Finally, after three strangely botched attempts at applying the stencil, Scott whipped out a Magic Marker, ready to sketch a snake on my ankle. Several shaky, disjointed lines later, I inquired as to his intentions. Surely, I asked, he was not planning on working from only his deranged lines?
By this point, he was sweating too, and probably wishing I had never come in. He was certainly wishing that Nick and Dave would stop taking pictures of his incompetence. As he tried to explain that he was, indeed, going to work from his sketched lines, I asked frantically how he was planning to incorporate the design within the snake. “I’ll figure it out once I start,” he said, cleaning his tattoo gun.
My head started to spin. As I looked around, I realized that one of the other guys was resterilizing needles and stapling them into packets marked “Hospital Sterilization.” Very different from Artistic, where they use new needles for every customer. That was it. I wanted out.
Eyeing the door, I began trying to determine the quickest and most effective escape route. I had to work fast. Things had become decidedly uncool, and I didn’t want anything with so much negative potential on my body for the rest of my life. Explaining my tangoers was fun. I have only the fondest memories of good ’ol reticent Rusty even when I almost passed out. But this was different.
What happened next was a blur of adrenaline and energy. As Scott began cleaning the needle and preparing the black ink, I jumped up, exclaiming that I did not have enough money and needed to get to a cash machine. Waving my hands frantically and clutching my wallet, pulling out press passes and old IDs, I told him I’d be right back.
It would have gone off without a hitch, except Dave and Nick weren’t biting. First they offered to lend me some money, and then, when I finally succeeded in dragging them outside, they insisted that I go back in and explain that I was taking off. Maybe I should even offer Scott some money, they suggested.
At this point, Dan pulled up in the Volvo and, looking slightly confused, said he hadn’t been planning on coming back for an hour, and what were we doing out so early. Suddenly, it seemed that Scott and the boys at Electric Ink were the least of my problems. I had lured Dan and Nick and Dave down to Providence with the promise of blood and needles, of twisted expressions of pain that they could document in the interests of Journalism. Now we were running off with our tails between our legs. They weren’t going to give up so easily.
Eventually, I agreed to go back in. Although I certainly didn’t feel that I owed any explanations—after all, Scott was about to ineptly mutilate my body—my three companions disagreed. I even ended up giving Scott twenty bucks. I guess that’s the going rate for leg mutilation.
The final scene was as uncomfortable and unsatisfying as the end of a love affair in which no one had done anything wrong, but nothing had worked, either. Walking over to Scott, I tried to remind myself that the fact that he was incompetent did not reflect poorly on me. Still, I couldn’t help feeling bad. “Look, I don’t think I’m gonna do this today. Why don’t I give you some money for the work you’ve done so far.”
Instead of being angry, Scott appeared equally uneasy. “Sure, why don’t you give me twenty bucks.” Done. I couldn’t help feeling like I had come out on top.
As we drove off, we were all silent. The boys at Electric Ink had gathered by the window and were doing their best to glare at us, but they knew they hadn’t played their parts well. I couldn’t help thinking that they looked a little ridiculous.
Tattoos
J. D. MCCLATCHY
1. CHICAGO, 1969
Three boots from Great Lakes stumble arm-in-arm
Past the hookers
And winos on South State
To a tat shack. Pissed on mai tais, what harm
Could come from the bright slate
Of flashes on the scratcher’s corridor
Wall, or the swagger of esprit de corps?
Tom, the freckled Hoosier farmboy, speaks up
And shyly points
To a four-inch eagle
High over the Stars and Stripes at sunup.
A stormy upheaval
Inside—a seething felt first in the groin—
Then shoves its stubby subconscious gunpoint
Into the back of his mind. The eagle’s beak
Grips a banner
Waiting for someone’s name.
Tom mumbles that he’d like the space to read
FELIX, for his small-framed
Latino bunkmate with the quick temper.
Felix hears his name and starts to stammer—
He’s standing there beside Tom—then all three
Nervously laugh
Outloud, and the stencil
Is taped to Tom’s chest. The needle’s low-key
Buzzing fusses until,
Oozing rills of blood like a polygraph’s
Lines, there’s a scene that for years won’t come off.
Across the room, facedown on his own cot,
Stripped to the waist,
Felix wants Jesus Christ
Crucified on his shoulder blade, but not
The heart-broken, thorn-spliced
Redeemer of punk East Harlem jailbait.
He wants light streaming from the wounds, a face
Staring right back at those who’ve betrayed him,
Confident, strong,
With a dark blue crewcut.
Twelve shading needles work around the rim
Of a halo, bloodshot
But lustrous, whose pain is meant to prolong
His sudden resolve to fix what’s been wrong.
(Six months later, a swab in Vietnam,
He won’t have time
To notice what’s been inked
At night onto the sky’s open hand—palms
Crawling with Cong. He blinks.
Bullets slam into him. He tries to climb
A wooden cross that roses now entwine.)
And last, the bookish, acned college grad
From Tucson, Steve,
Who’s downed an extra pint
Of cut-price rye and, misquoting Conrad
On the fate of the mind,
Asks loudly for the whole nine yards, a “sleeve,”
An arm’s-length pattern of motives that weave
And eddy around shoals of muscle or bone.
Back home he’d signed
On for a Navy hitch
Because he’d never seen what he’s since grown
To need, an ocean which…
But by now he’s passed out, and left its design
To the old man, whose eyes narrow, then shine.
By dawn, he’s done. By dawn, the others too
Have paid and gone.
Propped on a tabletop,
Steve’s grappling with a hangover’s thumbscrew.
The bandages feel hot.
The old man’s asleep in a chair. Steve yawns
And makes his way back, shielded by clip-ons.
In a week he’ll unwrap himself. His wrist,
A scalloped reef,
Could flick an undertow
Up through the tangled swash of glaucous cyst
And tendon kelp below
A vaccination scallop’s anchored seaweed,
The swelling billow his bicep could heave
For twin dolphins to ride toward his shoulder’s
Coppery cliffs
Until the waves, all flecked
With a glistening spume, climb the collar-
Bone and break on his neck.
When he raises his arm, the tide’s adrift
With his dreams, all his watery what-ifs,
And ebbs back down under the sheet, the past,
The uniform.
His skin now seems colder.
The surface of the world, he thinks, is glass,
And the body’s older,
Beckoning life shines up at us transformed
At times, moonlit, colorfast, waterborne.
>
2.
Figuring out the body starts with the skin,
Its boundary, its edgy go-between,
The scarred, outspoken witness at its trials,
The monitor of its memories,
Pleasure’s flushed archivist and death’s pale herald.
But skin is general-issue, a blank
Identity card until it’s been filled in
Or covered up, in some way disguised
To set us apart from the beasts, whose aspects
Are given, not chosen, and the gods
Whose repertoire of change—from shower of gold
To carpenter’s son—is limited.
We need above all to distinguish ourselves
From one another, and ornament
Is particularity, elevating
By the latest bit of finery,
Pain, wardrobe, extravagance or privation
Each above the common human herd.
The panniered skirt, dicky, ruff and powdered wig,
Beauty mole, Mohawk, or nipple ring,
The penciled eyebrow above Fortuny pleats,
The homeless addict’s stolen parka,
Face lift, mukluk, ponytail, fez, dirndl, ascot,
The starlet’s lucite stiletto heels,
The billboard model with his briefs at half-mast,
The geisha’s obi, the gigolo’s
Espadrilles, the war widow’s décolletage…
Any arrangement elaborates
A desire to mask that part of the world
One’s body is. Nostalgia no more
Than anarchy laces up the secondhand
Myths we dress our well-fingered goods in.
Better still perhaps to change the body’s shape
With rings to elongate the neck, shoes
To bind the feet, lead plates wrapped to budding breasts,
The Sadhu’s penis-weights and plasters,
The oiled, pumped-up torsos at Muscle Beach,
Or corsets cinched so tightly the ribs
Protrude like a smug, rutting pouter pigeon’s.
They serve to remind us we are not
Our own bodies but anagrams of their flesh,
And pain not a feeling but a thought.
But best of all, so say fellow travelers
In the fetish clan, is the tattoo,
Because not merely molded or worn awhile
But exuded from the body’s sense
Of itself, the story of its conjuring
A means defiantly to round on
Death’s insufferably endless emptiness.
If cave men smeared their bones with ochre,
The color of blood and first symbol of life,
Then people ever since—Egyptian
Priestesses, Mayan chieftains, woady Druids,
Sythian nomads and Hebrew slaves,
Praetorian guards and Kabuki actors,
Hell’s Angels, pilgrims, monks and convicts—
Have marked themselves or been forcibly branded
To signify that they are members
Of a group apart, usually above
But often below the rest of us.
The instruments come effortlessly to hand:
Fish bone, razor blade, bamboo sliver,
Thorn, glass, shell shard, nail or electric needle.
The canvas is pierced, the lines are drawn,
The colors suffuse a pattern of desire.
The Eskimos pull a charcoaled string
Beneath the skin, and seadogs used to cover
The art with gunpowder and set fire
To it. The explosion drove the colors in.
Teddy boys might use matchtip sulfur
Or caked shoe polish mashed with spit. In Thailand
The indigo was once a gecko.
In mall parlors here, India ink and tabs
Of pigment cut with grain alcohol
Patch together tribal grids, vows, fantasies,
Frescoes, planetary signs, pinups,
Rock idols, bar codes, all the insignia
Of the brave face and the lonely heart.
The reasons are both remote and parallel.
The primitive impulse was to join,
The modern to detach oneself from the world.
The hunter’s shadowy camouflage,
The pubescent girl’s fertility token,
The warrior’s lurid coat of mail,
The believer’s entrée to the afterlife—
The spiritual practicality
Of our ancestors remains a source of pride.
Yielding to sentimentality,
Later initiates seek to dramatize
Their jingoism, their Juliets
Or Romeos. They want to fix a moment,
Some port of call, a hot one-night stand,
A rush of mother-love or Satan worship.
Superstition prompts the open eye
On the sailor’s lid, the fish on his ankle.
The biker makes a leather jacket
Of his soft beerbelly and nailbitten hands.
The call girl’s strategic butterfly
Or calla lily attracts and focuses
Her client’s interest and credit card.
But whether encoded or flaunted, there’s death
At the bottom of every tattoo.
The mark of Cain, the stigma to protect him
From the enemy he’d created,
Must have been a skull. Once incorporated,
Its spell is broken, its mortal grip
Loosened or laughed at or fearlessly faced down.
A Donald Duck with drooping forelock
And swastikas for eyes, the sci-fi dragon,
The amazon’s griffon, the mazy
Yin-yang dragnets, the spiders on barbed-wire webs,
The talismanic fangs and jesters,
Ankhs and salamanders, scorpions and dice
All are meant to soothe the savage breast
Or back beneath whose dyed flesh there beats something
That will stop. Better never to be
Naked again than not disguise what time will
Press like a flower in its notebook,
Will score and splotch, rot, erode and finish off.
Ugly heads are raised against our end.
If others are unnerved, why not death itself?
If unique, then why not immortal?
Protected by totem animals that perch
Or coil in strategic locations—
A lizard just behind the ear, a tiger’s
Fangs seeming to rip open the chest,
An eagle spreading its wings across the back—
The body at once both draws death down
And threatens its dominion. The pain endured
To thwart the greater pain is nothing
Next to the notion of nothingness.
Is that what I see in the mirror?
The vacancy of everything behind me,
The eye that now takes so little in,
The unmarked skin, the soul without privileges…
Everything’s exposed to no purpose.
The tears leave no trace of their grief on my face.
My gifts are never packaged, never
Teasingly postponed by the need to undo
The puzzled perfections of surface.
All over I am open to whatever
You may make of me, and death soon will,
Its unmarked grave the shape of things to come,
The page there was no time to write on.
3. NEW ZEALAND, 1890
Because he was the chieftain’s eldest son
And so himself
Destined one day to rule,
The great meetinghouse was garishly strung
With smoked heads and armfuls
Of flax, the kiwi cloak, the lithograph
Of Queen Victoria, seated and stiff,
Oil lamps, the greenstone clubs and treasure box
Carved with demons
In polished attitudes
That held the tribal feathers and ear drops.
Kettles of fern root, stewed
Dog, mulberry, crayfish and yam were hung
To wait over the fire’s spluttering tongues.
The boy was led in. It was the last day
Of his ordeal.
The tenderest sections—
Under his eyes, inside his ears—remained
To be cut, the maze run
To its dizzying ends, a waterwheel
Lapping his flesh the better to reveal
Its false-face of unchanging hostility,
A feeding tube
Was put between his lips.
His arms and legs were held down forcibly.
Resin and lichen, mixed
With pigeon fat and burnt to soot, was scooped
Into mussel shells. The women withdrew.
By then the boy had slowly turned his head,
Whether to watch
Them leave or keep his eye
On the stooped, grayhaired cutter who was led
In amidst the men’s cries
Of ceremonial anger at each
Of the night’s cloudless hours on its path
Through the boy’s life. The cutter knelt beside
The boy and stroked
The new scars, the smooth skin.
From his set of whalebone chisels he tied
The shortest one with thin
Leather thongs to a wooden handle soaked
In rancid oil. Only his trembling throat
Betrayed the boy. The cutter smiled and took
A small mallet,
Laid the chisel along
The cheekbone, and tapped so a sharpness struck
The skin like a bygone
Memory of other pain, other threats.
Someone dabbed at the blood. Someone else led
A growling chant about their ancestors.
Beside the eye’s
Spongy marshland a frond
Sprouted, a jagged gash to which occurs
A symmetrical form,
While another chisel pecks in the dye,
A blue the deep furrow intensifies.
The boy’s eyes are fluttering now, rolling
Back in his head.
The cutter stops only
To loop the blade into a spiralling,
Puckered, thick filigree
Whose swollen tracery, it seems, has led
The boy beyond the living and the dead.
He can feel the nine Nothings drift past him
In the dark: Night,
The Great Night, the Choking
Dorothy Parker's Elbow Page 13