By A.C. Thompson

New deal: Kilo chills (above) and sculpts Derrell Thomas's icicles (below). Guardian photos by Lori Spears

Kilo runs the Sunnydale Barbershop out of the ground floor of a converted row house. On the wall is a sign saying, "No weed in the shop, thanks!" and a poster bearing the photos of 20 black men who've been killed in recent years ("Were you there when I was murdered?" it asks). The space – little larger than a prison cell – is equipped with two well-used barber chairs upholstered with maroon Naugahyde, a floor covered in baby blue linoleum tiles, and a TV tuned to Black Entertainment Television.

The barber, who sports a teardrop tattoo beneath one eye, knows all about prison cells – he's got a three-page rap sheet that dates back to 1968, and he has done time in a panoply of county and state lockups. Now, at age 50, it looks like Kilo is finally getting serious about staying out of the joint. He's been back on the streets since 2003, and he's thinking perhaps this little micro-enterprise will be his ticket to long-term freedom and stability.

Kilo's aptitude for chopping, coiffing, and styling hair served him well during his days as a con; it seems even the super-hardcore alpha-dog inmates who control and terrorize their fellow prisoners appreciate a decent haircut. Inside, he traded his services for goods purchased from the prison commissary. "I was cutting hair on the inside for soups. One soup is 25 cents," he recounts with a laugh.

Every ex-con's story hovers around the question of whether he or she will make it on the outside. But for Kilo there's another question: whether society will let him save himself, and perhaps, save a few of the kids in this neighborhood.

  

Derrell Thomas, 10, and his mother, Renee Davis, visit Kilo on a warm afternoon in early June. Thomas's cranium is blanketed with a mess of unkempt hair he's trying to twist into dreadlocks. Mom ain't going for it. "He'll look better with it all cut off," Davis says.

Kilo, a charismatic, über-personable guy with a million tales to tell, is clad in a crisp pair of baggy blues and an XL South Pole button-down. His mustache and thin rail of a beard are meticulously shaped.

He makes a few exploratory passes with the clippers. "Cutting hair is like being a hound dog," Kilo says, meaning a good barber heeds the clues offered up by the client's hair. He's trimmed a spot on the back of Thomas's head. "See this?" Kilo asks, pointing to a fingerprintish swirl of hair. "That's the crown. You've got to follow the direction of the hair. You don't cut against it."

After gently but speedily mowing Thomas's three-inch pile of tangled curls down to a thin fuzz, Kilo comes to his itty-bitty preteen sideburns. "Guys my age call 'em sideburns. Young cats call 'em icicles. You gotta know the terminology." Kilo sculpts Thomas's tiny icicles into little points, then goes over his ears, artfully buzzing the clippers, leaving a perfect arc above each ear. Starting at Thomas's forehead, he adds the pièce de résistance, cutting a design – a sort of backward Nike swoosh – in a matter of seconds. The whole $10 cut takes about 10 minutes.

Watching Kilo work, it's obvious he loves his vocation. His involvement in the trade stretches back to 1971, when he worked in a salon with his then-girlfriend, Demetria Black. Kilo says that at the apex of his career, during the Jheri-curl era, he could pocket $300 to $400 a day. "We were the king and queen of SF, as far as doing hair goes," he recalls. But around the same time, he got heavily into snorting and selling cocaine – later crack and heroin played central roles in his life. His stint as royalty was short-lived.

At one point in the '80s, he did a year in county jail for selling coke, got out, and on his first day of freedom tried unsuccessfully to hijack a whole rack of clothes from the Emporium department store, a feat of nongenius that sent him directly back to jail. The anecdote typifies the Kilo of yore. "I wasn't living. I was tore up," he admits, adding – and this is painful for a connoisseur of style like Kilo to admit – his hair was a fashion train wreck. "I was looking like Woody Woodpecker."

  

Sunnydale, in a lot of ways, is the core of what you could call Forgotten San Francisco. It's distant. Situated on the extreme southeast edge of the city, near the Cow Palace, the decrepit micro-neighborhood is a long bus ride from anywhere. It's poor. According to San Francisco Housing Authority figures, the average annual income in public housing is $11,601. The bulk of the population is African American, with Pacific Islanders – mostly Samoans – the second-most-populous ethnic group.

People live here – and in a couple of other subsidized apartment complexes nearby – scrabbling to make ends meet. They die here. Often violently. Horribly. Either way, hardly anybody ever notices.

Mention Sunnydale to white folks and half the time they'll think you're talking about Sunnyvale, a Silicon Valley town 38 miles down the peninsula. Suffice it to say that the only time the San Francisco Chronicle covers the area, a chunk of Visitacion Valley, is when someone gets murdered – and even on that front, Sunnydale seems to get far less ink than Bayview-Hunters Point, even though it's nearly as brutal.

The project homes have been repainted relatively recently in neat shades of aquamarine and beige, but dozens of the units are abandoned and vacant, their windows covered with plywood. This despite a Bay Area-wide housing shortage and a waiting list of some 28,000 would-be tenants.

The Sunnydale Barbershop is a satellite of the Bayview Barber College, a city-funded project aimed at creating careers for employment-challenged dudes like Kilo. While enrolled at the college, Kilo is accumulating the 1,500 hours of work experience he needs to get his barber's license from the state Board of Barbering and Cosmetology.

The Sunnydale spot is a tough assignment. The rear entrance of the place is boarded over – a reminder of the time some neighborhood thugs broke down the door in their fervor to attack a foe in the shop. Just a few days ago, someone fired off a bunch of bullets at somebody standing right in front of the shop. It was 10:15 in the morning.

"I'm proud of my dad," says Kilo's son, Antoine Perry, 25, who overcame the chaos of his upbringing to become a social worker for the city (see "The Transformation," 5/18/05). "They put him in Sunnydale because only an OG could work there." The local hard-asses wouldn't respect a younger, less-seasoned guy, says Perry, who lost a friend to gunfire just down the street from the shop.

And that brings us to the other part of Kilo's job description. Besides being a barber, Kilo considers himself a mentor, a friend, a sage fount of street wisdom, and the shop has become a serious hangout for project kids. Last year the city's Board of Supervisors gave Kilo an official commendation recognizing his efforts as a "violence prevention specialist."

"I'm a violence prevention specialist because I know everything about it," he quips.

The whole barbershop thing "is really about me interacting with the kids. I'm trying to rescue them before they fall into the game.... I want to make life better for these young people, to be a big brother. I don't want to see them in San Quentin."

"I think he's doing a really good job," says Kim Mitchell, director of the nearby Willie L. Brown Youth Center. "He'll talk to you, give you advice. This is such a tough environment, and he won over those young guys very quickly."

  

At this juncture, Kilo is just barely surviving financially. He's still on parole, and will be until mid-2006. And he's got one looming concern about his transition from con to citizen: He's afraid the state cosmetology board won't grant him a barber's license because of his criminal record.

It's a valid concern, according to board spokesperson Miles Bristow, who says the board has the discretion to bar ex-offenders from the profession if they've been busted for certain felonies or are guilty of crimes involving "dishonesty, fraud, or deceit."

Kilo isn't overjoyed with the situation. As he puts it, "I'm trying to make myself acceptable to society, but I don't know what society wants."

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