by Sarah Buhl
3
Wynn
Around four in the afternoon I finished my first day at the college and went straight to Sid’s shop. It was in the same building for forty years and he opened it in his twenties. He was a machine when it came to the number of tattoos he created in a week and his work was nothing less than exceptional.
I had been getting tattoos from him since I was sixteen and he finished my first the night my mother died. I have known him for years as he lived in the neighborhood near my mother and me. A constant caregiver even when my mother was alive, he saw through her masks and wanted to be a rock for me in my childhood. He saw what she was capable of doing.
They dated a couple times and those two dates were enough for Sid. He may not have been able to see what she hid behind her mask, but he saw there was something there. He never asked. When I was a kid I resented that, but now I am thankful for it. By not answering his unspoken questions, my own masks remained secure.
The best gift my mother gave me was in creating her will. I appoint Sid Thompson as sole guardian of my son, Wynn Hawthorne, were the most liberating words I had ever read. Though she was a real bitch in life, she had the foresight to make sure I went to someone good. I wished she gave me to him earlier.
I walked into his shop and heard the familiar and welcoming sound of his tattoo gun.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” his hoarse voice from years of smoking yelled from the backroom where he worked. I wished he quit. He had told me once that he made it this far, what’s the point.
“Okay,” I said as I took a seat and began flipping through an album of tattoos while I waited. Mine were absent from the book, despite the number he had done for me. He knew mine meant something to me and didn’t belong in a book for strangers to try to mimic.
“Is that you Wynn?” his loud voice bellowed.
“Yeah, it's me,” I said as I scoffed at a tattoo of a sports team’s logo. To each his own, but I didn’t get it.
“Well, come back here. I’ve been telling this little lady how you keep my workload busy with your tattoos.” Sid laughed one of his raspy laughs.
I rolled my eyes. Sid was always trying to set me up with women. He worried for me being alone. At times, I wondered if he and Stinson were conspiring against me. But he’s as single as I am, so I never understood his concern. But he was nonetheless. He was always telling me of different girls that came through his shop. One time he asked me if I was gay, because he wanted me to be sure I accepted myself. I told him I wasn’t, but if I were, I would tell him first. He thanked me because he said he wanted to set me up with the right person.
He gives me this look sometimes where I can tell he is thinking of how my first sixteen years were. He worries that I will be alone forever, but he doesn't realize I am content to be alone and a random girl's affections are not going to change that. Depression must come with loneliness he said with his eyes set in a sad expression.
The sadness he felt for me was his perception. He didn’t understand this wasn’t a funk or depression that could be lightened by something fleeting. Years of anger and sorrow can't be erased by screwing a stranger.
I leaned back in the chair and locking my hands behind my head, leaned forward to rest my elbows on my knees. Uncomfortable was an understatement to describe what it was like knowing Sid was talking of me to a girl. I didn’t want to meet a girl, let alone meet her while she’s getting tattooed.
I took a deep breath and standing, I held my hands in tight fists. I dug my nails into my palms as the pain it caused helped me focus on talking and not running for the fucking exit. Her cheap perfume drifted into the room before she peeked from behind the door. I blinked as I entered the room to erase the thought. Focus on Sid, not the girl. You are twenty-three years old she died years ago. You aren’t that little boy.
The girl’s abdomen was showing and Sid was putting a tattoo on her hip along the pant line. It was a cliché Chinese symbol lacking originality. I looked back up at Sid and focused on him, ignoring the memories that haunted me.
He turned sixty-six last month and he was a weathered man with a head full of slicked back hair that was gray from age. Tattoos traced up his arms and neck to stretched lobes. I grinned as he looked at me over his dark plastic frames. He wore glasses that looked as if they were from another time, as was the man himself. He held a quiet strength that was home for me.
“How've you been Wynn?” Sid asked.
I swallowed and continued digging my nails into my palms. Keeping my eyes focused on Sid, I pretended the quiet girl sitting there in the tattoo chair was a nonliving canvas. She wasn’t a human being that was listening to our conversation. “I’ve been good. I had my first classes today.”
The girl’s head shifted toward me. Out of my peripheral I saw dyed black hair. I flicked my eyes to her for a second. She wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t interesting either. She wasn’t looking at my face, but my arms. I scratched at my forearms as if to distract her from examining such important parts of me.
“You weren’t kidding Sid, those are cool tats you’ve done,” the girl declared and I kept my eyes trained on Sid.
“Thanks,” he said nodding toward her. “She’s here getting her first tattoo.”
“It means sun. I thought it was perfect since I love the beach,” the girl said.
I risked looking at her face and made sure to hide the disdain and annoyance the sound of her voice and the words she spoke brought. She smiled at me and winked. She winked at me? It was… odd.
Her wink and voice reminded me of the many girls I went to high school with and the many guys that dated them. I tried not to get involved in the teenage drama and I wondered why so many of them remained in a perpetual high school, content with running in the hamster wheel of adolescence, never to move forward. They learned from television and movies what life was to be and they mimicked their lives after them.
A few years ago those same people decided to have a reunion party. It had been two years since we graduated and I was twenty. I went after Sid’s incessant nagging. He learned of it because Blake made the dumbass mistake of bringing it up to me in front of him. Sid thought it sounded fun—going to a campsite to party with my friends from high school. They weren’t my friends.
I was an adult and didn’t have to listen to him, but I didn’t want Sid to worry for me. He was the one person in the world that I owed my sanity. He took me in without question and raised me as his own. I wanted him to be proud of me, so to make him happy, I went to that fucking party.
I didn’t drink then, so I imagined the fun to be had, hanging out with people I despised—but drunk. I tried to convince myself that it was a social experiment. I watched the herd and their following of each other. Gods forbid one went outside the norm and had an original thought and strayed from the path pushed upon them.
The girls were vipers waiting to attack. Black widows or praying mantises was a better description. I had found Blake talking to a small blonde haired girl that I didn’t recognize. We hadn’t graduated with her and she was different than them, but he was going to use her. It was his way. I liked Blake, but he was capable of so much more if he stopped trying to fit in so damn much.
He grabbed my hand in a fist as he always did and gave me the bro hug that so many guys do. I still wonder what movie the interaction first happened in to make it a common reaction to seeing your friend. It always made me uncomfortable.
He asked me that day when I was going to put weight on and gave me a rough shove. He looked at the girl after as if the shove impressed her. I didn’t stumble back when he did it and held my ground.
I ignored him and set my attention to the crowd around the fire. They were talking, but not talking. Mindless chatter. I thought of my new tattoo inside my arm. Salinger was right. People don’t care if you are speaking to awaken them to a truth they never thought possible. If it didn’t help them in the physical world, it was worthless and they didn’t notice. They float through life
trapped in their own mind and others are a means to an end for them to get what they want.
Blake introduced the girl as Lilith and I nodded in her direction and didn’t listen as Blake told her my name. Blake wanted to have his own time with this girl, so I left him to it. She was fresh meat and the sharks waited on the sidelines in case Blake decided to drop the bait.
I sat near the fire and stayed at the party for another hour until a girl came over to talk to me. I remembered playing tag with her when we were in second grade. She was fast and always tagged me it. She smiled at me that night and asked to sit by me. I gave a slight nod and waved my hand. I was it again.
She asked me mindless questions on potential colleges, showing a false interest in my life. I had told her I didn’t understand the point because it’s filled with more people memorizing and repeating what they’re told. But in college, you get a degree that says you memorized and repeated enough to qualify you for a job. I told her I didn’t need the debt or the fucking experience.
She laughed and had told me I was depressing. I agreed, and she asked if it was because I needed to get laid. I still remember the smell of beer and peppermint as she whispered with seductive eyes, running her fingers across my Salinger tattoo, not noticing my disgust. But she noticed my disdain when I lifted her hand from my arm and flung it to her own lap.
Her eyes turned dark as she said one word through clenched teeth. Fag. That word and her reaction was enough to make me want to destroy, as if the rational conclusion to my not wanting to be with her must be because I preferred men. I hated these people. Their narcissistic closed minds made me ill.
As I was getting ready to leave, one of the former football players came up to me and yelled to everyone that I was gay. With a defying grin, he had asked everyone if they made sure to watch their asses when we were in gym. Blake came over and shoved the guy away from me. He had this need to defend me and I never understood why.
The douche bag got pissed at Blake and declared that we were together. He laughed a loud drunken laugh and people around him encouraged him further with their added laughter. I rolled my shoulders back and tried to ignore him as I walked away. I was not going to stoop to their level with a response.
He laughed and yelled that I was a Momma’s Boy and that was my undoing. I did not belong to my mother. I did not belong to my mother.
I took two steps toward him and felt my rage focusing itself in my fist as it connected with his jaw. His hand went up to his mouth as if he could hold the blood with his hand and keep it inside him. He dropped to the ground at the force of my knee kicking into his back. I jumped on top of him and every ounce of pain and rage I had bottled up, I now threw into his face. My hand possessed a feral need as I hit him with the years of aggression I once withheld. I watched the blood spatter across my arms and the way it looked intrigued and scared me at the same time. I looked as a crazed animal, with my focused determination on one thing—destruction.
Blake pulled me off him and I looked around at the people standing speechless. I met each of their eyes and wondered how people living in a big city still managed to have such small minds. The last set of eyes I saw were Blake’s as he dropped his hands to his side in astonishment at what had happened. The young woman from earlier was still with him and she gave me a sad expression, but in her eyes I found understanding. She had strength to her, showing she saw what I did as valid. Blake nodded to his jeep to suggest we needed to leave. He and the young woman walked to his jeep as I turned away from them. As I did, from behind I heard the loud girl yell, “I told you he was a fag!” The crowd responded to her with silence. Maybe they were afraid I was going to attack them too.
My thoughts came back to Sid and the girl getting tattooed when he cleared his throat. I looked at them and they both stared at me.
“Did you hear me, Wynn?” Sid asked with a furrowed brow.
“Uh, no, no I didn’t.” I stared at him with glassy eyes. Stuck in my own memories, I wore an empty expression. I nod and smile when I am supposed to and most of the time it works in conversation. But the last memory took too much space and the present conversation lost to it.
“Man, where the hell d’ya go? You were here and then you weren’t. I asked you if you were coming in this weekend for your tattoo,” he said, resting his forearm on his leg and giving me a confused look. I watched as he gathered more ink on his needle before finishing the girl’s tattoo.
“Uh, yeah I’ll be in on Sunday. I’m going to head out now though. I have a few things I should finish,” I said.
I needed to leave before I combusted. I shouldn’t judge her and believe her to be as the girls from my past because she looked and acted as they did. But as much as I sit on the sidelines and watch people, I am often correct in my assumptions. I turned to the door and left without a word.
When I stepped outside, I saw a familiar face and my thoughts and blood began to race—the stubborn girl who didn’t want me to open the door for her earlier. She was walking away with ear buds in again and I watched as she entered Petra’s bookstore and it made me smile. Was she different?
She acted and carried herself as if she were the break in a world full of repetition. Earlier she made a point not to welcome niceties most girls longed for and I liked it. She hadn’t put on a façade or played bashful as many girls do. She was not waiting for a knight in shining armor.
I walked past the front door of the store and the girl stood inside the entryway with her head lifted. Her eyes were closed and she looked as the very definition of free. She wore an expression of pure contentment. I stood there for several moments, anticipating the lowering of her chin and her eyes as she saw the store for the first time. The store was enough to fill any book lover with excitement.
I walked farther and continued to watch her as I stopped near the brick wall outlying the window. Leaning against it, I saw movement from an aisle of books farther inside the store. It was Petra. She gave me a knowing look with one of her sly smiles, tapped the side of her nose, and pointed at me. She was always weird that way. She was a perpetual child and it gave her a uniqueness one doesn’t often find in the world. I shook my head and gave my eyes back to the young woman. She lowered her head as Petra spoke and her attention drifted from the experience she had.
I lifted myself from the wall and turned to leave. I was a twenty-three year old man and this was the first time I wanted to know what was going on inside another human being’s head. I was happy living this way because I didn’t have to interact with people. When you get deep into someone’s psyche you pull part of them into you and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that pressure on me. I didn’t want them to know me. To be honest, it scared me. I didn’t want the vulnerability that came with it. But looking back toward the store, I wanted to know this girl.
I dated a couple times a few years back. Sid got Blake involved in his conspiracy to set me up with a girl. They arranged dates for me with a couple hot girls as Blake labeled them.
The first date spoke of herself and her ex-boyfriend. He wronged her and her purpose for telling me the story was to plant in my mind that I should never do that to her. I watched her as she spoke and I made myself smile at the proper times and nod my head to encourage her to continue as if I were listening to her.
Each date started with comments on my bike and tattoos. I responded with nods and simple replies with questions encouraging the girl I was out with to do most of the talking. I tried to listen to the mindless stories of past relationships and hairstyles. But my mother’s words were louder than theirs. People only want what they can get from you, Wynn. They don’t care about anything except for what you can do for them. That goes for me too. I learned a long time ago not to expect anyone to care, so I started to take as well. We do what we have to in order to survive each day. My mother’s comments always echoed through my mind. I tried my best to drown out her voice and listen to the nonstop chatter of my dates, but she always won.
A few of the
dates told me of their high school years as if being a cheerleader long ago was impressive. I said my good-byes to them at the restaurant or theater where we had our date and they waited with expectant eyes. I gave them a quick kiss on the cheek and turned to leave.
The last date I went on was different. She was the first I went further than a simple good-bye. She had asked me to come back to her place to play video games. That was the reason I followed her home. I had thought that since she owned a gaming console she might be interesting. Come to find out, she never played. She thought owning it made her favorable with men. Weird.
I followed her into her house and we started playing a first person shooter and it was fun for a while. She kept leaning closer to me until she touched my hands to take the controller from me. They felt dry and reminded me of Blake’s iguana.
She set the controller to the other side of her and placed her palms on my face. She straddled my lap and started to kiss me. It was my first real kiss and it filled my mouth with the taste of tortellini and cigarettes. I blocked those from my mind as I started to let my body go at her touch. It wasn’t awful and it was nice at first, until she put her hand in my pants and hell broke loose. I couldn’t handle that. I closed my eyes and saw her silhouette in my doorway. I was a boy, wanting his mother and not the tormentor from his nightmares. As the memories flashed through my mind, on reflex, I threw her off me and ran to the bathroom.
I left her apartment that night with a quick apology telling her that I was ill with something. That was that—I never saw her again. She tried calling and texting, but I didn’t respond. From then on, I declined dates. I told Blake and Sid if I found a girl that held my interest, I would date her. It worked and they backed off except for the occasional introductions as Sid tried.
I was getting on my bike when Blake called. Before I said hello, he started, “Hey, you want to go to Henley’s tonight?” I squeezed my eyes shut at the anxiousness that question brought. I pinched the bridge of my nose, knowing I had to decide if I wanted to hang out at a bar. I thought of saying no, but I heard Stinson in my head, “You have to take those first steps. You always speak of control, well take fucking control.” Yeah, he had an unorthodox way with me and I appreciated it.