Dorothy Parker's Elbow

by Kim Addonizio

  Savic and Karen aren’t the only new folks in town. People are moving here in record numbers, tossing around city phrases like quality of life and eco-tourism. They come here hoping to escape their pasts—the crime, the pollution, and the inflated economies of urban areas—but they’re looking for the West that exists more in myth than in reality. They settle in cul-de-sac arrangements of expensive city houses in neighborhoods with faux-Western names like the Buttes and Antelope Ridge. They see the possibility of inventing new, fruitful lives, but when this doesn’t happen, or at least doesn’t happen easily, they become overpowered by the need for a three-dollar mocha latte. That’s how it started. A coffeehouse here, a chain music store there. A subdivision on the top of the rolling hills east of Laramie, once a sacred Indian burial site. Consultants and telecommuters now outnumber ranchers and miners. Like Savic and Karen, they’ve all come here to settle the new West. The funny part is that I’ve never thought of Wyoming as a frontier. A frontier is someplace you go; this is where I live.

  Laramie is tucked into a windswept Rocky Mountain basin, with the Medicine Bow and Snowy Range Mountains to the west and the Laramie Range to the east. It was built around the railroad in the late 1880s, a rough-and-tumble watering spot with frequent lynchings and many shady characters. The major industries are the railroad, the university, and an automotive technical school. The town grew east from the railroad tracks: charming tree-lined residential streets, the University of Wyoming campus, boxy modern houses covered with vinyl siding, a strip-mall assemblage of newer buildings that have been erected with little regard for form or style. The eastern edge of town is littered with car dealerships, fast-food restaurants, and our own beloved Wal-Mart.

  Despite the civilizing influences of higher education, technology, and discount stores, Laramie is in the heart of the West, and this shapes the character of the town and the people more than you’d expect. I didn’t notice this when I was younger, of course. At the time, I associated the West with concrete images and symbols—cowboys, Indians, rodeo, cattle—and in Laramie these are dusted off and paraded through town only once each summer.

  Even though I grew up in Wyoming, most of my ideas about the spirit of the West came from books, movies, and television. My parents were quite fond of John Wayne westerns. Not the violent shoot-’em-ups so much, but the Rooster Cogburn sort of movies with solid plots, sophisticated jokes, and sarcastic heroines. We spent quality time at the Skyline Drive-In Theatre, my sister and I dozing in the backseat of the Chrysler while a tinny audio box reverberated on the half-rolled-down window of the driver’s door.

  And I read. Biographies, mostly, from the children’s room of the Albany County Public Library. Kit Carson, Calamity Jane, Frank and Jesse James—it went on and on, rows of safety-orange and forest-green bindings wrapped around Western lives portrayed in the best possible light.

  I grew up believing that the West was a special place filled with courageous men and strong women who struggled against the hardships of isolation and nature, carving out a peculiarly Western code of ethics and morality along the way. Whenever I tried to put my life in the context of other people’s versions of the West, I was usually disappointed. Even the movies that were filmed in Wyoming seemed to be about someplace else, but that didn’t stop me from believing that the mythic West still existed.

  I thought the West began somewhere outside the city limits, the places where my family went camping each summer, maybe, in the Middle Fork canyon, a labyrinth of evergreen overgrowth, dilapidated miners’ cabins, and placer claims. I thought the West was the Two Bar Ranch, where we rode and branded every spring. When I thought about my surroundings, which wasn’t often, Laramie was all about education, automobiles, boredom, and the lingering suspicion that many interesting people and things passed through town on the Union Pacific freights and the Amtrak coaches, but not much stopped or stayed.

  I grew up Western without really noticing, Calamity Jane without a horse. As it turned out, I developed a connection to the place and the myth, a connection that was absolutely seamless, so elemental that I didn’t know it existed. The myth became so deeply ingrained that I couldn’t have separated myself from it any more than I could have disengaged myself from a conjoined twin with whom I shared a heart. It has to do with solitude, with the connection between people and an unforgiving landscape, and optimism about what people can survive and what they might become.

  “Zowie Tattoo” I answer the phone with the combination of attitude and welcome that people seem to expect when they call a tattoo shop.

  “You’re gonna force me to take action against you.” The familiar voice of the absent father. Once this sound could almost stop my heart from sheer joy and passion. Now, my heart skips a beat and jumps into my throat. Fear. I cup my belly protectively with the hand that’s not holding the phone.

  “Did you know that it’s an automatic aggravated assault charge when you hit a pregnant woman?” I ask like it doesn’t matter one way or another. “Even without a weapon” Idle conversation. “I think it’s a felony if you just hurt a pregnant woman’s feelings.” This spawns a new set of threats, most of them violent and all of them vivid. I hang up.

  Growing up Western made it easy to become tattooed at a time when tattoos weren’t especially popular. I’d gotten a good dose of the importance of expressing one’s individuality at an early age, and I bought into the romantic myth of tattoos as a mark of the outlaw. I lived for a time in a tattooed West, and I was happy there.

  By the time I was twenty-four, I was well on my way to becoming heavily tattooed, yet I still believed in a more traditional pursuit of the American Dream. I didn’t see that these two choices would cancel each other out; this optimism was the West in me. I could drink almost anyone under the table, and I knew which fork to use for salad. I could swear like a sailor, and I could carry on a conversation about the benefits of investing in a 401K retirement plan. I never shied away from a dare, no matter how dangerous or stupid. I could rock up cocaine and bake a cherry pie, simultaneously, if need be. A fitted jacket over a modest brown skirt, and I was ready for dinner with my family and Christmas Eve church services. A black leather miniskirt and combat boots, and I was ready for a night on the town.

  The differences didn’t make either one better or worse. Just different. Like the differences between a waltz and flamenco, between poetry and prose.

  The sunny side of the American Dream centers on a satisfying career with room for advancement. Appearance is important. Manner, etiquette, tradition. Family, future, insurance, investment. On the flip side, having fun is a higher priority. Money—sure, you need it, if you’re going to have a good time. The difference might be in how it’s acquired. The underside of the American Dream is a childlike place, a never-never land, where the stakes are just as high as anything you’d find on Wall Street, but the adventure is as much fun as achieving the goal. You live in the present, maybe that’s the biggest difference. I have yet to hear anyone with an Individual Retirement Account utter these words: Live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse.

  I’m sitting in the front room at Zowie. Savic’s machine is buzzing away in the distance while I wait for the next customer and flip through a tattoo magazine, not really reading. I’m trying to decide what to tell the wriggle in my belly about its father, even though I figure I’ve got a good five years before it starts asking questions. Song lyrics spring to mind, pushing out more practical explanations. He was a hardheaded man/He was brutally handsome/She was terminally pretty. What he sang while we eluded a police chase last May. Life in the fast lane, and I love to drive. He was the ghost of a Texas ladies’ man. What he sang in bed, naked and sweaty after the lights were out. Wherefore art thou Romeo/You son of a bitch. The refrain of betrayal.

  I walk next door to the pool hall and buy a package of stale Slim Jims from the vending machine. Before I got pregnant, I didn’t eat meat, mostly because I like the looks of cow faces. This isn’t a popular sentiment in Wyom
ing. Plus, too, I thought it was hypocritical to eat a formerly living creature if I would not have the courage to kill it myself. Now I crave protein, especially beef. Rare steaks and huge hamburgers and ropy sticks of jerky. I eat with no remorse, even though I still lack the mettle to kill.

  Tattooing at Zowie is my second job, and it seems like I’m always tired. I wonder if I should quit my day job and tattoo full-time, but then I’d lose my health insurance, so I work seven days a week instead. Seven A.M. till four, hiding my tattoos and making photocopies. Four till eleven P.M., sleeves pushed up and pushing ink. Two jobs, fourteen-hour days. I didn’t think I’d ever work in a tattoo shop again, but I also didn’t expect to be pregnant, pregnant alone. At night, I leave the tattoo shop in a hurry for a shower. I tuck away my tattoo money, which has become baby money. After I wash off the smell of cigarettes and antibacterial soap, I lie on the couch, exhausted but unable to sleep. I watch Lifetime: Television for Women, lots of made-for-TV movies about abused women who eventually turn on the men who terrorized them. Sometimes I clap. Mostly I just lie on the couch, touching my belly and eating meat.

  Mrs. Purdy, my sixth-grade teacher, sent me off to junior high school with a few words of advice to my parents. “Karol always roots for the underdog,” she said. “It’s bound to get her into trouble sooner or later” My parents weren’t especially worried. I was twelve years old, and the only trouble I’d found so far was the heartache of bringing home stray animals and failed attempts at mending half-dead birds in a series of shoe boxes stuffed with toilet paper.

  An innate characteristic of the Western sensibility is the appreciation of the outlaw, a romantic view that permits the elevation of criminals and eccentrics to hero status, so long as they adhere to a Western code of honor and individual freedom. Growing up in Wyoming gave me a peculiar mind-set when it came to underdogs and outlaws, and I rooted for them out of sheer appreciation of their exclusion from the mainstream.

  The heartache of rooting for underdogs and outlaws became more acute as the underdogs became boys instead of stray animals, the outlaws men instead of boys. Any man I found attractive usually had a crust of rough edges and a dark side to his personality, with a flickering of goodness buried so deep that the process of finding it was a treasure hunt. It was this part, the banked coals that I could fan into a flame, to which I attached myself. Instead of falling in love with their hearts or their minds, I fell in love with their potential. I was willing to look especially hard for potential in any man who had a bad reputation, a wickedly languid smile, a penchant for drugs or fast cars, and a few tattoos. With each one, despite my efforts, the spark of potential always flickered brightly only once, burning just long enough to extinguish itself.

  The last time I tattooed was in an abandoned storefront with boarded-up windows somewhere in southern Colorado. This was before I got pregnant, back when the absent father and I acted like we thought we were Bonnie and Clyde. We were on the run from the law. More accurately, he was on the run; I was just aiding and abetting. I tattooed both his arms from shoulder to wrist, new work wrapping around jailhouse pieces and a haphazard caricature of Elvis. The NCIC wanted-fugitive report mentioned the Elvis tattoo, and the work I did was as much a disguise as anything. People will see only fully tattooed arms, was his rationale, not individual pieces.

  When I started getting tattooed, a sense of kinship seemed to knit tattooed people into a colorful community. This isn’t true anymore. Maybe it’s because MTV has planted the seeds of tattoo desire in the fallow soil of teenage minds from coast to coast. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen so many people rush into tattoos with little thought for design, placement, or permanence. Maybe it’s because some people use tattoos more to shock others than to please themselves. Whatever the reason, I’ve learned two things to be true. First, one tattoo does not a tattooed person make. Second, when I see someone with a tattoo on his face or neck, I know that we are tattooed for completely different reasons, and that this is only the beginning of the differences between us.

  The only tattooed people with whom I feel an inky kinship are those who are fully sleeved—tattooed from shoulder to wrist—on both arms. This speaks of a shared commitment of time and pain and dedication to an art form. Commitment and commonality breed a certain level of trust, however uneasy; full sleeves tend to be attached to bikers, felons, and other tattoo artists. If nothing else, there’s a flash of recognition and a nod of acknowledgment.

  I sleeved the absent father completely. He let me tattoo whatever I wanted, wherever it would fit. I had a pretty good time and slung some nice ink, but by the time I finished, I was struck by the absurdity of tattoos as a disguise. This, after a thousand dollars’ worth of tattoos in two weeks’ time, power pack running off stolen electricity piped in through borrowed extension cords.

  I think about some of the other things we did when he was on the run from the law, and I realize I could give him up in a heartbeat. I know, though, that I won’t, any more than one of the Wild Bunch would drop a dime on a former member of the gang. Instead, I buy a gun, and an old cowboy with new tattoos teaches me to shoot it.

  “Can I help you?” I smile at the three young men when they come through the door. One of them steps forward as though volunteering for an odious mission.

  “Yeah.” He sniffs and snorts in a manly sort of way and hitches at the crotch of his pants. “I want a tattoo.” He scans the flash on the first wall and thunks a stubby finger repeatedly against a tiny Superman symbol. “How much?”

  “Forty dollars.”

  “Let’s do it.” He looks to his companions for approval and the front room hums with a palpable wave of vicarious excitement. I pull the flash sheet off the wall and trace the design. “I want it in red and black, though,” he says, breathing on me while I sharpen my pencil. “No yellow.”

  “No problem.” I hold up the tracing paper. “I just need to make a stencil and we can get started”

  “I don’t want the S in it,” he says as though I should have known better. “I want a D.”

  “D?”

  “My name’s Dave,” he says. I erase the S and try to draw a satisfactory D inside the triangle. The tracing paper is gray and littered with eraser rubbings before I decide to call it quits.

  “The only reason this symbol works graphically is because of the S. The D doesn’t work,” I say, surveying my efforts. “Maybe if it’s a lowercase D—” I redraw it one more time, and hold it up.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t want a little D. I don’t want to be Little Dave.”

  “You don’t seem to mind being Duperman,” I mutter, erasing until the paper rips. Eventually the big D is awkwardly placed in the center of the triangle, and Duperman approves it after conferring with his friends.

  I belly up to Duperman, stretching his skin with my right hand and tattooing with my left. I’ve seen really fat tattoo artists, and I’m wondering how they manage. My elbows are lodged in the top of my stomach, and I’m anything but comfortable. Without warning, the baby kicks furiously. I lose the stretch on Duperman’s arm, and even though I try to pull the tattoo machine back, the needles snag the skin. Duperman doesn’t notice, but Savic does. I look down at the wide place this mistake has left in an otherwise perfect outline, and look up at Savic with dismay. We both look at my belly; I can’t tattoo much longer.

  A gay University of Wyoming student is brutally beaten, tied to a pole fence. Dies. This makes national headlines and causes local businesses to post signs: Violence is not a Laramie value. Media people swarm through town, interviewing anyone who will stand still in front of a camera or tape recorder. We all agree it’s a tragedy. A week later I hear my own voice on NPR, a sound bite from a barely remembered interview. Violence is, too, a Laramie value. What they left out was the part about Laramie’s past, about the vigilante lynchings from street lamps and the trees lining Grand Avenue. They left out the part about how, now, women are the victims of Western violence most of the time, women whose bo
dies are dumped out in Rogers Canyon or along Happy Jack Road with surprising frequency, and how this usually rates only a small local newspaper article, not national coverage.

  Savic has taken to accessorizing with a shoulder holster and semiautomatic handgun. Karen looks pinched. Business is slow, and we are all worried about money, burglars, killers.

  “It starts with a bunch of maggots crawling out of my ass, and they’re all wearing Shriner’s caps and puking.” Savic is explaining the concept for his back piece to the customer in my tattoo chair. “As the maggots come up, they get bigger and eventually turn into Shriners. The Shriners are sitting at tables in a strip club. Some of them are jacking off, and there’s a hare-lipped whore giving a blow job under one of the tables. At the top, there’s a stage, and on it is a one-legged stripper who’s juggling flaming bowling pins. Above it all,” he pauses for effect and makes an expansive gesture with both hands. “Above it all is a banner that says ‘Sleep till Noon.’”

  The young man in the tattoo chair looks both traumatized and impressed. He’s getting a very small Tasmanian Devil on his shoulder. Earlier, when I suggested that he choose something more imaginative, he expanded upon his original idea by deciding that the Tasmanian Devil should be making an obscene finger gesture, and there was nothing I could do to talk him out of it. I thought about refusing to tattoo him, period, but forty dollars is four packs of diapers, give or take a few.

  Karen pokes her head around the doorway. “Phone call.”

  I pat the boy gently on the half-finished tattoo. “Break time,” I say, stripping off my gloves and picking up the phone. I wish instantly that I hadn’t. On the other end of the line is my once-upon-a-time favorite outlaw, the absent father. A few months ago, he was busted, extradited, heard in court. Now he’s just waiting to be sentenced, but during a hefty methamphetamine binge between extradition and court, he decided that I must have been the person who tipped off the cops. It wasn’t true. Even so, his hands became fleshy maces at the ends of muscular arms covered with my artwork. A blur of ink and muscle swinging toward my face, my chest, my belly. Over and over. When that wasn’t enough to make me cry, he pulled out a .357 Magnum.