Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad!

by Nicholson, Scott; Shirley, John; Jones, Adrienne; Mannetti, Lisa; Masterton, Graham; Laimo, Michael; Rosamilia, Armand; Colyott, Charles; Bailey, Michael

  The weekend before, I’d been here to see Johnny Thunders with some friends from Jersey, the small clique of freaks that I trusted. Of course, most of them had gone off into different rooms of the Limelight to score drugs or sex, or just to get away.

  I watched the band, watched the people, and got drunk on the overpriced drinks. With nothing else to do, I decided to make this my Friday night haunt until something better came along. Jersey clubs were so damn lame, with Springsteen or hair metal bands at the Jersey Shore. If another “soulful acoustic love” hit on me again, I was going to puke. Boys back home were usually dirty, unemployed, and expecting to get laid because they carried a cheap guitar. I wanted nothing to do with any of them.

  New York City was alive, armed and dangerous. Here I could meet a guy or a girl—as long as they were my type, who cared—and get to know them for a night, and then get back to my real, boring life by sunrise. I wanted to live the vampire dream, as they said in books and on the street. I also wanted to see how close I could come to heroin without partaking. Call it nihilistic, call it living on the edge, call it stupid, but I loved the high of being so close to the high.

  Until I met Angelika. In a sea of soaking-wet goths and metal-heads, she alone was completely dry, as if she’d spent the day in the self-proclaimed Rock N Roll Church, sleeping in one of the dark recesses until the sun dropped below the tower.

  Techno music was never on the top of my list, but when I watched her from across the main room, I was converted. She was flirting with a stoned metal dude, who was wearing his wet hair draped over his shoulders and his sleeveless denim jacket (with a menacing Black Sabbath depiction on the back) like a badge of honor. I immediately hated him and was jealous of the attention this low-life was getting from a chick I didn’t even know. When she looked at me and grinned, I wanted to be with her—shit, I wanted to be inside her.

  Without a word, she left the metal dude’s side and approached me through the throng of bodies, swirling reds and greens and blues and yellows streaking across the dance floor. Two feet from me, she reached out her delicate hand. She was dressed in black, like ninety-nine percent of the crowd, but she wore the color like it was part of her. Her stomach was exposed under her half-shirt, taut and sexy, her legs were painted with black leather pants riding into her studded black boots. Black eyeliner, black lipstick, black nail polish, jet black hair, and arms covered in dark, swirling tattoos. I was in love.

  “Do you want to get high?” she whispered, even though the room was deafening with the beat and the mindless chatter.

  “I don’t do that,” I said, and wanted to cry. She smiled, her little pink tongue licking her black lips, before turning away. I caught a glimpse of her twice more during the night, but it was in passing, and each time I tried to follow her but she disappeared through the crowds and maze of rooms.

  I wanted to meet her and be with her. I couldn’t explain the feeling. I walked through the rest of my week like a zombie, going through the motions at work, staying in my apartment, and barely eating. I don’t think the television was turned on once, and the Stephen King book I was reading went untouched.

  Friday, I left work early, stuffing my clothes into my bag and heading to NYC. There was a sparse crowd hanging on the corner in front of the Limelight. The sun was dropping, the air was cold, and my stomach growled. The club wouldn’t open for at least three more hours.

  Then, suddenly, she was there, wandering through the crowd, touching and hugging as she went. Her all-black outfit had morphed into a red cat-suit, with tiny black felt ears on her head, and blood-red nails.

  Suddenly I felt like a poser, with my mall-bought black boots and tight leather pants. I realized with a blush that I’d copied her outfit from last week, and it looked horrible on me. I turned to run back to the train station, tail tucked between my legs.

  “Hey,” she purred and placed a warm hand on my shoulder, spinning me around. “Hungry?”

  We spent three hours, sitting side by side in a bagel store, talking and laughing and staring at one another. I knew that she was completely in control. I felt important in those three hours, like I was the only thing that mattered. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt like that, and I didn’t want it to stop.

  My throat ached, and I realized I had done most of the talking, Angelika interviewing me with questions about my past, my dreams, and my fears. I opened up to her like I never had to anyone before. I knew nothing about her still, but my mind couldn’t form a single question to ask.

  “It’s time,” she said, and rose from her chair, taking my hand in hers.

  “Huh?” I replied stupidly.

  At this Angelika laughed. “The Limelight is opening in twenty minutes. You can go in with me, I know everyone.”

  I was elated and nervous. I’d be going in with her. I’d be seen going in with her. I felt like I’d finally made it.

  “You know the story behind this place, right?” she asked as we approached the club.

  When I shook my head, she smiled. “You can’t experience the Limelight without knowing its history, now, can you?” Angelika stopped and pointed at the front of the building, ancient, dark and mysterious. “It was built in 1844 by Richard Upjohn, and it’s considered a Gothic Revival brownstone by the State of New York. It was an Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion. When it was deconsecrated in the 1970s, it was sold to Odyssey House.” Angelika smiled. “We’ll skip that part for now.”

  I swallowed and looked away, back to the group of people standing idly around the front entrance, waiting to get in like the commoner that I had been last weekend.

  We slid through a spot where the high, ancient fences didn’t quite meet, the former church hovering over us in the dark, the spotlights drowned out by the blackness.

  Inside, we stepped into a small antechamber, and I imagined priests and altar boys waiting here for the crowds to amass.

  Three figures emerged from the corner shadows, the effect unsettling. They wore garish outfits of black and leather and spikes and makeup. The closest wore corpse-paint and had so many body-piercings on his face that I stopped counting. His naked upper torso was covered in strange tattoos. The other two were females and looked like twins, with matching dominatrix outfits and the same exact tattoos on their exposed flesh.

  “Newbie?” the man said, spitting out the word as he stared at me.

  One of the twins suddenly gripped my wrist tightly and pulled my arm close to her black lipstick. She smiled as I tried vainly to pull away. “Heroin?” she asked and finally let me go. I was sure I would bruise where she’d grabbed me.

  “Not anymore,” I muttered.

  All three looked at Angelika, who only smiled.

  The other twin pulled up her shirt, exposing her tattoo-covered chest. I looked away instinctively. Everyone laughed. When I looked back to her she was still flashing me, but I controlled myself and looked. On each breast, around the nipple, was the symbol for anarchy that I’d seen all the punk kids using—a letter ‘A’ in a circle. Other tattoos went up and down her sides, but they seemed to start at the nipple tattoos.

  The guy put his wrists together, forming the anarchy symbol there as well.

  I looked to Angelika, confused, but she simply lifted her dark hair from her neck and showed me her own anarchy mark at her nape.

  “I have six of them,” the first twin said. “She only has five.”

  “One more, tomorrow, and I’ll be caught up. There’s a tattoo dude we use in the Village.” She glanced at Angelika. “We all use him.”

  “What’s his name?” I finally asked when no one said anything.

  “Ask for Carlo.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Greenwich Village. Everyone who is anyone will know Carlo,” the guy said.

  “I’ll do that,” I said, having no desire to. I was tattoo-free and wanted to stay that way. Even though I’d used a hundred needles for drugs in my time, I didn’t want the permanence of tattoo ink stai
ning my skin.

  Without a word, Angelika opened the door to our small vestibule and we were inundated with blaring techno music, swirls of dancers, and the stomping of feet.

  Angelika quickly disappeared into the crowd with her three apostles and I ran to catch up, but they were already gone into the bowels of the Limelight. Tonight the club was packed, and it took me several hours to get my first drink and calm my nerves. I watched an all-female metal band pump the crowd up, shatter some eardrums, and then scream their way off stage.

  The rest of my night was spent looking for Angelika, but she’d become a ghost. Finally, at the last possible minute, as the crowd thinned out only slightly, I trudged back to the train station and back to my un-life in Jersey.

  My week was spent at work, pulling a couple of doubles because I needed the money. My trips to New York were costly, once you factored in train tickets, food, and the proper clothing. Now my rent was a week past due and I was struggling to make it up.

  On Friday, despite still being a hundred bucks short on the rent, I was back in front of the Limelight. It was coming into late October and the wind and the chill were getting to me. Wearing only a short skirt and fishnet stockings wasn’t helping, either.

  A metal-head approached me cautiously. I did my best to ignore him but he stood in front of me and smiled. He was actually cute, with piercing blue eyes and a thin goatee, his dirty blond hair pulled into a ponytail. I played the bitch and stared at his leather jacket and various band insignias. I’d never heard of most of the bands, and the logos were so damn hard to even read.

  “I’m Bruno.”

  I ignored him and moved to the fence.

  Bruno didn’t take the hint. “I saw you with her last Friday, but not on Saturday.”

  “What?” I blurted.

  “You were at the L7 show but not here the next night.”

  “So? I have a life,” I said defensively. I was hurt to think Angelika hadn’t bothered to invite me to the Saturday show, and then realized how stupid and childish that sounded.

  “You went?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He pulled up his sleeve and showed me a new tattoo, a very familiar one. “I got it yesterday.”

  “Where?”

  He eyed me skeptically. “Carlo.”

  “Can you take me there?”

  Bruno took a step back. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “You need to find Carlo on your own.”

  “Whatever.” Now I was pissed at this waste-of-time dirtbag. “I’ll do it myself.”

  I walked away and hailed a cab, heading for Greenwich Village. I had no idea what I was looking for, which street to stop on, or who to ask about Carlo.

  The night was a bust. I made it to the train just in time, and spent so much money on cab fare that I was even further behind.

  Elena and I had been roommates in Odyssey House and had kept in touch for the last few years. I hadn’t seen her in six months, when she suddenly was there, sitting in the corner of the café and ordering a coffee.

  I took my break, we hugged, and I sat with her. Elena had fallen off the wagon a number of times since Odyssey, but she looked clean right now.

  “You’ve been back?” she asked over her coffee mug.

  “Back where?” I asked.

  “I saw you in line Friday night at the Limelight.”

  I laughed. “Yes, every week. I can’t help it, the place is so freaking cool. You were there?”

  “Yes. It’s so weird being back there, after being ... there. Our old rooms are now a bar, which is ironic.”

  “Remember the time we snuck in that Mad Dog 20/20 and got ripped?” I asked.

  “Good times.”

  “It’s funny, but I’ve been there three Fridays in a row but never bothered to find the rooms. It’s so different in the dark, and with the lights and noise.”

  “I saw Nikki and Cindy.”

  “Where?”

  “Where do you think? Last Friday, hanging around with the cool crowd.”

  “That’s weird. I took those two for complete dweebs. How’d they get with the cool crowd?”

  “I didn’t talk to them. You should have seen Nikki, though. She was covered in tattoos. Remember, she was the one who used to shit on you for using needles, saying she’d never stick herself?”

  “No kidding?”

  “Covered. All kinds of weird shit, too. Sayings from the Bible, band names, punk symbols, animals ...”

  “What kind of punk symbols?” I asked, but the hair on my neck stood up and I knew, I already knew.

  “That dumb anarchy thing you see graffiti idiots spray-painting on the sides of buildings. You still a cutter?” she asked.

  I shriveled when she said that. Elena put a hand on my arm and frowned. “I’m sorry, that was so rude.”

  “No, it’s alright.” I put both arms up and showed her my healed marks. “I haven’t done it in years.” Besides being a heroin addict, I’d been a cutter, slicing into my forearms, legs, and torso and bleeding. Odyssey had cured me of drugs and the self-mutilation.

  “Going to the Limelight on Friday?” she asked, to change the subject.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll pick you up at six and we’ll go in together,” she said.

  I wanted to punch Nikki in the face. We stood near the stage, waiting for some local band to start the night, pushed and prodded by way too many people in the club.

  Nikki was proudly showing Elena and me her third anarchy tattoo, the ink still drying.

  “Where’d you get that? Better yet, why?” Elena asked.

  “Carlo did them.”

  “Where?” I asked, trying to remain calm.

  “You need to find him,” she said slyly. I balled my fists and refrained from swinging and getting thrown out before I’d talked to Angelika. I needed to see her.

  “What, do you want one of those stupid things?” Elena asked.

  I ignored the question and moved away, into the crowd, in search of Angelika or someone who might be able to help me. There were quite a few people there with the tattoo, but they mostly looked me over to see if I had one, and when they didn’t see it, would ignore me like I was a leper.

  By the time the headline band was up and blasting out their techno/metal hybrid, I was defeated. I then set out to find Elena so I could get back home to Jersey, back to my shitty job, shitty apartment, and shitty non-life.

  Elena was still with Nikki, laughing as I approached her. I saw Cindy as well as the metal dude I’d talked to last Friday, and a dozen others.

  And, right in the middle of the circle, was Angelika, looking positively angelic in all white. As I approached, Angelika suddenly stepped away from the others and hugged me, gripping me tightly. “Where have you been? Your friend Elena is so charming.”

  I was jealous. Elena had spent the night with Angelika while I spent the night on a wild goose chase. I faked a smile and joined the group, but it was already breaking up.

  “She is so cool. Why didn’t you tell me you knew her?” Elena asked when we walked away. Once again, Angelika had disappeared.

  “I need to go find someone,” I murmured.

  “Carlo?” Elena asked.

  “How do you know?”

  “I think the two of us can find him.”

  I followed her outside and straight into a cab. Once again, I found myself being led by someone else through life, but I had no idea how to change the course of events. Instead, I walked a step behind Elena in our search for Carlo, asking random people in Greenwich Village about tattoos.

  We almost passed a homeless man cradling a worn backpack in a dark doorway. I stopped and asked him bluntly, “Any idea where Carlo can be found?”

  He smiled, his two remaining teeth bright white. “The tattooist?”

  “Yes,” Elena and I said much too loudly. In the middle of the night, with the cold creeping into my bones and my hooker-ish outfit, I realized that we wer
e very vulnerable.

  “My thoughts are always fuzzy when I’m sober, for some reason,” he said.

  Elena pulled a single from her pocket and handed it to him. The bill was sucked into his clothing but he still smiled.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “You gave me a dollar, which I appreciate. Good luck in finding Carlo.”

  I gave him a ten dollar bill and watched it vanish. He simply pointed at the doorway behind him. When we didn’t move, he shook his head and laughed, a dry, two-packs-of-cigarettes-a-day cough. “Carlo.”

  We gingerly stepped over him and his possessions, entering the hallway. It reeked of cat urine—I hoped it was only cat urine—and mold. As quickly as we could manage, we found another door and Elena knocked on it. When no one answered, she jiggled the door handle and it swung open, revealing bright light.

  The room was large, with walls painted white, and at least a dozen fluorescent lamps illuminating the rows of television screens mounted haphazardly on the walls, piled on tables and counters, and stacked on the floor three and four high.

  “Hello?” Elena called out.

  A wiry man dressed in a white lab coat and fingerless gloves stepped out of a side room and smiled. “Can I help you ladies?”

  “We’re here to see Carlo.”

  “That would be me. Are you here to pick up or drop off a television set?” he asked.

  “We’re here about the tattoos,” Elena said.

  He frowned, clearly puzzled. “Sorry, I only do TV repair.”

  We’d been had? Was this some elaborate joke to make me look stupid? I finally took charge, something I never do, and stepped forward. “Let’s cut the games, Carlo. I know what you do, and I want the anarchy tattoo that everyone who knows Angelika seems to have.”

  Carlo smiled. “Why?”

  I stared at him. Nothing solid came to mind. Why did I want a tattoo, when I’d never wanted one before? “I need it.” That was as good an answer as I could think of right at that moment.

  Carlo looked at Elena. “You?”

  “Same as her.”

  He put his hand on his stubbly chin and stared into a corner for a full minute. I was about to clear my throat and bring him back to Earth when he turned and asked us to follow him.