty-second floor.) It was a busy day at the salon and with very little time to spare, John took a cab uptown to the hotel. When John arrived, somewhat breathless, his assistant was already there, showing the princess photos of her own children. As John styled Princess Diana’s hair, the stress and jitters of this momentous occasion fell away. Both being outsiders, John and the princess hit it off during that first meeting. They seamlessly moved from topic to topic: Balmoral, her least favorite place to be stuck; her boys; Mother Teresa. The next morning, he returned to her suite and Princess Diana reported on the dinner party she attended the night before, about “being trapped between one of the dreariest men in New York City and one not much better.”
Then, the princess said, “Shall we have some fun?” Delighted, John said yes. Everywhere the princess traveled, she was greeted by thousands and thousands of letters and the palace chose five or six letters for her to read and then the rest were sent back home to be sorted. “One was from a plastic surgeon offering his services,” John wrote. “I was shocked that the most beautiful most photographed woman in the world received a letter like this. Perhaps he thought there was a one in a million chance she would take him up on the offer. We definitely giggled.” The next letter was sent by a woman who wrote that she identified with the princess’s pain and wanted to offer her healing services. “I think there was some mention of a rabbit’s foot,” John wrote. The other letters were merely solicitations from rapacious individuals hoping that Princess Diana would carry or wear whatever they were selling.
A few weeks later, the two saw each other again. John asked the princess why she had returned to the city. “She said Mother Teresa wasn’t expected to last much longer and wanted to see her before she died,” John wrote. As it turns out, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa had a visit, and then walked hand in hand in the streets of the Bronx. A month later upon arriving in Saint-Tropez for vacation, John learned about Princess Diana’s car accident and death. Mother Teresa died of heart failure a few days later in Kolkata.
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Two weeks after the tragedy of Princess Diana’s death, Michael and I got married on the eastern end of Long Island. We chose this location because it was near the city, so our friends could attend and Michael had spent many summers there; when he was younger, he had worked as an assistant for the abstract painter Dan Christensen in Springs. By chance, I had taught patients at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, which connected me to an Episcopal priest who gave us access to a summer church in Amagansett, where the ceremony would be held. John agreed to do my hair for the wedding. He reminded me more than once: “Kirk, I don’t do weddings.” I was still struggling with the conventional notion of being a traditional bride. John had requested that I buy a Lily of the valley (my birth flower) for the special day. Another friend was kind enough to allow me to get ready in her small cedar-shingled cottage that overlooked Gardiner’s Bay in Springs, with John, my sister, and a few close friends.
Not long after, my mother and my older brother arrived at the modest cottage. My mother wore a beautiful steel-blue dress with a fine silver filigree of delicate dragonflies hovering across the front and a pair of narrow Art Deco earrings, shaped like stretched-out teardrops. My mother knew how to dress up for special occasions. This still surprised me, took my breath away, how she could show up with such grace and elegance. Maybe she was a different kind of mother, a mother who I was proud of, a mother who had passed along a genetic inheritance of classic beauty rather than the mental anguish that would reveal itself with long periods of depression, suicide attempts, and verbal abuse throughout my lifetime. Perhaps things weren’t so bad.
At the time, my mother was in between her second and third marriages, but she and her husband-to-be had recently announced they would marry in a small ceremony in Grosse Pointe in early October. It was a marriage that was seemingly driven more by financial circumstances than love: Her third husband was wealthy, and my mother hoped he would take care of her as they aged together into their twilight years. (In a cruel reversal, her third husband developed dementia in his early eighties. Soon, his eldest son claimed guardianship over his father’s affairs, separated their assets, and discontinued paying my mother’s medical expenses.)
During the day of the wedding, my mother held it together, as she often did, but her rage quietly radiated from her refined presence. I could tell that she was stressed by any number of things, so I did my best to keep my interactions with her at a minimum. At the same time, the doubts of my younger self lingered: Aren’t you a little out of your league here? You don’t deserve this man. What are you thinking?! Instead of listening to these internal debates, I gave John my complete focus and attention. The afternoon of the ceremony, he styled my hair—which dropped well below my shoulders—and artfully arranged the delicate bell-shaped flowers into a silver clip that was precisely positioned at the back. “Everyone is going to be looking at the back of your hair when you and Mike are standing at altar,” he said. “We need to make sure you look beautiful from all directions.” As we were getting closer to departing for the church, John stood behind me and tightened the three thin satin ties that held my bridal gown together. This simple intimate act—the careful tightening of the ribbons at the back of my dress—produced a recalibration of my soul and spirit that afternoon. It felt as if he was tightening the cinch of a saddle on a thoroughbred right before the most important race of its life. “Kirk, remember, you are beautiful,” John whispered to me. “You are a beautiful woman.”
The tears rolled down my cheeks. I believed him. It was possible to be authentically beautiful, that it wasn’t just the elegant dress that I was wearing, but also it was all of the work and healing—the countless meetings, the years of therapy, the cultivation of a spiritual life—that brought out the most beautiful part of myself. This was the path that John, Michael and I shared together. Nothing could diminish this fact—our friendship, my love for Michael, our shared journey.
Our wedding day remains one of the most memorable days of my life. Thanks to John and others, I was able to bring my best self to the occasion: I felt confident, beautiful, alive. At the reception, I gave a speech that I had been writing in my mind for weeks, with the bruised apricot and lavender bands of the setting sun behind the two of us, about the moment I knew I would be spending the rest of my life with Michael and deciding on the importance of expressing our commitment in a public sort of way rather than elopement. Michael spoke about a short story by Raymond Carver—“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”—and how he thought he was destined to be like the cardiologist in the story, never truly experiencing, or believing in, a pure kind of love, and hating those who did, but then he had found me. Our friend, Dan Cronin, sang a breathtaking rendition of “Danny Boy.” Even my father cried.
That day, I experienced very little of the tensions and entanglements that I often encountered with my parents. It was a perfect day. It was a perfect wedding. Later, I would learn that my mother was enraged, that she wanted a more active role in helping me to get ready that afternoon. A few weeks later, we talked on the phone. “You are so selfish,” my mother said in a tone familiar from my childhood. Through my tears, I managed to say, “But it was my wedding.”
It was a complicated moment. At the time, I didn’t understand the origins of my mother’s hostility and aggression. I wondered if she was upset because I was exchanging vows with a man whom I truly loved, and this admiration and affection was mutual. Perhaps our love was too much to tolerate. Or perhaps she was enraged because we would never have a mother-daughter relationship that some of her friends had with their own daughters. In retrospect, I understand this wasn’t possible, given all of the damage, trauma, and addiction that had been handed down through the generations. Eventually, more than two decades later, my mother came around and saw our love for what it was. More than once, she said I was lucky, that Michael and I had something special that not everyone had. At the same time, her mental illness only worsened, landing her in a string of psychiatric wards and long-term care facilities. Soon after my father’s death, my mother stopped eating and died in February 2020. Even though my parents had divorced more than five decades earlier, my mom was still connected to my father, and his death opened the door to her own.
On that day in early September 1997, I knew John was essential to the joy and celebration of our wedding. He served as a much-needed buffer between my mother and me. Given his own experience, he was an expert at identifying and navigating maternal rage and anguish. He ensured that I felt beautiful—both inside and out.
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In summer 2004, Michael and I moved to Austin, Texas, because he was accepted into a three-year MFA program at the Michener Center for Writers, with the tuition fully funded as well as a living stipend for three years. It was hard to leave New York, but it was an opportunity too good to pass up, particularly since Michael had been a high school dropout and had never attended college as a full-time student. Despite our move to Texas, we stayed in touch with John with regular visits in the city and I still managed to sit in his chair once or twice a year.
The last time I got my hair cut by John was in August of 2009. Ted Kennedy had just passed away after fighting brain cancer for fifteen months. I remember talking about Senator Kennedy’s legacy, his efforts with the national health care issue, and the famous, complex family while John cut my hair. I had spent three weeks at an artists’ residency in Saratoga Springs, where I mostly worked eight-hour days, revising a novel manuscript. The Amtrack train had been late, getting into Penn Station, so I went directly to John’s salon as soon as I arrived in the city. In the mirror’s reflection, I remember the shadowy half-moons that hung below my eyes and the alert brightness of John’s blue eyes as he stood behind me, and then the rectangular profusion of green that was Central Park in full view from the penthouse windows. This was one of my favorite aspects of the Bergdorf salon: the aerial view of the ever-changing seasonal treetops of Central Park visible through the tall windows.
Halfway through my haircut, I noticed a flurry of activity at the station behind me. Several employees were attending to a beautiful woman. Her facial structure was exquisite, her radiant smile almost blinding. It was Stefanía Fernández, a tall, slender brunette with an exquisite smile and shimmering eyes. She had won the title of Miss Venezuela and then Miss Universe the following year; her pageantry campaign was focused on HIV/AIDS awareness and education—another famous AIDS advocate, like Princess Diana—and Fernández traveled to multiple countries to increase this awareness.
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In April of 2019, John started a new business, a 6,400-square-foot salon located at 36 East Fifty-Seventh Street between Madison and Park Avenue. Though I had never visited the space, it has been described as a more intimate salon, reflecting more of John and his personal style and tastes. The salon is filled with books and art from his own collection. Stunning floral arrangements dot the airy space. Thomas Keller’s Bouchon offers a menu of light fare. The floor-to-ceiling windows delivers copious amounts of natural light into the elegant, well-appointed space. “My business should make people feel like home,” John wrote. Later, John had called Michael and told him that he had to file for bankruptcy after the pandemic hit, but then the salon re-emerged from the crisis and he managed not to lay off any of his employees. Despite the financial crisis, he emerged almost victorious, taking care of his people, the way he always did.
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During the summer of 2022, Michael and I learned John had been diagnosed with leukemia. When he was discharged from hospital soon after his bone-marrow transplant, we began to attend a zoom gathering of some of John’s closest friends. “The whole leukemia experience has been an extraordinary revelation,” John said. “I’ve never received such kindness. Unfortunately, there lies the problem, you see, I’m very good at giving, loving, and encouraging, but when it comes my way, it’s hard.” At first, the prognosis after the transplant was very good. The treatment was taking: John’s blood was being replaced, and he would need new vaccines for his new blood. But then complications occurred: infections and more surgeries, fluctuations of the cancer numbers. Sometimes, John would be too fatigued to attend the nightly gatherings. Most of time a good deal of optimism was expressed about his chances for survival. John went back to work at the salon. He was confident that he would beat the cancer—and return to his former self and resume full responsibilities as the boss and the leader of his salon.
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The last time Michael and I saw John was on the late afternoon of July 20, 2023. It was a warm summer day in Manhattan. He had invited us to his Midtown apartment for a visit. He said the door would be open. When I arrived, I asked from the hallway if he wanted me to wear a mask, and he said, “No, just sit over there.” Michael had already arrived and was sitting in a chair in the far corner of John’s bedroom. I positioned another chair next to his. John was lying on one side of his king-size bed, dressed in a white T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. His skin was pale and translucent. Even though he was visibly sick, he looked as handsome as the first day that I met John in the mid-Nineties. Admittedly, we had all changed—and stayed the same in some ways: Michael had lost most of his hair, wearing it short on the sides. My thick hair still dropped to my shoulders, but pronounced streaks of silver framed my face.
That afternoon, John spoke softly and smiled as we told him about our recent adventures to Scotland and Northern Ireland. The summer sun dappled the bedroom with shifting patterns of shadows and light. Distant street noise traveled up to the eleventh floor. Elegant orchids stood, like dignified sentinels, in ceramic pots throughout the apartment. Much of the wall space was dedicated to high bookcases filled with countless coffee-table and limited-edition art books and John’s remarkable art collection (including works by Lucien Freud, Elisabeth Frink, Joe Gaffney, and Helmut Newton). A multitude of violets lined the narrow boxes that sat on cement shelves of his bedroom windows.
We talked about his current treatments and our many mutual friends and then about Elaine Stritch and how she returned to Michigan to start drinking again and die. He talked about the close circle of friends who were helping to take care of him during the myriad procedures, hospitalizations, and tests. Despite the dire nature of his circumstances, John appeared to be relaxed and at ease. He was certain that he was going to overcome the cancer, there was going to be another side. He had the best doctors in the world—and they had faith.
Before the end of our visit, John invited us to step inside his spacious walk-in closet where his pressed suits and shirts were displayed, his sweaters neatly folded, his many pairs of shoes carefully arranged, rows of leather belts and colorful and neutral ties.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Take a look.”
John had designed the closet himself—an intimate hidden room of style, refinement, and abundance. Since he was so sick, he wanted to show us something that gave him delight and pleasure in his life. It was as if he was saying with this simple request: “I might be dying over here, but look at my beautiful closet.” A soft sadness surged inside of me, perhaps not wanting to recognize that John might not wear any of these expensive clothes again. Instead, I did my best to express admiration and awe. Some part of me wanted to remain in the enormous windowless closet, sit on the carpeted floor amid the suspended empty sleeves and folds of luxuriant fabrics, the careful stacks of cashmere sweaters, and the sturdy wool suits.
I didn’t want to say goodbye.
During the past year, John once told me about a conversation he had over dinner with the great Irish writer Edna O’Brien. She asked him, “What was the most consequential thing your mother has ever said to you?” John said that it didn’t take him long to answer O’Brien. “You will never amount to anything. You’re just like that old fucker.” His mother was referring to his father, who was also named John Barrett. “Nurture and love weren’t any part of my childhood,” wrote John in one of the entries. “Although I’m surrounded by an abundance of love, I still hold it at an arm’s length because I’m scared that if I touch it or trust it, it will disappear and shatter me.”
I reflected on all of this on that July afternoon, where John’s past, present, and future were meeting at once. I wondered what his mother would have said if she could see him now. During the past year and half of his illness, John had allowed many people to love him. Conversely, John had loved and supported many people throughout his lifetime. He had inspired countless careers in the world of styling and fashion. He had helped many individuals find meaning and purpose through his example of well-lived, sober life. He had built his own house of love, compassion, and forgiveness. He had amounted to so much.
We didn’t hug at the end of our visit. Instead, we only said our “I love you”s and goodbyes from the foot of the bed.
Almost as afterthought, Michael said to John as we were leaving, “Doesn’t Kirk’s hair look beautiful?”
“Yes,” he said with a certainty. “Yes, it does.”
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On the afternoon of August 7th, Michael and I received a phone call that John was being moved into palliative care at NYU’s Langone Medical Center. In addition to his cancer numbers increasing, a fungal infection had spread from his sinuses into his brain. His health-care proxy decided against any further invasive procedures, only palliative measures. Less than twenty-four hours later, we received the call that he had died. In one of the Limerick-based newspapers, a short tribute to John ended with the Irish saying: Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam. The phrase translates to: “May his holy soul be on the right side of God.”
In Ardagh, along one of the winding rural roads, I can imagine a relative or two of the O’Connors, the Danahers, or Hogans leaning against a gate, gossiping to the next willing passerby: “By J, did you hear about little Johnny Barrett, how he went and made something of himself in New York City?” Yes, he did. John Francis Barrett certainly made something of himself, changing the world, one haircut at a time. Amen.