The Tattoo

by Chris Mckinney

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  Kenji “Ken” Hideyoshi—Brought up by a twisted code of samurai traditions, Ken’s life is an odyssey in which he battles the world and himself. Always looking for something better, Ken journeys through the island of Oahu only to find himself back home on the Windward side where, ultimately, he must face his demons.

  Koa Pauhi Puana—Ken’s best friend and a should-be Hawaiian prince, Koa is about to inherit a wasteland decimated by imperialism, drugs, abuse and rage. Charming and vicious, loyal and vengeful, Koa is a bomb waiting to go off.

  “Dad” Hideyoshi—A Vietnam vet and widower, Ken’s father’s life has been filled with hardship and tragedy. He is consumed with the need to teach his son that the world is cruel and harsh, no matter what the cost.

  Kilcha “Mama-san” Choy—“Mama-san,” the proprietor of a strip bar called “Club Mirage,” is a Korean immigrant obsessed with money and status. A former “comfort woman” of the Japanese Army, she is willing to do anything to insure that her daughter’s life is immune to the destruction that was once her own.

  Claudia Choy— A half-Korean and half-Caucasian Art History major at the University of Hawai‘i, Claudia has so far lived a life sheltered by her mother’s overprotectiveness and money. Falling in love with Ken, her world is changed forever.

  Kahala Puana—Raised in the upper-middle class suburbia of the Ahuimanu hills, Kahala marries Koa Puana right after high school. Three kids later, living in a skeleton house with an abusive husband, she dreams of the life that should have been hers.

  Matthew “Cal” Brodsky—Ken’s mute cellmate in Halawa Prison, “Cal” is the audience of Ken’s life story. Both a tattoo artist and veteran of the prison life, he listens while he tattoos Ken’s back, always seeing parallels between Ken’s past and his own.

  the

  TATTOO

  Copyright © 1999 by Mutual Publishing Company

  “Rusty Old Steampipes” reprinted by permission of songwriter Warren Kaahanui; “Ku’u Home O Kahalu’u” © Olomana Publishing Co. 1976, reprinted by permission of songwriter Jerry Santos;“Honolulu City Lights,” from Paradise CD Honolulu City Lights by Keola Beamer, reprinted by permission of Tom Moffat Productions, Inc.; “Waimanalo Blues,” written by Liko Martin and Thor Wold, reprinted courtesy of American Pride Publishing, BMI; “Flying,” reprinted by permission of songwriter Patrick Downes.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  McKinney, Chris.

  The tattoo / Chris McKinney.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56947-450-1 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 1-56947-450-8 (pbk.)

  1. Hawaii—Fiction 2. Mute person—Fiction. 3.Tattoo artists—Fiction. 4. Prisoners—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.C5623T38 2007

  813'.6—dc22

  2006052200

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  the

  TATTOO

  CHRIS MCKINNEY

  “It is said the warrior’s is a twofold Way of pen and sword,and he should have a taste of both ways.”

  Miyamoto Musashi

  Go Rin No Sho (A Book of Five Rings)

  I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deepthat they would have to face it without the consolidation of tears.”

  Richard Wright

  How Bigger Was Born

  table of contents

  prologue

  LOCKDOWN BY MIDNIGHT

  chapter one

  THE GROUND BOOK

  chapter two

  KOA

  chapter three

  LOOKING AT MUSASHI

  chapter four

  SUPERNOVA

  epilogue

  THE LAST RONIN

  prologue

  “Rusty old steampipes banging away,

  letting me know it’s another day,

  in hell, in a cell.

  For I’ve done wrong and I agree,

  so punish me with humanity,

  for I’m a human, not a dog.”

  Rusty Old Steampipes

  Mkaha Sons of Ni‘ihau

  LOCKDOWN BY MIDNIGHT

  After breakfast, Cal was led to the doors of Module C. He took off his clothes and put his hands against the wall. He then let his hands fall and spread his ass-cheeks. After a few seconds, he turned around and faced the small, compact frame of Sergeant Miranda. He lifted his testicles. Cal watched the other guard, Officer Tavares, go through his clothes. After the routine inspection, Tavares tossed him his underwear, shirt, and pants. Cal glanced at Tavares’ huge tattoo-covered forearms. More than me, he thought.

  Cal put on his clothes and waited for the buzz of the metal door. When the buzz sounded, he went through and walked toward the barred door of Quad Two. He walked by the mirrored windows of the control box and felt the eyes behind it watching him. Another buzz sounded and Cal walked through to the door of his cell. He waited in front of the metal, brick-colored door. He looked through the skinny, rectangular window and saw his mattress, which smelled like dirty underwear. The final buzz sounded and Cal walked into his cell for lockdown.

  Cal prepared the gun in his cell. He watched the Walkman motor wind and the guitar string vibrate. It sounded like a fly trapped under a thimble. Satisfied, he put the gun back into the hole of his mattress, placing it by a bottle of black ink.

  A few minutes later, the door buzzed. Cal sat rigid as his new cellmate walked in. The new guy immediately dropped his pillow, blanket, and box full of books on the floor. Cal didn’t want to fight him, even though it was a jailhouse custom for a new guy to get his pillow and blanket taken away by his cellmate as soon as he walked through the door. Cal knew. He’d had just about every pillow and blanket taken away from him every time he’d moved.

  The new guy took off his shirt. Cal was surprised at the sight of him, not because he was Japanese, though Japanese inmates weren’t too common, but because he was a mean-looking Japanee. He was tall for an Asian, about five-eleven, not skinny, but cut-up. He would’ve been skinny if it weren’t for the years he’d obviously spent on the weights. He had the body of a welterweight boxer. No, Cal, who as a constant victim learned to hate violence in prison, didn’t want to fight with him.

  The new cellmate’s face had its share of pock marks. There were other scars, badges of violence, short jagged lines. None of the scars were too extreme, though — they didn’t make him ugly. His hair was long, straight, thick. A ronin’s hair, Miyamoto Musashi hair, Cal thought, put back in a ponytail, but not a slicked-back Steven Segal ponytail. It was a reckless, weary tie that let some of his long bangs come out on the sides of his face. His hair was more brown than black, the sun probably having toned down the darkness. His skin was dark, weathered, tough. He did not wear the skin of the cliché Japanese national, slicing-and-dicing American business. TeppanyakiGeneral Motors. He wasn’t the president of Honda, Sony, not the one who bought up land from New York to Honolulu. He wasn’t the bobora foreigner walking on Kalakaua Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Donna Karan, pale face, crooked teeth. He was also not the katonk of Berkeley, the A.J.A. majoring in business or engineering, devouring white jobs, trampolining off the affirmative action springboard, soaring in the white clouds. He was not even the Hawai‘i townie Japanee, the upper middle-class Pearl City-living, private school-attending, baseball-playing, gel-haired, car stereo-pounding, my-dad’s-name-is-Glenn (he wears an aloha shirt to work) fucking dime-a-dozen Japanee. He wasn’t townie, he was country.

  His eyes were slanty eyes, but cold. Cal looked closely and saw the dark topaz, eyes that told
Cal not to fuck with him. Doubting his eyes, Cal looked at his knuckles. They were scarred and broken.

  The Japanese prisoner squatted on the stainless steel toilet. Marking his territory. Cal looked closer at the man’s hands and saw an ugly, green tattoo on his right. It was between his thumb and index finger and it read SYN in homemade, capital letters. When Cal’s eyes drifted up, he saw that the guy was looking at him with an angry frown.

  “What, old man?” the new guy asked. “You neva seen one guy take one shit before?”

  Cal looked away. He felt the scar on his throat. He recognized that look in those eyes, that extra hatred which came in a flash. It was because Cal was haole, he was white.

  Cal remembered going through it all before. It was why he’d gotten his throat cut, why he could no longer speak. He was white and was hated in Halawa Correctional Center because of it. Besides, Cal thought, the swastika tattoo on his forearm didn’t help either. The Hawaiians ran the prisons in Hawai‘i. The only reason he was in the high security area of Halawa was because he was under protective custody. When he’d been in the middle security facility, he’d just taken too many beatings.

  The toilet flushed, interrupting Cal’s memory. He looked up at his cellmate, who ignored him, picked up his pillow and blanket, and went to the bottom bunk. Within a minute the guy was snoring. Cal took off his blue trousers and stuck his thumb and index finger up his ass. He pulled out a rubber glove. He opened the glove and took out a bent cigarette and a short sliver of telephone wire. He leaned over to the electrical outlet and put the wire into the socket. He lit his ten-dollar cigarette off the wire and took a long drag. He looked at the box which the Japanee had brought with him. He saw a bunch of paperbacks. Macbeth, Native Son, Invisible Man, The Tripmaster Monkey, and A Book of Five Rings sat on the top. Cal reached out his hand. His cellmate stirred. Cal shot his hand back and took another drag from his cigarette.

  An hour and a half later, the door buzzed. Slowly the prisoners of Module C, Quad Two made their way out of their cells. Cal was one of the first ones out and he walked up the stairs to claim his place at the stainless steel cafeteria-style table. He almost ran into Nu‘u, who was walking down from the second floor. Nu‘u, the bull of Quad Two, put his arm around Cal. “Hey, California Joe,” he said, “what’s your hurry?”

  Cal shrugged his shoulders. Even though his real name was Matthew Brodsky, he’d accepted the name Cal. It was what everyone had called him since his arrival fifteen years before.

  “Come,” Nu‘u said, “we go play dominoes.”

  Cal’s new cellmate was the last to leave the cells. His hair was no longer tied back, so his bangs covered his eyes. Like most of the prisoners, he didn’t put on his shirt. He walked up the stairs and sat next to Nu‘u. “Who da fuck are you?” Nu‘u asked.

  The new guy let out a quiet laugh. “Ken. I jus’ came from special holding. Da fuckas finally took me off max.”

  Cal thought he looked like a hard case. Most of the prisoners in Modules A, B and C were, but most were under closed status. The guys who carried max status were the real fuck-ups. They were the guys who didn’t give a shit. These were the guys who were thrown in special holdings because of disciplinary problems. In special holdings, they were forced to stay in their cells for twenty-three hours of the day. During their hour out, they were let outside in the yard alone. The cells had no beds. They ate in their cells. There was no television, no visiting privileges, no phone calls, no nothing.To say you were maxed meant you were someone who shouldn’t be fucked with. Cal saw that Nu‘u recognized this when Nu‘u stopped playing to shake Ken’s hand. “Howz it. I’m Nu‘u. Dis California Joe. He no talk. His troat was cut. Fucka is one mean tattoo artist, though.”

  Ken extended his hand to Cal, who shook it. Ken looked at the scar on Cal’s throat, then looked at Nu‘u. “He got cut ova hea?”

  “Nah, was in middle security. Dis fucka get one Nazi ting tattooed on his arm. Show ‘um, Cal.”

  Cal raised his arm and showed Ken the tattoo. Ken laughed. “Bad place fo’ have one swastika tattoo. You must be from da mainland.”

  Cal shrugged. Everyone assumed he came straight from California, but he had been in Hawai‘i ten years before he killed his wife. He had gotten the tattoo when he was young, when he used to bike around in Texas.

  “Hey, no worry,” Ken said, “We all get tattoos we regret.”

  Cal smiled. The others in the room acted like they were watching T.V., but Cal could see they were listening to the conversation. Nu‘u spoke. “So how much more time you get?”

  “Shit,” Ken said, “I would be out I tink if I neva fuck up. But all dis overcrowding, da time should be short. Parole maybe six months.”

  Nu‘u nodded. “Bradda, befo’ you leave, you should get one tat from Cal. Fucka is mean.You should talk to him, too. Da fucka is one mean psychiatrist. Good ah, he only listen, he no talk back. Besides, you know if you tell him da truth, all da fucked up shit, he cannot tell anybody anyway. Da fucka get mean patient confidentiality.”

  Cal grinned. I could write it down, you dumb Samoan. But he wouldn’t tell. He loved listening to the stories. It reminded him of when he used to listen to country music or the blues as a young man. He looked down at his swastika. What a dumb kid I was, he thought.

  Ken pulled his hair back out of his face and tied it. He watched quietly as Cal and Nu‘u played dominoes until the next lockdown.

  When Ken and Cal returned to their cell, Ken plopped down on Cal’s mattress. Cal flinched. Ken stuck his hand in the mattress and pulled out the gun and bottle of ink. He smiled. “You really dat good?”

  Cal shrugged. He looked at the tattoo on Ken’s hand, the one which read SYN. Ken smiled again. “You like hear da story?”

  Cal shrugged again. He was surprised when Ken laid back, closed his eyes, dropped his pidgin and started with perfect English. “I got this one at my friend Koa’s house,” Ken said, as he pointed to his hand. “We were sitting in the middle of the dry-wall, door locked, cooking it up, basing for hours. It was a joke of a room: the floor was the closet, the back seat of an old Chevy Chevelle was the bed, a blue-vinyl bed.There was no carpet, only a cheap brown linoleum that was peeling at the corners and the edges of the floor. Koa had stacks of books and magazines at each corner of the room to hide the curling of the linoleum. In one corner were his Playboys, in another his hot rod magazines. The third corner was covered with a stack of Muscle and Fitness magazines, and in the final bend of the wall, closest to the door, sat some novels I’d given him, books he’d never read. As for the walls, they were peppered with fist holes, but none big enough to escape through.”

  He paused as if to wait for Cal to say something, then smiled and went on. “We sat in the middle of the room on Koa’s dirty laundry, smoking it up. Koa lit the lighter and heated the bottom of the stained teaspoon and said, ‘Hey, some of da boys at school get one tattoo, SYN, you know, for syndicate? It’s one gang, an dey like us join. I went arready put mine.’

  “He put down the spoon and raised his right hand so we could see the homemade block letters printed on for life. ‘You guys should join, too. We goin’ rule da Windward side.’

  “There were five of us there, I was the only one who wasn’t Hawaiian, and as Koa carefully loaded his glass pipe with the cooked up coke, we nodded to each other. Strength in numbers. Boys for life. Later, as the sun rose, we were finishing my tat last. Koa was poking the thread-wrapped needle into my skin. Every few seconds he dipped the threads on the needle into the bottle of black ink. Little drops of blood speckled the ink, and Koa sometimes had to stop and wipe my hand with toilet paper. Blood and ink smeared the letters. We were brothers.”

  Ken stopped and opened his eyes. He seemed to be looking at Cal trying to determine whether his story was interesting.

  Cal knew Ken was kind of rambling, probably because he hadn’t really talked to anyone for at least a month while in special holding. Ken seemed satisfied that Cal was intereste
d so he pointed to his other tattoo, the one on his left deltoid.

  Ken closed his eyes again. “My second tat, I got much later. On my eighteenth birthday I drove to Waikiki, by myself, and went to Skin Deep Tattoo. Because the first one had turned green because of bad ink and a worse artist, I wanted this one to be done professionally. I refused homemade tattoos. It’s awesome walking into a tattoo parlor for the first time. Dozens of folios showing hundreds of designs. Choose one, they beckon. They have it all, old-fashioned anchors to new-wave tribal. We have kanji! Isn’t kanji brushed on, not poked on? I entered armed with my design.”

  Ken pointed to the tattoo on his deltoid. It was a circle, about three inches in diameter, filled with a plant of some sort. Three balloon-shaped leaves were joined together. On top of each leaf, rose a stem. On the three stems sprouted small, clover-shaped leaves, on the top and on the sides. “I wanted the Paulownia crest,” Ken said,“our Hideyoshi family crest, tattooed on my left shoulder. Besides the Chrysanthemum, this was the most prestigious crest during the Tokugawa Era.

  “I walked into the mirror-walled ‘operating room’ and showed the haole my design. He told me, ‘No problem.’ As he prepared his gun, I looked at his tattoos. His body was covered with them. Reapers, clowns, dragons, koi. All of this only on his arms and calves; his black T-shirt and aloha print surf shorts covered the rest of the collage. The koi struck me the most. It leaped from the waves and looked at me with its lifeless, black eye. It looked like a shark’s eye. What did Quint from Jaws say about a shark’s eyes? Lifeless eyes... Like a doll’s eyes. Quint was right. I’d seen this eye before. I’d always thought of the koi design as a Yakuza tattoo.These fucking haoles, pick and choose what they like from other cultures and flush the rest down the toilet. ‘Hey, we’ll take your sushi, your tattoos, your women, the little geisha girls, you can keep the rest.’ One-stop shopping. We don’t get to shop, the medicine is forced down our throats.