An Arrangement of Skin

by Anna Journey

  After five nights alone in the graveyard, I abandoned the apartment and, at thirty years old, moved in with my parents and younger sister, in Fairfax, an hour and a half north. Rebecca had recently graduated with her master’s degree in Oral History from Columbia University and, priced out of her place in Brooklyn and unable to find a job, returned for nine months to our childhood house. Our circumstances at first seemed similar: I’d received my doctorate from the University of Houston and I, too, was unemployed and needed to come home. I spent most of the months I lived at my parents’ house lying in bed with my cat, crying in the middle of dinner as my parents looked on helplessly, or hiking around the nearby suburban pond with my mother. Rebecca busied herself reposting the photographs of my ex that I’d un-tacked from the kitchen bulletin board—to show her solidarity with Carrick—and mailing a series of anonymous envelopes to her former roommate in New York. Each envelope contained a single pewter murder weapon—a knife, revolver, candlestick, wrench, or lead pipe—that she’d removed from the murder-mystery board game Clue. “Do you think I should start with the wrench,” she asked me, “and then follow it with the candlestick, and arrange them according to their increasing level of menace?” I realized that we were both uniquely broken.

  Five years later, Rebecca was living in Copenhagen and conducting research for her anthropology dissertation while I’d gotten a teaching job in Los Angeles. We both referred to our postgraduate disasters as “the dark year.” Although Lee never apologized for abandoning our friendship—or for ratting me out to Carrick for my affair—he wrote to me after I’d lived in LA for a year and a half, in part to justify his behavior yet expressing his desire to rebuild our friendship. I knew this gesture—defensive, contradictory—was as much as he’d ever be able to offer. Now, when Lee and I hang out, we bring our spouses. Instead of once a week, we speak on the phone a couple of times a year. We’re not anywhere close to recovering the friendship we once shared, though this cautious incarnation does honor, I think, its long and complicated bond.

  During a recent summer visit to Richmond, I went with David to an exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, “Japanese Tattoo: Perseverance, Art, and Tradition,” where we admired roomfuls of life-sized photographs of seminude tattooed people suspended from the ceiling, the massive panels as tall as sails. Many of the photographs of the traditional Japanese tattoos, or irezumi, featured muscular men in full or partial bodysuits. Their backs, shoulders, buttocks, and upper thighs undulated with multicolored dragons, amber-scaled koi, curly-maned Lions of Buddha, rising phoenixes, folkloric demons, and cascades of loose fuchsia cherry blossoms. Much of the enduring imagery inflecting Japanese tattoos derives from ukiyo-e woodblock prints, popular from the Edo through the Meiji periods (the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries). Ukiyo-e—“pictures of the floating world”—remind us that all existence is transitory, as in the Zen metaphysics of the wind-tossed maple leaves, peonies, or cherry blossoms, the fragile sakura broken free from the branch and hovering, gradually, toward earth.

  During my time as an art student at VCU, I taught a lesson on ukiyo-e prints to a class of elementary school children. Instead of woodblocks, I’d passed out pink rectangles cut from recycled Styrofoam lunch trays onto which the children carved—by pressing down on their dull pencil points—images of ephemerality: magnolia leaves, daisies, sunflowers, snowflakes.

  By the time of the tattoo exhibit, the many shades and layers of Richmond’s ghost town seemed, at this distance, to enfold more good memories than bad. David and I met Lee at Belle Isle, the forested five-hundred-acre island (and former POW camp for Union soldiers) across the river from Hollywood Cemetery. We crossed the narrow suspension footbridge, which shook from the pounding of joggers, and dodged dog turds, pausing to watch a couple of teenage boys leap from the bridge, one after the other, into a deep part of the James. We cheered from the edge, clapping. Arriving at the island’s flat rocks, we sat, the guys talking behind me as I rolled up my jeans and dangled my bare feet in the current. I could see a coal train smoking on the tracks beyond me and the many graves, white and grey, Johnny’s and Winnie’s, teething the leafy hills of the cemetery on the other side of the river. Kicking my legs in the water, I listened as David described the tattoo exhibit and the images of “the floating world.” I kept my eyes fixed on Oregon Hill, my old neighborhood of artisans and folks who sit on their front stoops in the evenings to share stories. “[W]omen on the porches,” sing the Cowboy Junkies, “comparin’ alibis.”

  As I revisit the tattoo exhibition’s color catalogue at my home in California, I keep returning to the same image: an intricate color piece by the renowned tattoo artist Shige. The artwork ripples across the back of a nude woman who stands with her spine toward the camera, her black hair flipped over her right shoulder to better display her tattoo, whose focal point is a cavernous human skull that spans her shoulder blades. What is it about this design that keeps pulling me in? In irezumi, the skull is not, I’ve discovered, a symbol of death or danger. Instead the image prompts people to invite change into their lives, to “embrace the new.” The artist Shige, however, who smiles—composed and wryly amused—from his headshot in the exhibit’s catalogue, provocatively subverts the conventional symbolism of the human skull, as he covers the woman’s back in crawling maggots and seaweed-like wisps that could be red hair or raw viscera. The skull’s two eye sockets seem deliberately positioned—in shape, size, and location—to resemble scooped negatives of the woman’s breasts, as if one could peer through her back into the live interior of her body. Fusing irezumi imagery with the outlaw aesthetic of biker tattoos (which Shige encountered during his early work as a mechanic for Harley-Davidson), the artist weaves an ambivalent taunt. Is this bodily landscape one of harrowing decay or teeming regeneration? Into the skull’s right eye socket twists a monstrous violet centipede, which emerges, open-mouthed, from the left one. “Exactly,” I thought, nodding. “I’ve been there.”

  Above the skull’s cranium hover orange and white moths while below pink peonies blossom across the woman’s buttocks, the edges of her tattoo dark and soft as smeared coal—the trademark of the akebono mikiri. The dawn border: that gradual, bruise-like blurring between ink and skin, like the cumulous edge of a sunrise, a slow transition.

  RETRO ANATOMY OF A STRING BASS

  During bluegrass gigs my former boyfriend Carrick, an upright bassist, used to wear a canary-yellow vintage T-shirt emblazoned with the Jujyfruits logo and the dazed face of a cartoon boy tipped toward a hovering nebula of red and green gumdrops. Carrick had bought the shirt at the Salvation Army because he found the image unintentionally psychoactive and therefore hilarious. (Those colorful candies looked like benzos, we’d agreed, and that kid’s dilated pupils and daffy grin were pure whacked-out drug bliss.) He’d trimmed the bottom hem to make a cropped half-shirt, which exposed his craft-beer belly each time he raised his arms onstage to play the bass. With his auburn beard that ebbed and flowed in profile—topiaric—between the whiskers of Karl Marx and Darwin, bared hairy midriff, and leather bow quiver strapped like a gun holster to his right thigh, his stage persona was something like Britney Spears meets Yosemite Sam in a jug band. He’d dance with his string bass in time to the music, bobbing his chin as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  Carrick owned three string basses. One he kept on campus, in the jazz department at VCU, where we were students, and two lived with us for seven years like a pair of moody roommates, alternately mute and ecstatic. We crammed our brick row house in Richmond with more instruments than most other objects (exceptions: books and records). Mandolins and fiddles perched on wall brackets, burnished and curvilinear as beetles. A herd of banjos and acoustic guitars rose from A-frame stands by the idle fireplace. Two full-size keyboards formed an “L” in the corner near the front door. There were even obscure instruments, like the theremin Carrick assembled from a Moog kit, or invented ones, like the dildophone: that raunchy mock trombo
ne he made by rubber-banding a plastic kitchen funnel to a silicone dildo. But the upright basses loomed like Druids and took up most of the space. They were Carrick’s favorite, his specialty.

  He played an eclectic range of genres (jazz, bluegrass, old-time, big band, funk, classical, rockabilly, blues, roots) as well as in a diverse number of groups: the potty-mouthed vaudevillian octet Special Ed and the Shortbus Bluegrass Band (imagine Frank Wakefield grafted onto Frank Zappa), popular on the Richmond bar scene and hippie music festival circuit; the lounge-jazz trio for which he donned his Banana Republic suit, toned down his leprechaun kinesics, and sent “The Girl from Ipanema” purling over shrimp and grits at the Jefferson Hotel’s Sunday brunch; the funk-infused gospel quartet that performed for a historic African American church and was comprised of three other VCU jazz students—all of them black—and the ruddy Scots-Irish-complected Carrick, which the guys christened Three Pieces and a Biscuit (the congregation loved the punch line).

  Double bass, contrabass, kontrabass, bass viol, and bass violin all name the body of the bass. Some terms distinguish the acoustic from its electric incarnation: upright bass, standup bass, bass fiddle, string bass. Others try to sketch—through metaphor—the hefty instrument’s strange grace: elephant, doghouse, bull fiddle, the tree.

  To me the upright bass’s shape has always conjured a person’s: it has parts called a head, a neck, and a belly; it possesses a back, two shoulders, and a waist. Other terms draw from the character of negative space. The concave C-bouts delineate the cinched middle of the hourglass and make room for the plunging gestures of a bow. And the pair of f-holes, carved on either side of the bridge like mirror-image cursive f’s, allow sounds to vibrate more freely from the hollow body.

  Ever since Man Ray painted black f-holes across the gelatin silver print of Kiki de Montparnasse’s nude back in 1924 and rephotographed the image to create his Le Violon d’Ingres, turning the female body into a violin, f-holes have been popular back tattoos. The tension in Man Ray’s iconic surrealist photograph lies between the beauty of the classical nude and crude objectification, between seductiveness and a creeping unease, and the way the Parisian model Kiki crosses her arms in front of her chest, concealing her limbs from the camera, evokes both metamorphosis and dismemberment.

  No matter how familiar I’d become with the bodies of Carrick’s instruments, I’d often walk past one of his six-foot-tall string basses in the dark and mistake it for a burglar hunched in the corner. I’d gasp and knock my shin into the coffee table before shaking off the double take.

  The first time Carrick brought me to Blacksburg, his rural hometown in the mountainous southwestern tip of Virginia, we’d just adopted a three-month-old kitten and decided to bring her with us. Carrick’s mother feared Jellybean would infest her house with fleas, so we stayed in the upstairs apartment of his father’s orthodontist office in town: an old Victorian on Main Street. Despite Carrick’s belief that the office was haunted (slamming doors, hidden toothbrushes, turned-on lights, screams from the basement), this was the more desirable sleeping arrangement. His relationship with his mother had been strained since he gave up the violin for the bass as a teenager. She’d groomed him to be a concert violinist, making three-year-old Carrick practice holding a toy fiddle with a pencil pressed against its belly like a bow, even though doing so produced no sound. She wanted him to get used to the gesture. After years of violin summer camps and weekly lessons, her youngest son’s defection to the upright bass—to jazz and bluegrass and late gigs at smoky bars—was a choice she’d neither understood nor fully forgiven.

  The upper floor of the orthodontist office contained a kitchen, den, bathroom, and bedroom, where Carrick’s father could stay if the narrow country roads vanished in snow or whenever he needed a few days alone, away from the family. The examination rooms and waiting area for his father’s patients took up the downstairs floor. Carrick had told me that many of his classmates in middle school got their braces from his dad and that plaster casts of their crooked teeth sat on shelves in a storage closet. I had asked Carrick if he ever poked around to locate the dental molds labeled with the names of girls he’d had crushes on, so he could hold parts of them in secret. I wish I could remember what he said.

  We spent the night in the office’s upstairs bedroom and I woke up in an unusual position, lying flat on my back, leaden from sleep paralysis. Although I couldn’t turn my head or roll myself over, I could see every object in the room ripple in the sunlight as if the room were gradually filling with olive oil, while the dark slur of a figure loomed over the bed repeating: Get out of the house. Get out of the house. Carrick startled when I told him about the hallucination, saying he’d had an almost identical vision in the past. We decided to leave Blacksburg early.

  Carrick’s parents had sent his older sister to a private Catholic girls’ school in Richmond and shipped his older brother to an elite boarding school for boys in Charlottesville. Both institutions funneled a large portion of their graduates into the University of Virginia, the college (red brick buildings, neoclassical Corinthians) immodestly nicknamed “the Harvard of the South.” As soon as the kids hit puberty, Carrick’s parents wanted them out of the house with their loud music and adolescent drama. Carrick was the baby of the family at seven years younger than his brother and fourteen years his sister’s junior. When he reached middle school, his parents expected him to go to the same rich-boy boarding school in Charlottesville and graduate from UVA, like a good prep, like his violin-playing, obedient brother. Carrick refused. Leaving Blacksburg would mean leaving his bands, his bluegrass buddies, and his avuncular mentors who’d taught him how to play real old-time music. And besides, where would he store his upright bass at a boarding school aimed at future mortgage bankers and engineers? Carrick’s mother was outraged, but his father had respected his standing up for himself and allowed him to stay.

  The Purple Fiddle is a café, community gathering space, mountain market, and venue for Appalachian-based acoustic music located on a quiet stretch of Highway 32 in the leafy town of Thomas, West Virginia. The landmark’s large, violin-shaped marquee juts its purple body sideways, just above the doorway’s overhang, and sports the name of the venue in wavy yellow letters beneath a painted sun. The sign is too huge to mimic a fiddle one might tuck under a chin and bow; it’s closer in size to the largest instrument in the violin family, the upright bass.

  I traveled with Carrick and his string bass to West Virginia several times when he and the other seven members of Special Ed and the Shortbus Bluegrass Band played at the Purple Fiddle. Zipped in its black canvas case the bass took up half of his station wagon, stretching its shoulders and neck over the flipped-forward backseat. Because the Purple Fiddle was family-friendly—swarmed with children who’d flat-foot to the music across the hardwood floors—the Shortbus guys tended to omit their naughtier numbers: the rollicking scatological chant “Who Flung Poo”; the cover of Zappa’s deranged doo-wop tune “What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?” (replete with harmonized “woo-wee-ooos”); and the loony satire of a birds-and-the-bees sex talk written by Carrick, “T and A,” in which a serious-sounding patriarch attempts to impart to his son everything he knows about tits and ass. Not to pathologize or oversimplify Carrick’s sense of humor, but I’ve seen in his beaming, excitable, and essentially sweet nature a keen edge of reflexive defiance, an urge toward subversion, a naughty Shakespearean sprite grinning behind an upright.

  I wasn’t in the car the night Carrick drove a few members of the Shortbus back from a gig and hit a patch of black ice. Theirs was the only car on that stretch of the highway. The five-string banjoist recounted how the station wagon spun once or twice before careening into a skid and everyone sat in terrified silence, gripping their arm rests, everyone except Carrick. He let loose a giddy “Wheeee! Wheeee!” grasping the steering wheel and tipping his head back as if thrilled by a roller coaster ride, until they finally lurched to a stop along the shoulder. I’m no
t sure if it was Carrick’s knee-jerk insurgent clowning or visceral nervousness that inspired his reaction, but I’ve always thought that if I had to pick one story to capture his sensibility, it might be that slow-motion spin over black ice and toward potential death, in which Carrick’s decision was automatic: choosing to make people laugh.

  I don’t remember the first time I saw Carrick perform. It must’ve been at Richie’s Pub (now defunct) on the corner of Meadow and Broad, before the Shortbus had a substantial local following. I do recall my delight at discovering that the guy who wrote and sang lead vocals on “Who Flung Poo” (“Who flung poo? / Who flung poo? / Who flung poo? / Fuck you!”) also penned the wistful bluegrass tune “Each to Each,” which quoted T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock in the chorus: “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to each a peach? / I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. / I heave heard the mermaids singing, each to each.” Each time Carrick stepped onstage and grabbed his bass, his mouth stretched into a goofy elastic grin, his eyes widened and rolled, his chin jutted in and out to the rhythms. As he shuffled his feet, his whole body, like his bass’s, seemed to vibrate.