by JD Hawkins
“It’s a good idea, Ash,” he says, though it sounds like a consolation. “Maybe we could revisit it at a later date, but for now I think we shouldn’t rock the boat too much. Let’s keep things running as smoothly as possible. You’ve only just started as a producer, so let’s see how you do on the show as it currently is.”
“Ok,” I say.
“But great idea, and it’s good to see you’re thinking of ways to improve the show. Always good to see.”
“Thanks,” I say, already stacking my papers, grabbing my coffee, and standing up to leave.
I almost bolt out the door. Blood boiling so hot I want to scream like a kettle. I stride back to my office wondering if the door is soundproofed, but halfway there I hear Jenny’s voice.
“Ash! You having that meeting today?” she asks as she struggles to keep up beside me.
“Just had it.” I refuse to make eye contact as I power walk down the hall, and I see her shoulders slump as she takes in my demeanor.
“Guessing it didn’t go well then?”
“Your guess is correct.”
I turn into my office and slam my papers down on my desk while Jenny closes the door behind her.
“You wanna talk about it?” she says, her voice gone low and soothing.
I turn around to face her, and at the site of her cute-as-a-button nose and thick, red, hand knit wool shawl, find it hard to maintain these levels of atomic frustration.
Jenny was one of the first people I met at this job, and now one of my closest friends. She’s a writer, though nobody who saw her would have too much trouble deducing that. She looks like Virginia Woolf if Virginia Woolf smiled all the time, wore hoop earrings, and constantly dyed her hair whatever the most hipster shade of the month happened to be, in this case a glistening shade of greyish-blue.
“You were right,” I say, throwing my hands up in the air and slumping onto the office couch, body limp with defeat. “Candace is never going to change. And neither is the show as long as she’s in charge.”
“She didn’t like the yoga studio feature, huh?”
“She didn’t just dislike it, she spat all over it. You would think I was trying to allocate a segment to a Vietnam documentary the way she tells it. All I’m trying to do is add a little more substance to the show.”
Jenny murmurs sympathetically.
“Was Sean there? Did he do anything? He loves you.”
I shake my head. “Sean is Sean. He was into my ideas, but at the end of the day he’s as scared of Candace as anyone. To be honest I don’t blame him.”
Jenny settles herself beside me on the couch and puts an arm around my shoulder, saying nothing, which I know comes hard to writers like her.
“Why am I even here? What’s the point, Jenny?” I say, entering the ‘despair’ phase of this informal psychotherapy.
“The point is that you have a job that pays pretty well, you’re great at what you do, and that you get to work alongside such cool and talented persons as myself.”
“Such cool and talented persons that are allowed to do nothing better than write bad puns for segments about butt implants.”
“You’d be surprised how challenging that can be.”
I laugh a little, then stand up in a huff and start to pace, trying to shake off the bad energy that crackles through me. Jenny folds her arms and smiles.
“You gonna pretend that this is actually what’s bothering you?” she asks.
I stop and look at her.
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. You don’t expect me to believe you’re this mad about a rejected segment, do you? You’ve worked here for two years—you know the drill.” She pauses a moment, eyeballs me, and then nods slowly. “Alright. I see how it is. What’s his name?”
I can’t help but smile and shake my head a little, looking away in slight embarrassment.
“It’s complicated.”
“Great,” Jenny says, leaning forward. “I love complicated. I read Pynchon for the jokes.”
I sigh a little, taking my time as I try to pick the right point to begin.
“It’s not just any guy. I bumped into an ex yesterday.”
Jenny rubs her hands together and grins. “Mm-hmm. I’m hooked already.”
“He was, like, my first love. I mean real, deep, carve-your-name-in-my-skin love. Leave-your-shirt-behind-so-I-can-smell-you-after-you’ve-gone love. Kill-me-now-so-I’ll-never-come-down-from-this-moment love, you know?”
“Whoa,” Jenny coos on a heavy breath. “No. I don’t know. My first love was more ‘I’ll-come-over-tonight-but-only-if-you-can-give-me-ten-bucks-for-gas’ love.”
I shake my head. “Anyway, we dated in high school and everything was magic and I thought it was forever until one night…he just skips town. Doesn’t tell anybody anything. Just…gone. Nothing left behind, no clue where he went. Just gone. Never heard from him again. Until now.”
Jenny sits back and frowns.
“You really don’t know why? Did he act weird before he left or anything?”
“No. Nothing. His dad was always in and out of jail, involved with a lot of shady stuff, I don’t even know what. Teo used to get picked up a lot by the cops too. But for nothing.”
“Maybe that was it, though. Maybe this guy—Teo—committed a crime, like with his dad or something, and then left before he could get caught.”
“No!” I say, sounding just like I did back then, always first to defend him. “Teo wasn’t like that. Sure, he’d get into fights sometimes, but he wasn’t anything like his dad. Besides, he would have told me. We didn’t hide anything from each other…or at least, I thought we didn’t… I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he was just really good at pretending to love me, and I was really good at believing it.”
Jenny lets the sadness linger in the air a moment before sympathetically sighing.
“How long since you saw him?”
“About seven years.”
“Whoa!”
“I know. Long time, right? I tried to get over it. God, I dated some awesome guys. Smart, funny, talented, interested in me. But every time, I knew from the first date I wasn’t going to fall for them. That it’d always feel…like an imitation.”
“So you bumped into him again in L.A.? Just randomly?”
“Yeah. Just out of the blue. I went to a tattoo shop, and there he was.”
“And you didn’t say anything about your past? Or ask him why he left?”
“No. I mean, I wanted to, but…I don’t know. It was confusing. A shock just seeing him. And I feel like I’m supposed to act like it’s all water under the bridge. Like we’ve both moved on and it doesn’t mean anything now. But…” I trail off, shaking my head.
Jenny sighs and nods sympathetically with the kind of expressive sadness only her big brown eyes could manage.
“Damn. And you’ll never see him again. So now you’ll never know.”
“Actually, no—we’re meeting again. He’s supposed to call me.”
“What?!” Jenny jumps up from the couch and paces toward me determinedly. “You’d better tell me you’re gonna ask him what happened this time, because at this point I feel like I’m reading an Agatha Christie with some missing pages.”
I laugh a little and move back to the desk, ready to take my seat and get back to work.
“That’s not a bad way to describe how I felt the past seven years.”
“Don’t be afraid to talk to him, Ash. You can do this. You just gotta stand up and be your badass, take-no-shit, awesome self. You deserve some answers.”
I nod and pick up my now-cold coffee, taking a big gulp and steeling myself for the day ahead. Jenny’s right. I deserve answers. And I’m going to get them, no matter what.
4
Teo
It took me the bigger part of my life, but eventually I figured out that if you don’t have much of a home, you can always make a new one yourself. That’s what Mandala Ink feels like now. Home.
It wasn’t e
asy. L.A.’s full of artists who can wield needles better than most surgeons, brilliant obsessives who could put a pore-perfect replica of the Sistine Chapel on your left butt cheek. I never saw the high standards of the city as a threat, though, more of a minimum requirement.
We don’t do cute little dolphins for your ankle. We reject drunk bachelor party remnants and frat dudes for whom a tattoo is just a dumb story to tell to strangers. I make sure everyone who works for me reads up on the history of tattoos, on how they were used to distinguish warriors and women from Polynesia to Northern Europe, on how it became a mode of identification for Western militaries, and how tribes in India marked themselves to be recognized in the afterlife. I tell them to treat every tattoo like it’s going on their own skin. I take tattoos seriously—and how could I not? They pretty much saved my life.
Those kinds of high standards and strong principles are a hell of an overhead. For the first few years, Mandala was a couple dimes away from going under. But I figured that that kind of heavy investment was always gonna pay off. The thing about tattoos is that they’re their own kind of advertising, especially with the internet and social media. We were putting stuff so beautiful and unique out into the world that eventually the world came to us.
Appointments started coming so thick and fast we considered hiring a full-time receptionist. People so famous we had to do their tattoos in private, or after-hours.
More than that, Mandala became as much of a community as it was a tattoo parlor. I left the brilliant art school grads with a penchant for pissing off their rich parents to the other shops, and instead the people that I hired as apprentices were dropouts, repentant ex-cons, drifters like myself. Young men and women who only needed to be given a chance, who would show you the kind of war-like loyalty only people like them can. Some of them weren’t Picassos when I first started training them, but I believed that what you were born with only determined how much work you had to put in, that you could still win the pot with the worst hand at the table, and they were only too keen to prove me right. I’ve never had an employee that some other shop hasn’t tried to poach, and I ain’t never had an employee who took their offers. A few of my very first hires have even gone off to start their own businesses in other cities by now, and I’ve given my blessing to each one of them.
Though the front of the shop is all business, out back, behind a little door, we have a private lounge. Tatty sofas and stacks of beer that don’t fit into the fridge. The smell of vinyl records and nickel-wound guitar strings. Just a chill place for the employees to hang out, I figured, except soon everyone was passing through. The back of my shop became a place for people to hang out until the bars ramped up later that night, a place to crash for kids who’d train-hopped all the way from the east coast, a secret club for people who knew what tattoos and music and good company could do for the soul. I can’t tell you how many bands were formed there, how many bad-luck stories were drowned under booze and laughter there. Part halfway-house, part art collective, part underground club. I even got a legal permit to provide alcohol, just to keep the cops off my back. Shit—what else was I gonna do with all that money anyway?
That’s where I am now, sitting back in the antique dentist’s chair we used to use for tattoos, and which is now just a strange piece of furniture I got no reason to get rid of. I have the flyer for Isabel’s gig in the one hand, my phone in the other, and I’m texting Ash to tell her where it is and what time I’ll pick her up.
It’s just me, until Ginger squeezes his big body into the doorway and slaps his stomach.
“Hoo-wee! I’m about ready for a beer, a girl, and the whole cow.”
“Did you lock up?” I ask, still looking at my phone.
“Sure did.”
Ginger’s named after the red, braided beard that hangs from his chin all the way down his chest, which makes him look like some cartoon Viking. A four-hundred pound transplant from Alabama that I got into a fight with in a jail cell once, after we’d both been arrested for attending a house party that got a little out of control. The bastard used his Southern charm to wrangle a job out of me before the night was through. That was over two years ago now.
“We gon’ start slipping if we don’t get somebody else in here helping us out. You, me, Kayla—ain’t enough. Whole damn city’s fittin’ for a tatt.” Ginger comes close, casting a big shadow over the flyer. “Hey, I’m going to that. Want me to pick you up? Save yourself the DUI?”
I pocket the phone and put the flyer to the side.
“Nah, I’ll be on my bike. I’m taking someone.”
“Oh yeah?” Ginger says, perching his big body on a stool and popping open a beer. “Double-dipping on that brunette who keeps coming by wearing those booty shorts? Goddamn that girl, I oughta sue for public indecency—damn near put a needle right through a customer last time she brought that ass through here.”
I laugh and shake my head.
“No. You remember the girl who came by yesterday morning?”
“The cute blonde with the Mona Lisa smile?”
I almost wince as he says it—calling Ash a ‘cute blonde’ is like calling a Harley JDH ‘two wheels and an engine.’
“Yeah,” I say, biting my tongue.
“Wanted to ask you about that. Weren’t she supposed to get a tattoo? Seemed like she ran outta here pretty quick.”
I shift up in the chair, lean forward to look directly at Ginger.
“Remember that night we got blind drunk back here on the gin Kayla brought? Night I put the shop logo on your stomach?” Ginger lifts his shirt to reveal the mandala around his belly button with a sense of pride. “Kayla was talking about her kid, and I said I’d only ever loved one girl.”
“That’s about all I do remember from that night.”
I shrug. “Well, that was the girl.”
Ginger sips his beer quickly and widens his eyes, interested now.
“She just came by looking for you all of a sudden?”
“Not looking for me. Just a tattoo. It was a surprise for both of us.”
Ginger laughs. “A good one—if you’re taking her out now.”
I try to sound nonchalant. “I doubt it’s gonna happen.”
“Ok,” Ginger says with a sly smile. He gets up from the stool and reaches for the whiskey on the shelf. “I’m smelling a story here. A good one.”
“Ain’t no story. Definitely not a good one,” I say, making it sound like the final word on the matter.
Ginger takes a swig and hands me the bottle, then looks at me like I’m performing a magic trick and he wants to figure out how.
Kayla steps into the back through the curtain. One side of her head shaved, the other side braided, long metal earrings that match the studs and buckles on her leather jacket and boots. She looks like she’s stepped out of an eighties rock video, and is possibly the only girl I know who doesn’t just make it work, but makes everyone else in the room feel underdressed because of it. Her tatt specialties are full color horror tattoos, which makes sense, and watercolor florals, which kinda doesn’t. But she’s amazing at both. Go figure.
“What’s happening back here, boss?” she says, as she moves to the desk and starts packing some things. “Looks like a meeting of the sad bikers’ club up in here.”
With a big grin, Ginger says, “I’ve finally found a girl Teo’s scared of.”
“Fuck you,” I say.
“Oh really?” Kayla says, turning away from her things to fold her arms and look at me with interest. “So the prolific Teo has finally met his match?”
“It’s not like that. We’ve got history. Messy, complicated, dangerous history.”
Ginger shares a look with Kayla.
“Can you hear that in his voice?” he tells her. “Sounds like fear.”
“Fuck you,” I repeat, but even I can hear the slight smile in my voice.
“What happened?” Kayla asks. “You gonna tell us? Or make us guess?”
“There ain’t much to
tell. We met in high school. She was in a lot of my classes—well, art class, that was the only one I really went to. Anyway, we fell pretty hard for each other. Except we had to keep it a secret from the whole town.”
Kayla raises a pierced brow. “How come?”
“It was a small town. Everybody knew everything. I didn’t have the best reputation. Well, my dad didn’t have the best reputation, but it was the same thing to everyone else. Problem was, her family was pretty straight. Her dad was some big shot in the town. Sat on the local council, political bullshit, ‘pillar of the community.’ Mom was one of the teachers at the school until she passed from cancer our sophomore year. Last I heard, her sister was going to run for mayor.”
“Man, some people are just born into it,” Ginger says.
“Yeah,” I say, taking the whiskey back from him for another swig.
I hand it over to Kayla and she takes a swig herself, then says, “Too good for you?”
“Pretty much. Ash and her sister were like the ‘golden children.’ Destined for great things. Whole town loved them. They lived in this big white house, clean as the sky. Big gate, driveway you could drag race on, maids—the whole thing. Her mom used to donate a truckload of toys to the children’s hospital every year. They were seen as living saints.”
“Shit,” Ginger says, stretching the word out for three full seconds.
“And there I was sharing an illegal trailer with my dad on the other side of town. Dodging cops who had no one else to play authoritarian with and trying not to go out of my mind with boredom in that shitty hellhole.”
Ginger whistles and then says, “Man, just like Romeo and Juliet.”
Kayla and I laugh a little, looking at each other.
“Sure. Shitty ending and all.” I look at Ginger and notice that he’s frowning in confusion, too thoughtful to say anything. “You know how Romeo and Juliet ends, right?”
“Sure,” he says. “Those damned chick flicks are all the same. They’ve always got happy endings.”
I look at him to see if he’s serious, then shake my head in disappointment.