By John Johnston
The Cincinnati Enquirer

It's a late weekday morning and the hair clippers are silent at Dickie's Barbershop. Two men sit hunched over a small table, carefully eyeing red and black game pieces on a worn, wooden checkerboard.

"I used to whup on him so bad, until he got somebody to teach him somethin'," Andrew Coleman says, advancing a red checker.

"He used to whup me 35 (games) to three," says his opponent, Dickie Ellison. The barbershop proprietor slides a black checker forward.

"Ain't nothing changed," says Mr. Coleman, 73.

The barbershop occupies space in a Mount Healthy shopping center. It also occupies a place in the lives of those who frequent it. Camaraderie and conversation can be found here, along with barbers who will cut your hair but won't necessarily cut you any slack. Friendly verbal swipes fly as freely as hair clippings.

The movie Barbershop, which opened last month, tries to capture that. The comedy, about a day in the life of an African-American barbershop on the South Side of Chicago, has been a surprise hit, grossing about $70 million.

Dickie's Barbershop is the real deal.

"Hah!" Mr. Ellison shouts as he jumps one of Mr. Coleman's checkers. "Hah!" He sounds like a karate black belt pummeling a stack of plywood.

"I oughta go up there," Mr. Ellison says, still studying the checkerboard. He's been friends with his opponent for about 30 years.

"Go on up there," Mr. Coleman says.

"Matter of fact I think I will."

"Why don't you?"

"I am. I am. I'm coming now, what're you gonna do?"

"Anything I wanna do."

"Then do anything you wanna do."

Conversation stays the same

Mr. Ellison, a handsome man with a thin mustache, has been cutting hair since 1970. He opened this place 13 years ago. It has six barber chairs, lots of mirrors, and a few personal touches, such as the photocopied, autographed picture of boxer Aaron Pryor near the entrance. "To Dickie," it says.

About noon, Clifford Byndon, a 64-year-old Springfield Township man with a big, boisterous laugh, drops in. Before he settles into Mr. Ellison's barber chair - the one closest to the entrance - he offers a box of cheese crackers to the five other barbers. That's all it takes to get Kenny Parker going.

"Day-old crackers," the barber says.

"I came to share," Mr. Byndon protests, smiling. "Now you hurt my feelings."

Mr. Parker, 36 years old with a shaved head and close-cropped beard, isn't about to let up. "Of all the things we've given him, he brought in some old, stale crackers," he says. A patch on his red smock says "master barber." ("That means you can do a little bit of everything: talk trash, cut hair, sweep hair," he explains.)

Mr. Byndon sits back as Mr. Ellison goes to work on his hair. Soon he's admiring his new cut in a mirror. "Lookin' good, Dickie. Lookin' good. What would Kenny do if he was as handsome as me?"

Meanwhile, the checkers games continue into the early afternoon, with Mr. Coleman, a retired Procter & Gamble clerk, holding court on all topics.

Such as baseball . . .

"Barry Bonds. He's got the quickest hands I've seen."

And football . . .

"You know what the Bengals' problem is? Anybody can see that.

. . . It all starts at the top."

And war with Iraq. . .

"I been in two wars," the Army veteran says. "They don't accomplish much. Talkin' is better than folks getting killed."

And checkers . . .

"Dickie, you're tryin' to get away."

"Get away from what?" Mr. Ellison says.

"This whuppin'."

A couple of moves later, Mr. Coleman claims a victory.

"I taught him everything he knows," he says. "But I didn't teach him everything I know."

Julius Price has been watching silently, his hands resting on a cane. He is 97, but doesn't look it.

"This is a good place to gossip," he says. "Everybody comes in here. The police, the lawyers, the doctors. We have a bull session." And Mr. Price holds his own, even though he says he has only a fourth-grade education.

Robert "Bo" Wallace, one of the barbers, knows the old man is wise. The old man taught him a thing or two about saving money. "He's like a mentor to me," says Mr. Wallace, who plans to open his own barbershop in December.

They met several years ago in the barbershop and became friends. When Mr. Price was suffering from cancer, Mr. Wallace drove him to his treatments. Nowadays, whenever Mr. Price wants to spend time in the shop, Mr. Wallace stops by his retirement home and picks him up.

The cast of characters changes depending on the day and the time.

Friday afternoon, the after-school and after-work crowd comes in. Customers occupy all six barber chairs until closing time. A new barber, Darnell Howard Sr. is in Dickie Ellison's spot, near the entrance. Dickie's on a golf course this sunny day.

Cutting hair next to Mr. Howard is Mr. Parker. On down the row are Benny Kittles, Mr. Wallace, Vernon Edwards and Bill Jackson.

While their electric clippers buzz, Herman Tyler sits, waiting. For 36 of his 59 years, he shined shoes and tended bar at a Holiday Inn in Sharonville. It closed last year, so the Mount Healthy man loaded the tools of his shoe-shine trade - brushes, polish, rags - into two Bud Light boxes and set up shop at Dickie's.

"Ain't too many barbershops left with a shoeshine concession," he says.

But nobody's getting a shine today.

Mr. Wallace runs clippers over the head of Mike Wheeler, a music producer who has worked with the likes of Bootsy Collins. "I look at all these (barbers) like my big brothers," Mr. Wheeler says. "They've been there and done that before me."

True, says Mr. Wallace, who is 41 and grew up in Cleveland, where he used to hang out on mean streets.

"But now my life has changed. I'm in the church. I'm a family man. A lot of the young guys that come in, I can see they're going through some of the things I went through."

As he cuts hair, he's not shy about steering folks to his church, Word of Deliverance Ministries for the World. He says some of his customers have joined.

Black man's country club

As the afternoon wears on, more than a dozen people wait for an open barber chair. There's chatter all around the barbershop, much of it drowned out by two TVs.

Mr. Parker, a barber at Dickie's for four years, seems to know everybody. He greets Mike McCoy, the basketball coach at Finneytown Middle School, and says he wants to go jogging with him sometime. "We ain't gonna run hard, though," Mr. Parker says.

Mr. McCoy, who runs 4 miles a pop to keep in shape, smiles. "He's just talkin' trash. He ain't gonna get out there and go. He's just talkin'."

That's what they do in the barbershop. Talk. About the abduction of Cincinnati Councilman David Pepper. About the D.C. sniper. About those gosh-darn Bengals.

"We got (UC basketball coach) Bobby Huggins comin' up," Mr. Edwards says, trimming hair. "I hope Bobby's feelin' OK. Huggins, man. He's our guy. He's our savior. That's all we got good in Cincinnati now."

Halfway across the room, Mr. McCoy, the basketball coach, is smiling. He's heard it all before - politics, sports, trash talk - and he'll be back to hear it again. "You can find out what's goin' on in the barbershop. It's the black man's country club right here."

E-mail jjohnston@enquirer.com