by Roan Parrish
Christopher was thoughtful. “I don’t know if it would work, because I’d have to make sure they didn’t split open when I boiled them, but I know it can be done with cheese, so…”
“Wait, you boil pretzels?” Daniel asked. “I knew there was stuff you were supposed to boil…” he muttered to himself.
“Yeah, you boil them in a bath of food-grade lye. Or you can do a baking soda wash. Then you bake them. But the boiling is what gets a good crust on them. Like bagels.”
“You boil bagels too!?” he asked. He pulled out his phone and started texting furiously.
A waiter I didn’t recognize slid my sandwich in front of me and, looking at the ticket, said in a monotone, “I’m supposed to tell you, from John, that this is the best grilled cheese sandwich ever to be prepared on the premises, and everyone else should be jealous of it but only you can eat it.” She shrugged and walked away.
“Wow, they really like you here, huh?” Christopher said. His smile was warm, and his hand found my thigh again under the table. I put my leg up on his knee and leaned back in the booth, and he slid his hand inside the ripped knee of my jeans.
“They love me,” I said gleefully, and I watched Christopher’s smile go soft and personal, like maybe he could understand why.
⌃ ⌃ ⌃
J,
Ok, back to email, no problem.
The morning after you met her, Ginger banished me because Daniel came into town and they had plans to celebrate their super special best friends Chanukah. It’s a thing they’ve done for years, but I still felt like a kid who didn’t get invited to a birthday party or some shit. Because…I wanted her to make an exception for me. I wanted her to want me there. I wanted her to miss me. Pathetic, right?
Then, out of nowhere, she did invite me to hang out with them, like she’d had a change of heart. Or…like she wanted to show me off to him? Or shit, maybe she wanted to show him off to me.
Anyway, Daniel’s like a brother to her. It seems like they’re good for each other, but also a little codependent? They have some kind of little club, like Freaked Out By Vulnerability Anonymous or something…
Fuck, bro, I’ve got it so bad, and all the things I love about this girl are also the things that are making me fucking miserable right now. I love how independent she is. But it’s like she doesn’t even think about asking me for help, like maybe she’s never asked anyone. I love how she doesn’t do shit just to be polite, except that means I can’t count on her feeling obligated to invite me to do things, like hang out with her and Daniel. I love how when I’m with her, the world looks completely different because she sees things I’d never notice, and doesn’t care about things I assume are normal. I love the way she watches me like I’m something special. I love the way she’s so fucking tough with everyone, but when I touch her hair she leans into me like a cat for just a minute.
Okay, I guess those last few don’t make me miserable.
Wait until you see her work, man. Her tattoos, but also her paintings. She’s unreal. She has a show soon and you should come. Her paintings are these hyper-detailed portraits in black and gray. Sometimes I catch her staring at someone or something so intently, and I can almost see her memorizing the play of light and dark so she can paint it later. It’s made me start thinking of things that way too. Like there’s a filter over things sometimes—the What Would Ginger See filter.
She has this ugly purple velvet couch. And the first time I sat on it, I was wearing a green T-shirt, and she kept staring at my shirt against the velvet. The green and purple. Then when I wore a gray shirt she didn’t. So I tested it again with a different shade of green and she couldn’t stop staring at it.
Then the next day, this lady ordered a pastrami sandwich with slaw, and I’d used purple cabbage in the slaw that morning, so when I put the pickle spear on the plate, it was green right next to purple and I got this—fuck!—this, like, zing of joy because it reminded me of her.
Ah fuck, bro, tell me I’m an idiot. I mean, you met her. Am I making a total fool out of myself falling for her?
And yeah, I am gonna just keep emailing you about my problems. Write back at will.
C
Chapter 15
Daniel left the next day. On the threshold, he gave me a look that usually meant “I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear” and chewed on his lip for like eight thousand years before finally speaking.
“You know how every love story has its thing—its impediment? Romeo and Juliet come from warring families. Ethan Frome and Mattie are on the edge of being together and then they get into a catastrophic sledding accident. Lancelot and Guinevere can’t be together because it would destroy the empire. Hell, Mr. Rochester can’t be with Jane Eyre because he has locked his tormented, possibly syphilitic wife in the damn attic. It’s all very drama-drama, you know?”
I snorted a laugh. “I’ve never actually read any of the books you’re referencing—though obviously I saw the Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet—but okay.”
“Right. But most of the time the shit that keeps people apart isn’t quite that dramatic. It’s just as real though. All the stuff you’ve said about you and Christopher…like, if I do a thing where I extract the main idea that underlies everything you’ve said—”
“Wow, you mean you wrapped my Chanukah present in worksheets to develop a thesis for my paper and now I get to hear the thesis of my relationship problems too?”
“Yes. And you should feel lucky because my students pay, like, some horrifying number of thousands of dollars a year to have me sort through all their bullshit and extract an idea. Well, probably their parents do.”
I waved him on. “Yeah, yeah, extract away.”
He glared at me. “Okay, then. It’s pretty fucking simple. You’re scared because you feel like in order to be with Christopher, you have to give things up. Like, your art, your time, maybe some autonomy. You feel like eventually it’s gonna come down to a choice between Christopher and your self. But…what if that’s just not true? Or what if the stuff you have to give up is small—way smaller than what you’ll gain?”
I stared intently at the scuffed-up toes of Daniel’s boots, as familiar in my shop as my own. But he’d changed. Love had…loosened something in him. Eased something that I hadn’t even known was there.
“Maybe,” he continued, his voice small and a little hopeful. “Maybe for some people love isn’t a result. Maybe it’s a choice. I don’t know. I think for me, it just caught up to me? It was like I had been running away from something in a nightmare but then suddenly it was there, on me, the way things move in dreams. But maybe for you and Christopher it’s more like…it’s already there—a river running between you, and you can choose whether or not you step into it.”
He huffed out a breath and ran a hand through his messy hair, and when he looked up again, he looked mortified.
“Fuck, don’t listen to me. Jesus, I sound like a fuckin’ idiot.”
Then he hugged me tight, and left.
The thing was, while he did kind of sound like an idiot, he was right that I felt this bone-deep resistance to compromising any of the things I’d worked so hard for. I was afraid that if I lost my grasp on one inch of the territory I’d staked out for myself, I’d suddenly find myself with nothing.
He was also right about how damn much I liked Christopher. Christopher had gotten so far under my fucking skin without me fully noticing it, and now that he was there he was indispensable. Like his roots had worked their way deep into the ground, anchoring him there. And I…I liked it.
✕ ✕ ✕
Now that I knew Eddie Sparks was a misogynist and a sexual harasser, there was no way in hell I was going to condone him by passively allowing him to frame me how he wanted. And definitely no way I was going make it look like I stood against Etta Blake.
Because fuck Eddie Sparks. Fuck him for using me and my art and my gender as weapons against someone. Fuck him for making it seem like I stood in opposi
tion to someone I really respected. Fuck him for making me think he cared about my work when he really just cared that I had a vagina and that made me a tool for him to use.
I wasn’t going to play by his rules because there was no way I could ever win by them.
Nope, I was going to turn the shitty situation Eddie Sparks had implicated me in into something positive and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
I talked it out with M&M and Faron while we tattooed. Marcus was calmly furious, and practical: what effect would this have on the business, and were we ready to accept it. We were. Morgan ranted and swore, much as I had, which was supremely satisfying, and agreed that Eddie Sparks needed to be set on fire. Faron listened to everything intently and in near silence, his expressions eloquent with a combination of anger and exhaustion that I hadn’t seen in him before. But his support was clear, as was Phee’s, when he came in a few hours later.
So, with Morgan’s help, I spread the word about what I was planning to do on every online and social media platform I could, and responses started rolling in faster than I expected. The irony was not lost on me that Eddie Sparks’s promo had gotten me the platform I was now going to use to combat his douchebaggery.
I replied to Etta Blake, so nervous that my fingers slipped on the keys with sweat:
Dear Etta,
I can’t start this email any other way than telling you how much I admire your work and…well, you, really. I’ve been a huge fan for a long time now, and while I’m sorry it had to happen under such shithead circumstances, I’m pretty psyched to be in touch with you.
So. #1. Eddie Sparks is the worst. I’m so sorry to hear about what happened to your apprentice and I’m pissed as hell that ES leveraged me as any part of it. I hope you’ll pass that on to your apprentice too.
#2. Like you said, I’m exhaustingly familiar with the garbage politics in the industry and I try to do everything I can to fight against them, so if you are ever looking for an ally, I’m here.
#3. To that end, I’m going to start a—campaign, I guess the kids are calling them? A *thing* on social media, anyway. I hate that ES *bestowed* words like “badass” and “legit” on me like they were a gift he was in possession of and got to hand out as he saw fit. Like he gets to decide which of us the industry has room for.
Problems in the industry are about more than gender, but that’s the shit he’s throwing right now, so that’s what I want to focus on. It’s going to be about the ways women use tattoos and tattooing to support each other, to make space for each other, to help one another thrive in a world that constantly fucks with us.
I’m sure you know a ton of people who might be interested—if you’re into it, maybe spread the word? People can email me at this address, or I’m about to set up an Instagram and Twitter for it (links to follow)… I’ll, uh, teach myself what this whole Snapchat business is ;)
Finally, I so appreciate you getting in touch with me directly. I was really confused by the whole thing and, since SM isn’t exactly my forte, I might’ve gone on for a *long* time never sure what the hell was going on. Now that I know, I hope we can stand together.
More soon! <3 GH
Then I sent a text to Lindsey: Dude, I know it’s your day off so you guys might have plans, but I wanna hire your kid to do some social media stuff for me—it cool if I ask her?
She sent back: Yes plz take her away from me for the love of god & don’t believe her for one sec if she tells u to pay her $!$!$!
I had no clue what the going rate was for social media counterdirtbaggery, but I replied, SEND HER OVER!
✕ ✕ ✕
Four hours later, Tara and I (fine, mostly Tara) had set everything up, complete with hashtags and a logo. I made Tara an admin on everything so that she could vet posts as they came through. She seemed to know everything about social media and was one hundred percent behind the message of the campaign. I was proud of her, really. I’d known her since she was eight years old, and I felt like I was seeing her as a kind of adult for the first time.
“You ready to launch?” Tara asked.
Everyone fell silent, even the buzz of Phee’s tattoo machine cutting out.
“Oh shit, just like that?”
“Yup.”
I looked around at everyone, and they all nodded at me. We gathered around the desk and looked at the computer where Tara was doing her thing. “Okay, fire at will.”
“Right,” she said, after clicking around among a bunch of tabs. “We’re live.”
“Cheers, kid! Thanks.”
The campaign was simple. In the tattoo industry, as in so many, women were pitted against one another, as if the way to win a place at the table was to knock one another out. So the campaign was about women having each other’s backs. I was very clear in the language of the campaign that part of having each other’s backs was about including everyone who identified as a woman.
It was about celebrating those connections and lifting each other up, rather than division and tearing each other down. Pictures of tattoos that took words like “badass” and “legit” out of the mouth of an industry that used them as macho designations, and used them to describe a meaningful connection among women instead. That insisted there was enough space for all of us, and we didn’t need to fight for it. I called it United Ink.
I was under no delusion that a social media campaign was a magic bullet solution to sexism and misogyny in the tattoo industry, any more than I thought getting a tattoo to engage with something difficult in your life was an easy fix. Nope. Both were gestures—ways to stop feeling ineffectual, ways of connecting with others who’d shared similar experiences, ways to reframe something negative or scary and make it something you had ownership over. A reclamation. An engagement on our own terms.
This was an internet response to an internet provocation.
I had started off the campaign with two tattoos I’d done last year. The first was for Carmen Montez, a woman I’d known for years. When she came out as trans, her family had been fiercely supportive. The first person she’d told was her grandmother, who she was very close to. Carmen had come in for a tattoo of a thorny rose on her shoulder. It was a tattoo that her grandmother had gotten (much to the scandal of her family at the time) and Carmen wanted to honor the matriarch of the family. Her sister had come in with her and, on a whim, gotten the tattoo also. The next day, Carmen had come back in with her other sister and her mom, and they’d gotten the tattoo as well.
I’d taken a picture of the four of them, arms around each other’s waists, grinning as they looked back at my camera, roses on their shoulders. I wrote: The family that tats together stays together! Three generations of Montezes supporting each other through thorns and blooms. #legit #badass #UnitedInk.
The second was for Sally, a woman about my age who’d had her lower arm amputated as the result of a crush injury she’d sustained pulling her friend out of a car after they’d gotten in a crash. Above the line of where her prosthetic fit, she’d gotten a simple tattoo of half of one of those best friends necklaces that were popular when we were kids, the heart cut in half and strung on a chain. The friend she’d rescued had gotten the other half tattooed in the same place. The picture I posted showed both halves of the heart.
When I’d emailed Sally, she’d given me permission to use it immediately, and said she’d spread the word.
On the picture, I wrote, Sally saved her friend Martha after a car accident. Now *that’s* #legit #badass! Life is full of DRAMA we can’t control, but we can choose how we respond to it. #UnitedInk.
Over the next hour, we were all glued to the computer screen, watching the response to my first post, and watching other posts and reposts, and emails start trickling in.
“Oh my god,” Tara muttered as I came back from talking with a customer. “Uh, yeah, something in my eye.” She pushed back from the counter and headed for the bathroom.
I looked at the post she’d just approved, and Marcus looked over my
shoulder.
The picture was posted by @ThirdBaseThirdGrade, and it was of a woman in khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt, showing off a tattoo of a softball and bat on her calf. The text read:
I played softball in college and it gave me the best friends of my life and taught me about determination and pushing myself. When I started teaching third grade at a girls’ elementary school in a small town in Pennsylvania, there were no sports teams for girls in town. So I started a softball team at my school, the Tigers. At first there was a lot of pushback. But now we’ve been playing for six years, and it’s the best part of some of my girls’ days. They’ve learned to believe they can do things they didn’t think they could. They’ve learned they’re strong! This year, one of the girls from the year I started the team became the captain of her high school softball team. #legit #badass #EmpoweringGirlsThroughSports #UnitedInk
“Oh Jesus fucking Christ on a cross.” I blinked away the sudden moisture in my eyes, and Marcus wheeled away toward his station, wiping at his eyes and clearing his throat as Tara slid back into the chair. She took one look at us and nodded, rolling her eyes. “Oh, man,” I said. “There’s just no way not to turn a social media campaign into sentiment porn, is there?”
Tara shrugged. “When people see someone expressing, like, raw emotion, they feel like they can too. Like, if that’s what the campaign is about then that’s what it’s about, so why not? It’s like an assignment. You’re supposed to. And it’s to strangers, so you don’t have to bullshit. You can just…be.”
“Hunh. Amen to that, kid. Let me buy you a drink to say thanks.”
“Sounds good. Then you can also pay me to say thanks even more.” She grinned at me and batted her lashes angelically.
I laughed. “You got it, babe.”
I waved goodbye, and everyone seemed dazed. I knew they’d be watching the computer out of the corners of their eyes as they were working. I hooked my arm through Tara’s to take her to Tattooed Mom. I had a feeling she and Turner would get along.