He couldn’t believe that it had actually come to this, that he was submitting to such an outrageous demand. But what was the alternative? Prison. Even if he ran away to some other state, gave up the priesthood and tried to hide behind an alias and a false mustache, eventually he would be hunted down and brought to trial. They had their hook in him up through his butt and into his gut, and no amount of wriggling could help. It was this or prison or suicide, and he’d had three weeks in which to prove to himself that he didn’t have the nerve to kill himself. He’d gone so far as to read Final Exit, and he’d had a supply of the requisite pills for the last three years, ever since he’d cleaned out his mother’s medicine cabinet after she’d been taken to the Home. So it would not have required much in the way of physical courage. But what it required he lacked.
Did he then, secretly, deep down, still believe in hell? Was that what stopped him? Hell and its associated demonologies had been the first part of his faith to go, first fading into something vague and symbolic, the hell beloved by the more liberal interpreters of Dante, and then simply disappearing into the mists of a more and more mythological afterlife. By the time of his ordination he had reached a tacit understanding with his confessor that all beliefs of a pictorial or narrative nature were equally idolatrous, golden calves at whose devotions priests perform rituals for the benefit of those unable to face the dark truths shared by those initiated to secrets of the inner temple: that the tabernacle is empty and God an eternal, inapprehensible Absence. A cloud in a sky that is everywhere cloudy. He was in no hurry to get there.
The time has come, he told himself, it has to be done. But at the last moment before leaving the car he decided that it might be prudent to deposit his billfold and wristwatch in the glove compartment. When he opened the glove compartment he realized it wasn’t the dictates of prudence he was responding to but his addiction. For there, where he had no memory of having left it, was a nearly full pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s. So much for his good intentions of only twenty minutes ago.
He uncapped the bottle and took one slow, grateful swallow. The bourbon worked its usual magic at once. The impossible suddenly was possible, the undoable on its way to being done. He transferred billfold and wristwatch to the glove compartment, and after the benediction of another, slower, better-savored sip of whiskey, he got out of the car and tucked the bottle in his back pocket.
He checked to see that the car doors were locked and the windows rolled tight. He checked to see that his mustache was in place. He even brushed his Adam’s apple with his fingertips to be sure he was not wearing his collar, a gesture that had become semiautomatic in situations when he was off his clerical leash.
The interior of the tattoo parlor, visible through the front window, fairly vibrated with excess of fluorescence, the way some supermarkets do. Its furnishings were as minimal as those of any church basement. Folding chairs along the walls and a single threadbare couch. One end table stacked with magazines. Some free-standing ashtrays. Nothing to distract from the framed samples of the tattooist’s work that covered the walls from knee level almost to the ceiling. The effect was like wallpaper—if hell were to have wallpaper.
Then, as though summoned, the tattooist appeared through a door at the back of the shop. He seemed about Father Bryce’s own age, with the usual abrasions and scuff marks of middle age—receding hair, a small potbelly, a scruffy beard irregularly tufted with gray. Reading glasses hung pendantlike across his chest from an elastic band. As he approached the front door, he walked with a pronounced limp. No vision of macho glory, certainly, and no visible tattoos, for he was wearing a plaid flannel shirt that covered his arms to his wrists.
The tattooist’s eyes met Father Bryce’s through the shop window. He paused a moment with a questioning look, and then, as though the question had been answered, he smiled, exposing the decayed stumps of his incisors. He opened the door and thrust out his head. “You the guy called about the custom design?”
Father Bryce nodded.
“Okay! I got your money order, the stencil’s done, and we’re ready to roll. I’ll just switch this sign around”—he flipped over the OPEN sign on the door so that it read CLOSED—“to guarantee ourselves some privacy. Funny, you didn’t knock or anything, but I had a feeling you was out here. Come on in.”
He could still say no, he thought, even as he stepped across the threshold into the shop’s pulsing fluorescent glare. He was under no physical compulsion. His will was still his own.
The tattooist turned the bolt that locked the door, then held out his hand to be shaken. “Wolf.”
It took Father Bryce a moment to recognize what the man had said as an introduction. “Wolf,” he repeated, taking his hand. “Glad to meet you.”
Wolf maintained his grip on Father Bryce’s hand, waiting to be offered a name in return.
“I’m Damon,” Father Bryce said.
“Damon the Demon,” the tattooist said with a smile revealing more of his dental problems. Instead of releasing his hand, Wolf tightened his grip. “You came to the right joint for your ink, bro. Hail fuckin’ Satan.”
“Right,” said Father Bryce weakly. Then, thinking, When in Rome, he made a more complete surrender. “Hail fucking Satan.”
“I’ll tell you something, Damon,” Wolf said, letting go. “I consider it a privilege to be putting this design on you. A fuckin’ privilege. Most guys come in here, they look around for maybe an hour at the flash on the walls, and they bullshit with each other and ask prices on designs you know they are never going to go for, the really heavy biker shit, and at last if they don’t just walk out the door with ‘Maybe next payday,’ they get a scroll with the name of their fuckin’ girlfriend, or ‘Mother,’ or what I do the most of for some reason, a panther-and-snake, like these here.”
He tapped a finger on a framed panel bolted to the door at the back of the shop. Beneath the clouded plastic was an assortment of crudely drawn panthers, some by themselves, some in contention with large snakes, all in the same heraldic pose, the panther rearing up, a snarling head in profile facing right, forelegs lifted and the right leg flexed, as though the creature were climbing the flesh on which it was tattooed, from which each claw extracted its own distinct drop of blood.
“Don’t get me wrong. This is a good basic design. It says something. And we all got to start somewhere. But the kind of work you’re talking about, man, that is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Wolf opened the door blazoned with the rampant panthers. “We’ll be in here.” He waited for Father Bryce to enter.
He felt like a prisoner being shown, for the first time, to the cell he is to occupy for the rest of his life. It was about the size of his own bedroom at the rectory, some fourteen feet square and windowless. Where his bed would have been was an old-fashioned barber chair of white porcelain and shredded black leather, which was flanked on both sides by a shallow white Formica counter, with shelves above it, that held the implements of the tattooist’s trade. An oversize lightbulb in a metal cone was suspended above the chair.
“You can hang your stuff over there,” the tattooist said, pointing to a coatrack with a black cowboy hat on it.
Father Bryce nodded and began unbuttoning his shirt, first at the cuffs, then down from the neck. There were no hangers, so he hung the shirt right on the hook. Then he pulled his T-shirt up over his head, taking care not to disturb his mustache, and stood before the tattooist bare to his waist.
“You’ll want to take your pants off, too,” the tattooist said as he started snugging his right hand into a surgical glove. “We’ll start off by laying out the whole design. From crotch to clavicle.” He tapped the top of his shoulder. “That’s this bone here.”
Before he took off his pants, Father Bryce removed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from his back pocket.
“You came prepared, I see,” Wolf observed. “Better go easy at first. Some guys got no problem drinking and inking, others puke their guts out. If you’re us
ed to the booze on like a daily basis, you probably won’t have any problem. Myself, I got to stay away from the stuff. Nobody wants to get tattooed by a drunk, right?”
Father Bryce nodded. He uncapped the bottle, drank from it, and screwed the cap back on. He unbuckled his belt, but then it was as though he were thirteen again, in the locker room of Ramsay High School, having to undress for the first time in his life in front of strangers. He felt a warmth of embarrassment suffuse his face. He unsnapped the snap at the waistband and pulled down the zipper, and then he stood there holding up the pants, blushing and paralyzed by shame.
“Hey, pal, if you got a hard-on, don’t sweat it. I’ll tell you a trade secret. Most guys got boners while they’re getting inked, the ones that ain’t creaming in their pants. It don’t mean you’re a faggot or anything like that. It’s just your body’s natural response to the needle, know what I mean? It’s like when you hang someone, the guy comes. I guess it’s sort of like you get one last chance.”
“No, it’s not that. I just didn’t know what… The bottle…” He handed the bottle to Wolf, who put it on the countertop. He got his pants off and hung them on the hook beneath his shirt. As though Wolf’s words had been a snake charmer’s tune coaxing a cobra from its basket, Father Bryce found himself getting an erection, along with the related symptoms—a dry mouth, a hollowness in his chest, a tightness about the temples and around to the back of his neck.
“Come over here,” said Wolf. “I want to show you the design. You’re gonna like this.”
He spread open a tattered tabloid newspaper on the counter, the Weekly World News for April 7, 1992. The headline announced, in two-inch-high letters:
SATAN
ESCAPES
FROM HELL
A smaller boxed subheadline explained how this was done:
13 Alaskan oil rig workers killed
when the Devil roars out of well
In evidence of this event there was a photograph: In a typical oil field landscape with tanks and drilling rigs, one of the rigs was spouting flames which rose to become a gigantic roiling cloud of smoke, the billows of which formed an unmistakable snarling face, with fanglike teeth and a beaky nose and white, pupilless eyes.
“Here’s what you sent me,” said the tattooist, “and I’ve got to say it is a pretty un-fuckin’-believable photograph. Like you said on the phone, if it’s a fake it’s a real professional job. And here”—he rolled out a scroll of white paper—“is the design I worked out. There’s no horns on the face in the photo, but I figured it’s Satan so you’d want horns. The horns’ll spread out from just above your tits to your shoulder blades, and Satan’s chin’ll be about three inches above your navel. It’s a serious piece of work. I figure the face’ll be all blackwork, pretty much like in the photo, but the flames around it can be different colors, mostly red, but some blue and yellow. Basically it’ll be like the Technicolor version of the photo, except down below where you’ve got the guy on the horse with the torch. I made him a Viking type, but that could be changed. I could do an Indian, or a Mongol warrior, or a storm trooper, all depending. So—what do you think?”
“It’s really… big.”
“For sure. I figure it’ll take about ten hours, but we can get the basic outline on tonight if you can hang on for two hours or so. You like the horseman okay? His mustache is kind of like yours, did you notice that? Talk about strange coincidences. I mean, till just now I never saw your face.”
“I like the whole thing,” Father Bryce assured him.
“I should also point out, down here on the left, under the pile of skulls, I signed it—‘Knightrider.’ That wasn’t in your specs, but a piece on this scale, I’d like to sign it.”
“That’s fine. So, should we get started? You want me in the chair?”
“Yeah, but first, why don’t we go over and stand by the sink and I’ll zap off your hair there so it doesn’t get all over the place. You’re a pretty hairy guy.”
“Zap off my hair?” Father Bryce repeated with dismay.
“Your body hair, where the tattoo goes. You got to be smooth if I’m going to tattoo you, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You hadn’t thought of that? It’s funny, a lot of guys don’t. I’ve had some guys decide to get a tattoo on their biceps when they were thinking of getting it on their forearm, just ‘cause they didn’t like the idea of shaving off the hair. Anyhow, with a piece like this you’ll probably want to keep it shaved. At least anytime you’re going to be showing it off.”
The tattooist took an electric clippers from the countertop and plugged it into an outlet by the sink. “Next,” he said. The clippers, when he switched them on, made a buzzing sound that seemed the audio equivalent of the flicker of the fluorescent light.
Father Bryce walked over to the sink and watched in the mirror of a medicine cabinet as his chest hair was shorn away in long downward swathes, falling in clustered curls to the newspaper that had been spread across the linoleum floor.
At each further indignity, he would think, This isn’t happening to me. But it was. Now the tattooist was pulling down his underpants to get at his crotch hair and thereby exposing his state of erection. Exposing, which was the truly shameful thing, that he was someone who would in such circumstances be able to have an erection.
“Wha’d I tell you?” Wolf remarked, pushing Father Bryce’s cock forward, out of the path of the clippers. “Just the idea of getting inked will get a guy stiff, it never fails.”
To Wolf’s credit, he dealt with the matter clinically, in much the same way as a nurse or orderly at a hospital might have approached the same task.
“Okay,” Wolf said, switching off the clippers. “That didn’t hurt, did it? But the needle will, I can guarantee you that. So maybe you’ll want another drink?”
Father Bryce shook his head.
“Or whenever, just tell me.” Wolf spread a large towel over the seat and back of the barber chair and nodded for Father Bryce to sit down. The terry cloth of the towel was damp and a little chilly.
“You don’t have to start biting the bullet yet. We still got to transfer the design from stencil to skin. And because of the size of this mother, that means four separate stencils. Anyhow, you may be one of the lucky ones.”
“The lucky ones—how’s that?”
“Some guys manage to get off on it. Like some guys get off on taking a punch when they’re boxing. I wouldn’t count on it, it’s not that common. Mostly you grin and bear it. The tough part is when the needle gets closest to the bone. Like here.” He tapped Father Bryce’s collarbone. “But everyone’s different. I had a guy come in and get a spread eagle across his chest, no problem. Then he comes back and gets this snake wrapping up over his hip, where’s he’s got a lot of cushioning, and he blacks out. Winch may be the easiest way to handle it. Like they say, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
As he talked, Wolf began to apply the stencils, moistening the shaved skin of Father Bryce’s chest and stomach with a sponge, then positioning each stencil carefully and pressing it to the damp flesh until the skin bore a transferred image for the tattooist’s needle to follow. As if he were in a dentist’s chair, Father Bryce kept his eyes closed and tried not to think about what was being done and to ignore the tattooist’s chatter. One anecdote followed another, each one a little parable about the satisfaction to be gained through suffering. Father Bryce had given more than a few homilies on the same subject, and he felt a professional respect for Wolf’s skill in engineering the right attitude in his customers so that instead of dreading what he was about to do they would welcome it.
“Okay, Damon,” Wolf announced as he peeled off the last stencil from Father Bryce’s abdomen. “We’re ready for serious shit.”
He took up the tattooing gun and positioned the tip of the needle over the middle of Father Bryce’s chest just below the rib cage. He tapped the on/off switch with his foot and with a high-pitched electric whine the needle bit in
to flesh.
Father Bryce’s first reaction was simply relief to know the extent of the pain he would have to bear and to know that it was bearable. It was not as bad as he’d feared, nothing like the pain of a dentist’s drill, which the instrument in Wolf’s hand so much resembled. It couldn’t be shrugged away or ignored, but it was not such a pain as the Jesuits knew at the hands of the Hurons (or, for that matter, the Cathars at the hands of the Inquisition).
“Tattoos do things to people,” Wolf observed, keeping his eye fixed on the slow progress of the needle as it traced a line of ink and blood across Father Bryce’s flesh. “They get changed. Not just in the way that’s obvious. Like they say, what happens is more than skin-deep.”
Father Bryce flinched as the needle hit a nerve that caused the dull pain to flare, momentarily, into something bright and intense. He began to sweat.
“You become a different person,” Wolf went on coolly. “I’ve seen it happen to lots of guys. Chicks, too. Not always. Some guys get tattooed the way they go to work where their dads went to work. Like, it’s part of the job description. But you’re not that kind, I knew that even before you come in. Not with a design like you were asking for.
“Some designs are like doorways, you know what I mean? They’re like there’s something inside of you that can’t get out until the tattoo is there, and the tattoo lets it out. That’s how it was for me, man. Five years ago, you know what I was doing? I was a fuckin’ CPA. I shit you not. A tax accountant for a big company. So what happened was I went with a buddy of mine who had this bike that’s like a toy for weekends, and we drove to this rally in Wisconsin, and there was this tattooist there working out of a Winnebago. We got stewed and then we got tattooed. I got a wolf, the head of a wolf, on my shoulder, where I figured no one would see. But I saw it. And I knew the person with the tattoo was not the same person who put on the business suit and commuted to work every day. And gradually Wolf, the person with the tattoo, took charge. The other way of looking at it—my wife’s way—was that booze took charge. But really the booze was like a switch, or the stuff Dr. Jekyll drinks in the movie when he wants to become Mr. Hyde. It sort of greased the hinges on the door. But the tattoo was the doorway.”
THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance Page 3