Jealous? Yes, sir. Guilty as charged. Sign me up. Book ‘em, Dano.
“No,” I responded. “And I meant where on your body, not where in the city.”
“Oh,” she said, as if destroying that particular insight meant little to her. “I was thinking of something on my chest or stomach.”
“I like your chest the way it is.”
“You didn’t mind me getting my nipple pierced.”
“You can take that out. Tattoos are just… I don’t know, Jesse. I’ve gone along with nearly everything you’ve wanted. Christ, I even wore that male skirt you bought me—and for an entire weekend. But this… it’s so permanent.”
When I turned back to her, I saw a face I didn’t see often. It was not exactly cross, but crossed: full of silent measuring and analysis.
“Mikey, you decided to wear the skirt, which, by the way, I still think you looked really hot in. But this is my body, my decision.”
She was right. This was the first time I had ever tried to impose my feelings on something she wanted to do to herself. I never told her how to dress or how to wear her hair, never even thought about it.
“You’re right,” I admitted. “But you asked me, and I told you.”
“Fair enough,” she said, her mood shifting back to playful. “You’ll come with me and hold my hand, won’t you? At least to make sure Mutt doesn’t make a pass at me.”
“I’ll come,” I growled.
* * *
The needle touched skin, vibrated with the small hum of a person in deep concentration.
A smell—electrical, full of ozone with metallic undertones—crackled from everything in the cramped little backroom of the tattoo parlor.
There was a brief moment of contact, full of excitement and anticipation.
Jesse grasped my hand, squeezed it tightly.
Then, the needle broke the skin, punched through.
A dot of color, a bright, iridescent green, lay side by side with a perfectly circular dot of blood that had been coaxed to the surface by the tattooist’s instrument.
Jesse’s skin flinched, relaxed.
The needle approached again, penetrated.
With casual impatience, Mutt wiped a cloth across Jesse’s quivering belly, brushed his long, braided, white-boy Rastafarian hair out of his eyes and over his shoulders with a great clacking of wooden beads and a smell not too dissimilar from that of a wet dog.
Mutt was just that: a shaggy, brooding dog of a man. He leaned over Jesse, shirtless, his skin a dirty, greasy olive in color, with numerous piercings and tattoos covering his well-muscled, yet slight form.
I didn’t really find him repugnant, merely mildly disgusting. Yet, I could see it was these very same qualities that had attracted Jesse to him originally. I could see, despite myself, how they had been together, how his careless hygiene and rumpled demeanor might have appealed to her.
As I thought these things, Jesse was stretched out topless upon a battered barber’s chair of dubious lineage, Mutt straddled over her. His hands moved on her, bracing himself, roving here and there over her, stretching her skin, wiping at it.
It was impersonal enough, but she writhed under his touch, seemingly as excited by him and the constant pricking of his needle as pained by it. Her compact, rose-colored nipples were stiff and achingly erect, her breasts a mass of goosebumps. Light shone from the single gold ring that looped through the areola of her left nipple.
I began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, voyeuristic in a jealous, envious way that I had not experienced before with Jesse.
This is what they had looked like together when they made love long ago.
This touching, as professional as it appeared, grabbed that part of me that had shambled into the light earlier when she had first mentioned the tattoo, and shook it fiercely, like a dog worrying an old shoe.
And that part of me was becoming angry.
A rapier-thin moan hissed from between her lips drew me back. When I looked down again, a bright green line snaked from just above and to the right of her navel all the way to the midpoint between her breasts.
One of Mutt’s hands, large and flat like the blade of a shovel, clenched Jesse’s right breast, held it away from the area he was working on. A single, dirty-nailed finger rested casually, familiarly atop her nipple.
“Hey,” I muttered. “Watch it.”
Mutt looked at me through the veil of his hair and smiled the smile of a cur, toothy and nervously courageous.
He slowly, conspicuously removed his finger from Jesse’s breast, moved his hand so only the heel of his palm held its weight aside.
Jesse didn’t notice—or chose to ignore—this exchange, and Mutt, too, quickly forgot it, and me.
It took nearly two hours to complete this particular piece of ‘body art,’ as Mutt called it. Jesse lay exhausted when he finished, but I still held her limp hand, patted it.
Mutt told us in diffident tones that the area around the tattoo would hurt a little for a while. Maybe a couple of days. To shore up this statement, he shrugged, then helped me put Jesse’s shirt back on. Her bra I wadded up, crammed into my pocket.
I paid Mutt myself, with my own money.
It was as good a way to make up to Jesse for my earlier disapproval as any I might be likely to come up with later.
As I forked over a rather large amount of money to Mutt, I asked what it was he had permanently affixed to Jesse’s chest.
Mutt folded the cash into a thick, dirty bundle and pushed it into the front pocket of his long, baggy shorts.
“It’s a flower, man,” he smiled again, this time disarming in its brutal, blunt dislike of me. “A fuckin’ flower.”
He shook his head, laughed roughly, then disappeared into the recesses of the filthy little tattoo parlor.
He took my question as an insult.
But I truly couldn’t tell what it was.
* * *
We stumbled home after it was done, her and I.
Jesse seemed overly tired and sluggish for so simple a procedure, but who was I to know? I had no tattoos; certainly no other friends or lovers of mine sported them.
Like so many things that Jesse dragged me into, I was not experienced in this.
So, I half-walked, half-carried her back to our apartment in some cheap industrial space on the north side of town. We talked a little on the way, before she became so tired that I had to carry her.
“When you make a hole in something—anything—something else will want to get in through it. Or out,” she’d laughed, describing her personal philosophy of tattoos.
I laughed, too. She could make you feel giddy even when you were mad at her.
Two buses, seven blocks of walking and countless wondering stares later, I got her home and closed the door behind us. My arm was numb from holding her up, but I gathered her to me nonetheless and carried her through our open, minimalist living space to bed.
Jesse didn’t stir much as I removed her Doc Martens, unsnapped and then slid her jeans down and off. She wore no panties, and her bra was still a ball in my pocket.
I hesitated at removing her shirt when I saw that virulent green line oozing up her belly in the darkness underneath. I thought of her rolling over in the night, pressing her naked body to mine, pressing that thing to me… and I shivered.
I left her shirt on, stripped myself and crawled into bed with her.
She smelled like the tattoo shop, like Mutt, like blood.
I fell asleep facing away from her.
Late that night, I awoke.
The wind stirred the sheer curtains covering the huge, open windows that were one entire side of our apartment.
I heard the ghostly huff and rumble of a train in the distance, near the river.
Industrial dusk-to-dawns spilled pools of orange-sherbet-colored light onto the floor.
Something moved next to me, rubbed against me with urgency.
“Mikey?” I heard her breathe into my ear. “Are you awake?”
&
nbsp; Suddenly, I was. Very.
“Umm,” she purred, her hand reaching around me, grasping me. “You are.”
I turned over and found her face, kissed it.
Her lips were as cool as the night air, moist.
Her skin, though, was hot and sticky. For a moment, I thought she might be delirious, feverish from an infection due to her damned tattoo.
But her hands and lips left me little time to think.
So, I didn’t.
As we embraced, I noticed that, at some time during the night, she had removed her shirt.
Jesse seemed frantic in her lovemaking, nipping and rubbing and pulling me to her until the sheets and pillows were kicked away, leaving just us, tangled, sweating and breathing heavily.
She lay back, relatively docile, as I trailed kisses across her breasts, down her belly.
As my head pushed lower, my hand reached up for purchase in the darkness, slid across flesh.
Something wet and accommodating engulfed my index finger, drew it in, sucked it.
My excitement neared crescendo. I became more frantic, my kisses more fervent, lingering as I descended.
Her mouth scoured my finger, released it, drew in the next.
I can’t begin to describe how intense this experience was, how it overwhelmed my senses.
Until she spoke.
“Come up here.”
Aside from panting, her voice was certainly unaffected by any of my fingers.
I instantly broke the surface of my desire, and with chilling clarity moved the hand that was being sucked on.
It swept up the curve of a breast.
In one motion, I uncorked my finger from whatever held it and lifted myself to see what it was.
My finger came free with a sound not unlike that of pulling a wet sneaker from a puddle of thick mud.
“Here,” Jesse pleaded, still writhing beneath me as I hovered over her on unsteady arms.
I looked down, and those arms nearly gave out.
The ridiculous orange light oozed across Jesse’s body, falling full on the tattoo that lay between her breasts.
Where the bud of the rose should have been, though, there was a dark hole in her flesh. It gaped like a glistening wound, and its edges opened and closed wetly, making little slurping, kissing sounds.
I closed my eyes. Opened them.
My fingers had been there, in there.
With force that was more spasm than coherent movement, I pushed myself away from her, tumbled over the edge of the bed and thwacked my head on the cold, concrete floor.
Not too hard, but it stunned me for a moment.
It took some time for Jesse to realize I was not there anymore.
“Mikey?” I heard her voice above me. It sounded normal now.
“Here,” I grunted, pulling myself up and rubbing the back of my head.
“Where did you go?” she asked, moving across the bed toward me.
I saw a slim, white hand, hesitated, took it.
“What happened?” she asked again, helping me to a sitting position next to her on the bed.
“I don’t know…” I hesitated, hoping she would think it was the blow to my head, and not the terrified beating of my heart, that had me rattled. “My arms just gave out, I guess.”
From within the orange-tinted darkness, I saw the gleam of her smile.
“Dopey. You’re probably still exhausted from carrying me home. Just lie here with me.”
Even that, frankly, was more than I was capable of at that point.
She drew me near, and I stiffened, resisted a bit, put my hand out… to ward her off?
… to see if it was still there?
It wasn’t.
My hand encountered smooth, unbroken flesh that arced gently upward in either direction.
No ragged, slurping hole.
“Hey!” she giggled, pulling my groping hands away. “Don’t start something you can’t finish. Just lie back and relax now. Fall asleep.”
Jesse pulled me to her again, and my head fell toward her breast.
But I couldn’t relax, couldn’t nuzzle my head to her… not there, anyway.
“I need a drink,” I said, pulling away perhaps a bit too brusquely.
“Sure, okay. Whatever.”
“I’m gonna get a glass of juice. Want some?”
“Nope. I’m going back to sleep. Hurry back,” she yawned, gathering the sheets and pillows and nesting them around her.
I padded across the floor to the kitchen area, drew open the refrigerator door. Light exploded from it, and I reached in, dazzled, and grabbed for the juice container.
The acidic orange juice, drank straight from the container, cut through the dust and mucus that filled my mouth, cleared my aching, swirling head.
I didn’t hurry back to bed.
Don’t know how long I stood there watching her as she fell quickly back into sleep, as if the past fifteen minutes had been no more than a dream.
Must have been a while. The orange juice container slipping from my grasp roused me. Rather than open the fridge again and let the light out, I drained the rest of the juice, left the empty container on the counter.
I fell asleep on the couch near the windows, feeling the breeze and the edges of the curtains tickle my skin.
And watched the pale crescent of Jesse’s body wax under the approaching light of dawn.
* * *
When I arose late in the morning, she was gone.
It was already becoming hot as the sun climbed the blue hill of the sky. A thin, lazy wind curled into the apartment without disturbing the curtains.
The heat also brought with it more of the industrial smells of our neighborhood—tar and asphalt; unknown, probably caustic, and most certainly carcinogenic, chemicals; burning diesel and oil from the hundreds of tractor trailers that swarmed around the area, all topped by the rich, rotten miasma of the nearby river.
As my head cleared, I remembered the day, the night before.
The tattoo.
And Jesse was gone.
For some unfathomable reason, this alarmed me.
Angered me.
Understand, if you don’t already, that Jesse and I were what are charitably called ‘free spirits.’ Or as my father called us, ‘deadbeats.’ We had no schedules, no constant source of employment. Nowhere we had to be at any given time.
And it certainly was in keeping for Jesse to leave without telling me where she’d be. I never worried about this, because she always turned up none the worse for wear.
I told myself this as I scrambled into my clothes, laced my boots.
I told myself she was okay.
I told myself she wasn’t with Mutt.
That she wasn’t at the tattoo parlor.
* * *
She was, of course. I knew it immediately.
But why?
Was she getting another tattoo?
Was Mutt finishing the flower he had begun yesterday?
Or was it something else?
The word affair went through my mind then, derailing my thoughts.
What a dumb, antiquated word it is. Not a word for the Pepsi/MTV generation—a word suited more for the nine-to-five middle manager screwing his secretary or the bored suburban housewife seducing the paperboy.
Not for me. Not for Jesse.
I mean, Christ, we were living together; we weren’t married.
As I considered all this, the dark, hulking thing within me that had flexed its muscles while Mutt shimmied atop Jesse the day before was growing stronger.
It had quietly fought my conscience; it had won my heart.
And had I been listening, I could have heard the sound of it coming now for my brain, screaming like an enraged juggernaut.
Maybe I could have gotten out of its way.
Maybe I would have wanted to.
* * *
By the time I reached the tattoo parlor, it was late afternoon. The waning sun already threw shadows into the canyons b
etween the buildings, and everything looked uniformly grey.
Of course, there was a closed sign in the yellowed, barred window of the shop. But lights were on, and I could hear music from within, vibrating the glass: Korn or Tool… something.
Of course, the door was locked.
I was prepared for these eventualities.
Slipping around the corner, I made my way down a narrow, littered alley to the back of the building.
A battered metal door was embedded in the building here, rusting like a raw sore. Blocking it was a municipal trash dumpster filled with garbage.
It was on wheels, and a few hard pushes got it moving easily.
Mutt must have been depending on the dumpster to block access to the door, because it was unlocked.
The knob turned easily, quietly, and I found myself in a storeroom filled with darkness, stacks of boxes, and garbage from lunches past. But mostly, darkness.
Another door, half open, led into the backroom where, yesterday, Mutt had made holes in Jesse’s skin.
Something will want to get in…
I closed the back door behind me. It creaked loudly on its ancient hinges, but the music was so loud in there I didn’t worry.
I stepped cautiously into the wedge of light that pushed through the open door.
Even as I peered around the doorjamb, some part of me—some part that had not been thoroughly cowed by my anger—did not expect to see Jesse there.
That part of me understood that I was about to make a fool of myself.
It was pretty damned surprised, then, when I saw Mutt and Jesse locked naked together on the battered and spotted reclining chair.
His mouth and hands were all over her body, and her response was much the same as it had been with me the night before: feral and unthinking. Her hips pumped, ground into his lean body as he worked her into a frenzy.
One of his spatulate hands stroked the area between her breasts…
… the tattoo.
As I watched in anger and anticipatory horror, the tattoo rippled, as if his hand had passed across the surface of a pool of water.
Little Deaths Page 14
