Famous People

by Justin Kuritzkes

  And I think, for me, like, there are a few main things I like to consider before I get anything tatted on me, and those are:

  #1. Aesthetic—I don’t want to put something on my skin that just looks lame.

  #2. Meaning—I want every tattoo to mean something to me on at least two or three levels. Ideally, four.

  And #3. Staying Power—Will I still be happy looking at this thing when I’m eighty? Will this mean anything to me in the nursing home?

  That last one is kind of the trickiest, you know, because you have to make a prediction about where your mind’s gonna be at in the future, and I don’t really think anybody is particularly good at that. I mean, for someone like Z or for someone like Skelet0r, they’re both just sort of like: Whatever. The only thing that’s real to me is right now, and right now I want a fucking Snickers bar on my nose. And I totally respect that. I actually think that’s kind of a dope way to live. But I try to think about my own tattoos from the perspective of my whole life, because, like, I don’t know, I care about that guy in the future. I want him to have a good time.

  Like, for instance, I don’t have any tattoos about my dad—at least not directly—because I’m still not sure how that’s gonna sit over the years. Like, I’ve got a ton of stuff about my mom—I’ve got a rabbit, which is her favorite animal, and a dentist’s chair to commemorate all those years she was working—but I don’t really have anything to do with my dad, because, like, I don’t really know if I want to see that shit every day, you know? Like, if I got the dates of his life or like, his name and “RIP” or something, I’m just not sure I want to be reminded of that shit every time I look in the mirror, or like, every time I get out of the pool.

  Because one of the beautiful things about tattoos, one of the things I really love about them, is that you forget about them sometimes—like, especially when you have as many as I do, you forget about certain ones for days, weeks at a time—and then you’ll be reminded of them sort of randomly throughout the day or throughout the year, because, like, one of them catches your eye or like, someone will ask you about it when they see you with your shirt off or your pants off, and you’ll be like: Oh, right, that thing! And if you’ve chosen your tattoos well—like, if you’ve only put stuff on your body that you really care about—those moments are actually sort of beautiful, because you get to talk about something that’s really special to you, and you get to let this other person a little bit deeper into your world. But I just don’t know that I want to set myself up to be ambushed every once in a while by these memories of my dad and all the shit he put us through, because I’m not sure how I’m going to react to that. I’m not sure it would be a good idea to plant a little land mine like that on my body.

  I’m only thinking about all this shit because a few weeks ago, I had my assistant commission this graphic designer to draw up that diagram I was talking about of all my tats, and she just finished it and sent it over to me a few minutes ago, and I’ve been sitting here on the plane looking at it, like: Wow. There are so many talented people in the world. She really knocked it out of the park.

  It was kinda funny, because, like, in order to make sure the diagram was accurate, I had to let my assistant take pictures of every inch of my body. I mean, some of the tattoos are really small, so I wanted the diagram to have all these blown-up sections, you know, like a biology textbook or something, where we zero in on just one little patch and like, get a super-close-up view of all the various tats there, and so we spent like, an hour or two in my living room a few weeks back with me just like, completely naked and her circling around me with a camera. I don’t even think she knew about all of them, you know? Like, usually I show her every new tat when I get one—I’ll send her a pic from the parlor or whatever while the ink is still settling in—but a few times during the photo shoot, she was just like: Whoa, really? And I was like: Yeah, you didn’t know about that one?

  I think the one that surprised her most was this little devil guy I have tattooed in between my big toe and my pointer toe on my right foot. It’s just this super-terrifying demon guy that I got in Indonesia when we were stopped over there with the HERE we Go tour. One of our technicians had this absolutely terrifying, like, traditional devil mask tattooed on his neck, and I was just like: Oh my god, that’s the dopest thing I’ve ever seen. And he was like: Oh, thanks, my friend did it. And I was like: Do you think he could do one for me? And the guy was like: Of course! Let me call him up. And the tattoo artist was super-excited to do it. I mean, he was a fan, and he was super-talented, and I was just like: I want it in my toes. I want to crush the devil with my toes. And he was like: Okay, cool, but I’m just warning you: That’s gonna hurt a lot. And I was like: Whatever, man, let’s fucking roll. And it REALLY fucking hurt. LOL. The whole time during the show the next day, I was like, limping around the stage and shit, trying to hold it together.

  On the diagram, there’s two main images of me just standing there with my arms out—there’s a front view and a back view—and then there’s all these smaller sections, and it’s like, the graphic designer got every inch. She didn’t miss anything. It’s actually really fucking beautiful, you know, to see yourself like that—to see yourself so fully rendered. I’ll include the whole thing in the final version when they publish it and it’ll be like one of those glossy sections, you know, with a key and everything—like, when you pick up the book, you’ll see that there’s just this section in the middle with this different-colored, different-textured paper, and then when you finally get to it, you’ll be like: Whoa! Cool!—but for now, I’ll just write down the little descriptions every once in a while whenever I have the time. She already labeled all the tattoos with numbers and everything on the diagram, so all I have to do is write down the descriptions and the little stories that go along with each of them. It’s WAY too much work to do it all in one go—if I tried to do it right now, it’d take me, like, five hours at a minimum—so I’ll have to just chip away at it gradually.

  The dudes are all passed out—we’re just finishing up this sort of insane leg of the tour where we went all through Central Europe, you know, like Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Vienna—and now we’re heading home. On the way there, I decided I wanted to stop over in Svalbard and finally visit my man Oddvar at the seed vault to see what that’s all about.

  LOL.

  He’s been telling me for a while that I should drop by. I’ve always wanted to check it out and hang with Oddvar on his home turf, but I’ve been too busy with one thing or another, and so it never ends up happening, but then, finally, two weeks ago, Oddvar emailed me telling me that he’s naming a seed after me, so I was like okay, all right, I should probably go visit him.

  Apparently, there are some seeds that they catalog over there that don’t have names yet because like, there are some plants that I guess people are discovering every once in a while for the first time or like, cataloging for the first time, and so this plant—I guess it’s a kind of shrub that’s found in New Zealand?—they didn’t have an official name for it yet—it just had like, a number—and so Oddvar decided that he was going to name it after me.

  Which is dope, you know, because, like, imagine a thousand years from now, something horrible happens and the whole world ends and they have to rebuild everything from scratch and they’re just like, shit, we need to plant some shrubs, you know, and so they dig into the vault and pull out this seed that’s got my name on it and they’re like, okay, no idea who this guy is, but this looks okay. And then, like, all over the world, people are running through fields of shrubs with my name or like, losing their volleyballs in my shrubs and having to go in there to find them. I don’t know. Something about that just really makes me happy.

  After Oddvar sent me that email, I wrote him back asking him if he’d read some of the pages I had written so far, because like, I’m actually kind of curious to hear what he thinks of the book, and I was like: Yo, Oddvar, I need you to keep this totally confidential, and you can’t sho
w this to anyone, but I need someone to take a look at these pages I’ve been writing and tell me if they feel honest, you know? Tell me if they sound like me. And Oddvar wrote me back immediately being like: I would be honored to take a look. I’ll write you some thoughts at the end of the week. So that was pretty cool of him.

  I like Oddvar. I don’t think Oddvar really cares if I like him, and like, I’m not even sure he likes me, you know—like, I don’t think that’s a part of his whole relationship to me—but I think we could actually be really good friends if we lived in the same place or kept up more of a correspondence.

  He wrote me back a few days ago with like, all these super-thoughtful notes about the book—like pages and pages of thoughts—and I was reading through all of it, you know, just like, this mountain of thoughtfulness, and I was like: Okay, I can’t write a fucking email back to this guy. I have to go see him and talk about this shit in person. So I wrote him back being like: Oddvar, can I stop by the seed vault on Thursday? I’m gonna be flying back home from Europe. And he was just like: Of course, yes. I’ll have a room made up for you and your entourage. LOL. He actually said “entourage.”

  Patrick’s not happy about it. I mean, I get it, you know, he’s the head of my security detail, and like, yeah, Oddvar’s super-chill, but at the end of the day, like, he’s still a FAN, you know, and fans should always be treated with suspicion. Plus, we probably won’t even be getting cell service on this fucking island, so Patrick’s just like: There’s too many variables to control. I strongly advise against it. But I was just like: You know, Patrick, I respect that, and like, you know I love you and I respect one hundred percent what you do for me, but at the end of the day, this is what I want to do, and this is my decision, so this is what we’re doing.

  And I mean, whatever, by the time we get there, he’s gonna love it. All the guys will. I can already picture it: like, Patrick and Curt and Mo just throwing snowballs at each other on the ice, and drinking beer out in the snow and looking off into this endless expanse of nothing and just being like: Wow, guys, we’re at the end of the world. We’re in some James Bond shit. Their inner Viking will take over.

  Apparently, tourists aren’t allowed into the Vault. There’s a lot of people every year who head up to Svalbard to catch the northern lights, because, like, it sounds like they’re really beautiful from there, and the tourists are always asking the guides like: Yo, can you take us to the Vault? Can we go check out the Vault? But Oddvar was telling me that your average person isn’t allowed to just waltz in and look around. You need to be somehow associated with the people who work there, or like, you need to be an invited guest.

  Something I also didn’t realize is like: This isn’t the only seed vault in the world. Apparently, there a couple thousand of these things that have been set up by different organizations all over the place, and this one is just what they call the “Doomsday Vault”: It backs up the whole system. EVERY seed that you can find at one of those other vaults, like, every single one, you can find a duplicate here. Like, there’s a seed vault in Italy that only has different kinds of tomatoes and basil and whatever, and like, there’s a seed vault in Lebanon that only has different kinds of Lebanese seeds. But this vault, like, the one in Svalbard, has everything. It has ALL the seeds from ALL the different places on Earth just in case any of those regional seed banks get wiped out.

  And Oddvar was telling me that it happens all the time. Like, apparently, because of all the shit that’s been going on in the Middle East, a few of the seed vaults over there have been completely destroyed. Like, they’ve been bombed to shit by the U.S. or fucking pillaged and burned to the ground by one of those crazy militant groups. And so the Svalbard vault has to back them up. Some of those plants are so rare even that like, the Svalbard vault is the only place in the world now where they even exist anymore, you know? Without the Doomsday Vault, those plants would’ve just been gone forever—wiped off the face of the earth.

  Anyway, I’m gonna try to get some shut-eye for the rest of the flight—I want to be totally fresh and rested for when we get there—but before I close my eyes, I just wanted to catalogue this one tat on the diagram before I forget: the first tat I got after my dad died. I was just reminded of it because of all the shit I was talking about earlier.

  I was obviously super-conscious of the fact that like, whatever I got at that point was gonna be majorly significant, you know? Like, the timing just made it so that whatever I ended up getting was gonna have a lot of heaviness attached to it, a lot of weight, and so I wanted to do everything I could to counteract that. Like, I knew that the worst thing I could do would be to wait, like, a couple months or whatever until I found the “right thing” to put on my body, and so literally a week after he died, like, only a few days after we put him in the ground, I just went to see Optimus, and I was like: Yo, what’s a tat that I’m always talking about getting but that we haven’t gotten around to? And Optimus thought for a second, and he was like: What about the map of St. James? And I was like: Dope. Perfect. And then he tatted it on the back of my left thigh.

  It’s #63 on the diagram.

  * * *

  The funeral was pretty low-key.

  There weren’t that many people there. I mean, you know, there were a few people who felt like they had to come—people who had been working for me for a while like my road manager, Bobby, and my manager, Shari, and some of the record label guys—but at that point, there weren’t that many people left who actually gave a shit about my dad or his life. A few of his band mates from the early days were there—guys like Greg and Daniel and Harry who were all part of the grunge scene in St. James—but that was pretty much it in terms of “friends.” His dad, my grandpa, was already dead, and his mom was already in a nursing home.

  Honestly, there were more paparazzi than guests, so the whole thing had this very weird vibe around it. It felt like everybody who was actually there to bury my dad was doing some sort of performance art piece and the cameras were just there to document it. Like, obviously, the photographers had to keep a certain distance, but we could still hear the cameras clicking from over the fence, and every once in a while, we’d see the flash, so it really felt like we were actors on a film shoot and the paparazzi were the crew.

  It’s ridiculous, because like, obviously, there are a ton of different cemeteries in L.A. where the view is completely blocked off from the public, but my dad specifically said in his will that he wanted to be buried at this one particular place where like, there’s a clear view from the street. And, I mean, honestly, it’s insane that he even wanted to be buried in L.A. in the first place, because you have no idea how much it costs to have a body transported that far—especially one with its head blown off. I mean, I could afford it, I’m not complaining, but it still just felt like a dick move.

  Mandy came with me. Mandy’s mom too. We all hung out a lot when Mandy and I were coming up in the scene together, so I guess they both wanted to pay their respects. Kelly is actually a really dope person. I’m not sure if she’ll read this, but if she does, I hope she knows how much I love and respect her. She’s the best.

  Of course, everybody saw Mandy and me standing next to each other in the photos, and they were immediately like: Are the two of you back together? For a couple weeks after the funeral, there was all this speculation about whether the two of us had started things up again, and the truth is she was really just there as my friend. I just really needed her.

  My mom and Bob didn’t come to the funeral. I’m sure my dad would’ve wanted them to, but my mom just had a newborn baby, and she wasn’t about to get a sitter. Plus, you know, she definitely wasn’t going to bring the baby with her to the funeral. She knew, even before it happened, exactly what kind of event it was going to be—my dad literally couldn’t surprise her at this point—so I honestly just don’t think she could stand to be a part of it anymore.

  Sometimes, when I think about my mom’s life, I just think about it as this thing that
’s been completely defined by men. Like, whether it’s my dad or Bob or me, my mom is always getting caught up in some dude’s life, like, being defined in relationship to some man she loves. And sometimes, it feels like all she does is just answer for her men and apologize for us and deal with the consequences of our actions. Which is why I’m really stoked that she’s got her jewelry line now, because like, that’s something she actually really cares about for herself. I think it’s really allowed her to shine in a way that she hasn’t been able to before. I mean, she’s always been making jewelry—like, even back when she was a dental assistant, she would be tinkering around with beads in the living room at night or making little Christmas presents for my aunts and my cousins—but now, like, she’s able to do it on a bigger scale with some nicer materials, and so her creativity has just been able to flow. Bob’s been so supportive of it too, which is dope. He doesn’t just sort of go like: Oh wow, that’s amazing! Good work, honey! He actually critiques it and helps her out with business concepts and talks through the ideas with her. That’s what I mean when I say people don’t know Bob. He’s such a sweetie when it comes down to it. I wish people could see that.

  My mom made me this little cross necklace that I’ve been wearing to shows and on the road recently. I’ve just found it really comforting, you know, having a little piece of her with me. It’s weird, because like, I’m not even that religious anymore—like, I don’t even really think about God at all that much—but ever since I’ve been wearing the cross, people have been writing articles about how I’m finding Jesus again, and it’s like: No, I just love my mom’s jewelry. But whatever, you know, there are worse things people could be saying about me.

  Weirdly, the funeral service was uber-religious, which was crazy because, like, out of the three of us, my dad was the one who NEVER gave a shit about religion—like, the only reason he even wanted us to keep going to church was so that I could practice my singing—but the priest at the funeral read a TON of Bible verses. We were standing out there for what had to have been an hour, just going through all this scripture. And I don’t know, maybe it was just because my dad knew the speeches were gonna be short, and so he wanted to stretch the run time of the funeral for as long as he could just so that the press could get all the coverage they needed, but a part of me thinks that he really was a little more religious than he let on, or like, maybe God started to mean a lot to him in his final days. I don’t know. It was nice to hear some of those verses again, and like, sing some of those songs. A lot of that stuff had sort of dropped out of my life, so to be reminded of it all at a moment like that was actually kind of powerful.