The Detour Project

My Nail Guy

by Neil Dixon Smith.

That’s right, I have a nail guy. His name is Louie. With his sister, he runs a manicure/pedicure/tweeze-your-eyebrows joint in my neighborhood in Chicago. I spend about 30 minutes or so with him every 2-3 weeks to get my fill done, acrylics on three fingers and the thumb of my right hand. Louie is one of my favorite guys, so I want to share his story a bit.

First, a bit of background. I don’t have any tattoos, and the piercings in my ears have long since grown in, but I do maintain one subtle body modification: fake nails. I’m a classical guitarist, so I depend on strong, unbreakable nails on my right hand. To get a solid tone, the nails on the right fingers need to be just a bit over the tip, and then a bit longer on the thumb. As a prodigious nervous nail-biter, keeping nails this length au naturel would just not be possible.

I actually first got them before starting on classical guitar. I was into country blues style finger-picking and experimenting with different finger picks. I like to play really hard, digging into notes, and most finger picks are designed for you to play nimble and quick. When I used them, they’d just twist off. One night sitting around a table of guitar players at an open mic, someone mentioned that he heard of some dude who had ceramic nails glued on and got an amazing tone with them.

The thought of that fascinated me, as well as the total commitment to the instrument it represented. I didn’t know anything about nails or nail shops, but I was pretty sure there was a place at the mall that did that. So that week I went down to the Ann Arbor Mall, found the uppity hair salon/spa that had a nail tech, and asked for ceramic nails.

“Ceramic nails? What the hell is that?” she said. “OK, then”, I replied, “what do you got?”. And I proceeded to get my first set of acrylics, and learned the procedure of coming back every couple weeks for a “fill”, whereby they fill in the new growth under the fake nail. I immediately loved playing guitar with them, and I’ve had fake nails on my right hand ever since. It’s made for many interesting moments.

Moving to Chicago, getting my nails done became a whole new adventure. There are literally nail shops on every corner in the city, catering to all social classes, most of them run by Vietnamese immigrant families. As you can imagine, they don’t get too many male customers, and it’s always fun to explain why I’m there and to receive funny looks, especially from the Puerto Rican women who live in my neighborhood.

I enjoy the ritual, and when you get into a pattern with one shop, you really get to know the family. Getting nails done is a very intimate thing, you’re very close, your hand is being held and you place an enormous amount of trust in the tech (one wrong move and the pain can be unbelievable). But even still, as someone who grew up in a comfortable middle class suburb it can make you feel a bit weird. Unlike the places at the mall, the neighborhood nail shops are quite inexpensive (they have to be), so you figure they can’t be making much money. And while I may be a fun client, you witness a lot of shittiness in terms of rude customers, who themselves are scraping every dollar. And there are crazy language barriers, with English, Spanish and Vietnamese all simultaneously audible. Even on a good day though, even with the nicest people, you’re still scrubbing peoples feet.

I’ve been going to Louie for the past couple years, after moving to a new apartment near his shop. Though the Vietnamese nail techs are mostly women, it’s not unusual for there to be a male tech as well. The male techs are almost always older though, no teenage boys (lots of teenage girls), and likely of the generation that immigrated after the war and started the shop in the first place.

That is Louie’s story, but it took a while to get there with him.

I am always happy to not converse with folks who are doing my nails or cutting my hair, I’m happy to talk too, but if I sense they are focusing on a doing a good job, I figure let them do it. From the start though, I could sense that Louie was more comfortable in his skin that the average person, let alone the average nail tech. Louie loves to talk.

Louie is in his mid-50’s, he immigrated to the US as a young man in 1975, right after the Vietnam war ended. The Vietnamese immigrant community in Chicago is pretty insular, they keep a strong connection with each other and the old country (financed by the nail industry), and in America they’ve built an impressive (and mostly invisible) subculture, with their own pop stars, celebrities, etc. My impression is that, especially with the older generation, they don’t really pay attention to American popular culture or politics. They work hard, support each other and get by.

From the get go, Louie was different. He loves talking sports and politics, and having a male customer once in a while is probably a great relief for him. Louie loves gambling, plays the sports books, and heads to the casino on his off days. Listening to Louie pontificate on the Bears in his broken English is seriously among the funniest things I have ever heard.

That’s how it starts. Funny little conversations about what’s on the store TV. I often stop in late in the afternoon, so I get the benefit of being there while the news is on. From there we get a sense of where were each coming from, even though I can’t really figure out Louie’s crazy politics. Louie also digs music and owns a guitar. He has these CDs of Vietnamese guitarists playing traditional songs mixed in with strange covers of Western pop hits.

The comfort level deepens and over the months we move on to stories about our families. Louie has two adult daughters in Los Angeles from his first wife. One is a doctor. And he has a 5 year old boy at home from his second. Louie loves to talk about women, and everything you can imagine he says, he says. Of course, he’s funny as hell on every topic, with the wisdom of life lived hard.

By the way, Louie’s Nail Style shop is open 7 days a week, more or less 10am to 8pm. My 30 minute sessions with him are $10. Every once in a while, he refuses payment.

After a year or so he mentions that he’s heading back to Vietnam to visit his family, and this opens the door to every Apocalypse Now fanboys questionings on what it means to be Vietnamese, and to have grown up in the war experience.

Louie grew up in small fishing village in Southern Vietnam, and his father was a fisherman. As teenager he moved to Saigon, the Southern capital, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, and took jobs that assisted ARVN, the Southern Vietnamese army that the US was there to support against the Communist Notherners.

In 1975 the Northern army captured Saigon and all of South Vietnam as the US pulled out. To gain control of the country and stamp out resistance, the Communists started a campaign of rounding up those who supported ARVN to be placed in work camps (aka, concentration camps), where they’d be essentially worked to death, if not killed outright beforehand.

Louie recognized this situation and did what nearly a million of his fellow countrymen did: he set to escape. By boat.

In a fishing boat filled with 47 people, Louie cast off in the middle of the night from a spot on the coast of central Vietnam, headed for some small islands halfway, where there were rumored to be makeshift shuttle services to Hong Kong. Kind of like the underground railroad, but in the open ocean. I would encourage you to look at a map.

There were a few different routes people took, some went to Malaysia, others to the Philippines. Louie’s craft was afloat in the open water for three days and three nights. They not only had to fear the elements and they’re own ability to navigate, but some known waterways were also patrolled by Chinese ships who were assisting their communist allies by capturing the traitorous “boat people”.

Louie knew that if the boat was captured it would’ve meant execution, or worse, so he was prepared. Under his seat was a box of grenades. It was a pact amongst the passengers, if they were to be captured, they would blow themselves up and take down their capturers with them.

Three days on the open ocean and they made their destination. And they got to Hong Kong. From there he applied for refugee status to the US, and it was the least we could do to accept. He came to Chicago and opened a nail shop.

Louie loves being an American, and he bitches about the little things with the best of us. He’s an educated, hard working, middle-aged man who does nails and scrubs feet, and keeps a good humor about it. Louie is my hero.

I told him recently, “Louie, man, you did it. You are the American Dream. You immigrated here with nothing, started a business, raised a family and your daughters are successful upper-middle class professionals”. Louie laughed, I was right, but it’s never that easy.

The hilarious thing? Louie hasn’t spoken to his daughters in 5 years, or I should say, they haven’t spoken to him. He doesn’t think they respect what he went through to give them the life they have. I can imagine to his daughters Louie is the hard-headed old world father who can’t relate to their lives. That’s a problem with the American Dream, I guess, your kids become Americans.

Anyways, that’s Louie, my nail guy.

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Neil Dixon Smith is a solo classical guitarist who performs for private parties and weddings, and rocks out on electric guitar in the band Más Trueno. You can check him out at neildixonsmith.com, and drop him a line at neildixonsmith(at)yahoo.com