Men’s stories unfold amid act of kindness at homeless veterans event

Kim Palchikoff, Special to the Sun

Monday, March 28, 2011 | 2 a.m.

For 15 minutes, their lives intersected — a 52-year-old homeless man hoping for a free haircut and a 28-year-old cosmetologist who was volunteering at a makeshift barbershop.

Neither knew the other’s story and it was a sure bet that they’d never see each other after day’s end.

Kevin Caputo, a former Marine who had spent the night at a Catholic Charities shelter, sat in the chair with a plastic bib covering his shirt.

Tramar “T” McCree was wielding the scissors, an act of volunteerism somewhat foreign to a man who normally does nails at an upscale Summerlin salon.

The setting was inside a dilapidated military tent at a Las Vegas senior center, the site of an annual fair for homeless veterans.

And their stories say something about who has been crippled by the economy, and who steps forward to lend a hand.

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Caputo says if his life were a movie, it would be the opposite of the film “The Pursuit of Happyness,” a tale about a homeless man who becomes a successful stockbroker.

He grew up on the East Coast, enjoying a fancy-free life on Long Island, N.Y. “Hung out with the guys in the ’hood,” he said. “We used to fight a lot, party a lot.”

After a major motorcycle crash, he figured a stint in the military would teach him some discipline and get him on track to a better life.

“I walked into a recruiter’s office and said I was ready to go. They were shocked. In those days, this was after Vietnam, the military wasn’t popular. Ten days later, I was on a bus to Marine boot camp.”

After his six-year stint, he worked his way through college as a manager in the valet parking business. “It was hard sometimes, dealing with customers who got their cars stolen. I had to tell people at a nice dinner, ‘I’m sorry, Sir, your car’s no longer here — there’s a lot of chop shops around Brooklyn.’

“I made a grand a night in tips, plus salary,” he said. “I’d go to the bank on Monday mornings, deposit three, four grand from the weekend.”

In time he found himself on Wall Street — doing well for 11 years, he says, marrying his girlfriend, divorcing her years later, burning out and seeking a change of pace and moving to Las Vegas. He mentions gambling in passing — poker, craps, the ponies — but doesn’t dwell on it. He worked for several years at a wedding chapel — taking photographs, developing its website, doing just about anything short of preaching and marrying. He also drove a limo, traded stocks.

He bought a home in Henderson and cashed out before the bubble burst. But his life was complicated by seizures that landed him in hospitals time and time again. Without family or friends for support, he found himself on the street, finding places to sleep at the Salvation Army, Las Vegas Rescue Mission, Catholic Charities.

“I’ve had peaks and valleys,” he says.

And now he’s sitting in a chair, and a stranger who goes by T is giving him a haircut. Caputo has no mirror to monitor the progress.

T has been quietly listening to Caputo’s story, but it hasn’t distracted him from his artistry.

Scissors fly, with the aid of an occasional squirt of water. Snip, snip, spray, spray. The haircutter seems to take up all the space in the room, in a positive, outgoing, happy sort of way. Sporting a gift of gab, the 28-year-old T, of Kalamazoo, Mich., talks about growing up openly gay at a time when coming out in high school was acceptable.

Six days a week, he is applying acrylics, gels and tips for finely coiffed women in Summerlin, chatting comfortably about what’s hot and what’s not.

He doesn’t do hair, but he learned it in school and when he heard of the need for volunteers to give haircuts at the homeless veterans event, he stepped up.

“I wanted to make a difference for vets. They go into the service with these big promises, watch people getting their legs blown off, then they come back, get nothing.”

By the time this two-day event is over, T will have toiled for 15 hours, giving more than 40 haircuts.

Then again, T never took life easy.

By the time he turned 18, he was a full-time high school student working at a fried chicken joint 40 hours a week. He speaks with the wisdom of someone who grew up too fast. His father was a bodybuilder who was on the road much of the time competing, so T was raised mostly by his mother.

He said his parents’ foray into alcohol, then drugs caused him to head out on his own.

After falling in love, he and his partner moved to Las Vegas, and now they are talking about marrying sometime, somewhere. Together they are raising his fiance’s four children and a 3-year-old niece whose mother is in the military.

His passion is nails. He misses how nails used to be, back when glitz was in, and the classics were out. “Oh my God, girl, puhleesse ... back then, doing nails was an art! It was big and people were, like, ‘Wow, you do nails!’

“For a while money in the nails was the big thing. I was doing a lot of escorts. They wanted me to cut up a hundred-dollar bill and put the tiny pieces under their acrylics. It was way hot.

“One day I did a housewife — she was almost 80 — who said, ‘You go crazy, put everything you could possibly put on it.’ I did everything in my imagination — painted murals on her nails — and they were gorgeous. Now it’s not so exciting. It’s all about the light pinks, the beiges, the nudes.”

Two men, two lives so different from one another, meeting ever-so-randomly for a haircut — the volunteer and the grateful recipient — and enjoying listening to the other’s tales of wow and woe.

Fifteen minutes, and then they move on.

Kim Palchikoff is a freelance writer. Her last story for the Sun was about Las Vegas’ community of Russian trapeze artists.