People are always asking me whether getting tattooed hurts; it’s one of the Seven Stupid Questions of the World. True, after a while your endorphins kick in and the sensation of spreading numbness becomes oddly pleasurable, kind of like some Heroin Lite. But in the beginning being tattooed is like being scratched with a safety pin—over and over and over and over. It’s irritating and it’s boring. And because I’m bored and because it makes me very anxious to sit half-naked with a stranger looming over my prickling flesh, I ask Hanky Panky all these questions: “Say, where did this kooky practice start? Why was it so big with sailors? Can I get AIDS from this?”
When I ask him about AIDS, Hanky Panky glances up from his needle and gives me a cold, gray, gunmetal look. “You should have asked me that earlier.” Total, withering disapproval. “I have been working on you for two hours.” I turn white. I’m thinking what an indescribable bummer it’s going to be to have survived all those years of shooting dope and getting up to all sorts of monkey business in the carnal department only to be killed by a cosmetic procedure. I can just imagine what my father would say if he were still alive: “So, what else did you expect, getting tattooed like some goy sailor?” To my father, there would have been no difference between my getting AIDS from a tattoo gun and my getting it from a syringe I’d shared with half the junkies on Clinton Street. As far as I know, Judaism has no line at all on heroin, while it’s got plenty to say about tattoos. At that moment, I remember something my father once told me. I couldn’t have been more than five, and he caught me picking my nose. He said, “You know what happens if you stick your finger up there? You want to know what happens, shmeggege? The bacteria bores up”—bores up, he’s saying—“it bores up into your brain and the next thing you know you’re dead from infection.” And, look, it turned out he was right.
Hanky Panky chuckles. “I am making a joke, heh-heh. We use only new needles. This is Holland, you know.” Because of course Holland is the country where hygiene was invented.
Two hours later I get up and I look at myself in the mirror. And there, on that chest that was just a chest, on those shoulders that were just shoulders, is a beautiful, undulant black labyrinth of slender, hooked lines. It’s incredibly crisp, the way new tattoos are, and the antibiotic ointment makes it shiny. This is my body, and it’s been transfigured. The word that comes to mind is lithe. I’m lithe and I’m powerful and I’m wild. This tattoo has turned me into a jungle thing, into a head-hunting Dayak motherfucker. Gone are the timidity, the caution, the doubt, the sniveling Heepish niceness, the excruciating self-consciousness that have encysted me since the day I first knew I was an “I,” that I dragged around with me through my childhood like some unwanted twin, that I spent twenty years trying to talk away with therapy and wash away with booze and shoot away with dope and fuck away with any woman who was gracious enough to recognize my handicap or dumb enough not to see it, and look it’s gone. Four hours under a tattooist’s needle and for the first time in my life I can look in the mirror and actually like what I see.
Amazing things, endorphins.
Now, before we get to Borneo, I need to mention that the other reason I’d been so late in getting tattooed was my father. First off, my father was Jewish, and Leviticus 19 says everything there is to say about Jews and tattoos: “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the Lord.” That “I am the Lord,” I’m convinced, is there as a sort of peevish afterthought, just in case you should have any questions about the basis for these injunctions. It’s like one of those T-shirts that says BECAUSE I’M THE MOMMY, THAT’S WHY.
Because he was a nominally observant Jew, my father had no tattoos, but his mother and several other relatives had gotten them when they were herded into Auschwitz. Tattooing had been the Germans’ way of keeping track of the Jews they were killing in such huge numbers with such witless method and ingenuity. The only way I can imagine what the Nazis had in mind is to envision an empire of idiot savants who’ve made it their national project to count to infinity by ones. At the railroad sidings, at the camp entrances, outside the gas chambers and the crematoria, they count and they count. And they tick off each “one” with a number on the wrist, because they don’t want to make any mistakes in their idiot progress toward infinity; they want to keep track of all those corpses and those corpses-to-be, of all those “I”s who are about to be transformed into inanimate “its.” Because what is a corpse but an I that has become an it?
My father wasn’t tattooed, but I grew up among tattooed people. I remember being at a family reunion when I was little and staring at the wrist of my father’s cousin S—“S” for Sam or Shmuel or Sandor, the exact name doesn’t matter. There, peeking out from under his shirt cuff, are some spidery numbers stitched in blurred blue ink; they look like an old laundry mark. And I was fascinated. Most of the time my father answered questions quickly, in irritated bursts: “What the hell do you mean by asking me anything so stupid?” But when I asked him about his cousin’s numbers, my father paused. And he actually thought for a while. I suppose he was wondering what sort of answer would be appropriate for an eight-year-old. And then he said, in that Russian accent that had not yet become so embarrassing to me: “They did that to him in the camps”
So I’m sure that subconscious thoughts of my father had played some part in my earlier hesitation about getting a tattoo. Otherwise it’s quite likely that I’d now be talking about a crucifix made of syringes. And the moment I got back from Europe, I fell into a depression. I stepped off the plane in Baltimore and—WHAM!—that old familiar gloom of mine was bludgeoning me like a two-by-four. Because in the back of my mind I was sure I’d betrayed my father and trampled on the memory of the Holocaust. As usual, my depression manifests itself in my body image. Which sucks. Mornings I stand before the mirror and stare at myself for an hour at a time. I turn in profile. I wring the fat on my waist. I tilt from side to side, checking my love handles. Every woman I’ve ever gone with has mistaken this custom for some charming vanity, but it’s really self-disgust, disgust at the self that is my body. The tattoo? The tattoo changes nothing. No, the tattoo is a beautiful addition to my hideous body, that squat, hairy, clay-colored body that aches and trembles and sweats and shits and stinks. The tattoo is something new for me to feel unworthy of.
But I wouldn’t call it a mistake. Or else, the very fact that it is a mistake is what makes it so successful. My tattoo may be the first mistake I’ve ever made that I can’t take back. Because up till now I’ve taken back everything. I was a loving child and I turned my back on my mother and father. I renounced jobs and apartments. I loved people and reneged on them. I got married and divorced so fast it was like something out of The Time Machine: Whoops, there goes the Industrial Revolution, there goes the wife! Even drugs and booze, the two great loyalties of my life—I turned my back on them, too, and if you look at me today, you won’t see a sign of those abusive love affairs on my entire body. It could be a Mormon who’s telling you this. Or at least a lifelong vegetarian.
But isn’t this how it’s supposed to be for us Americans? For what is the American dream if not the expectation that every shady episode of your life can be erased? Horse-thief uncles, illegitimate kids, old rap sheets—all you have to do is change your zip code and they’re history. At the very worst, you hire a media consultant and get him to apply a little spin. You can be driven from the White House in disgrace on national television, but if you wait five years, Time magazine will hail you as an elder statesman. I don’t know what America Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in, but it sure wasn’t the America of Richard Nixon and Oprah Winfrey. Because if Hester Prynne were walking around today with a scarlet A on her dress, people would think it stood for Armani.
So what I like about my tattoo is that at last there is some evidence in my life. It may be what I originally meant it to be or it may just be an advertisement of my terminal confusion, like the international symbol for DANGER: BRIDGE OUT. But
either way, my tattoo—all my tattoos—is a mistake I can’t correct by any means short of laser surgery.
Embellishments
VIRGINIA CHASE SUTTON
Mother called it mutilation.
As the needle swirled across the template
shooting gaudy Christmas color,
I knew it was right. Consider the pain.
Never mind the fine curl of silvered needles,
clean, sterile. The bite and stain forever
on the skin. Or staring men who fan behind
the artist’s tints, his colors pulled from mixing
bowls and pans, primary hues of all his longing.
Whiteness. Deep bitter blue veins. My breasts.
A slur of candied red, darkly green apple,
a smudge of summer yellow over black corners
already sketched. All that desire: rows of men
watching my naked breasts, their pocketed hands,
rub of hips in unison, my steady gleam under
a lamp’s small focus. I grow beneath his touch.
Spilled circles increase their glow, pale pink
raspberries, erupting nipples after the crush
of his hands. To be wanted by so many men.
To long for shifting hands, the body tightens,
fine lines tallied before the gushing glut
of color that filled each individual petal
and leaf. As a child, I saw Mother rise
over a stranger’s back. Her legs opened
and cracked as she stretched behind him
on his motorcycle’s slippery bench. They
embraced, her manicured fingers twined about
his waist. No smile or wave. Just a straight line
to the corner. Twisted in ornate darkness, the scent
of night-blooming flowers and a bit of air stirred.
Afterward, she limped to the kitchen and buttered
the new burn on her right leg. It was
a perfect circle, a cookie cutter cutout
forever melted into skin. She stroked butter
back and forth, trapped heat way down.
Raised bubbles, little kisses,
boiled to the top. She was marked by that
translucent ride with a stranger through
an empty town. Her skin took it all, healed
dark, blossoms of red and pink dripping brown
and yellow. Tattoos scab, and when mine was picked
away, colors were raw, sharper than a scar.
Is it a pierce, stain, wound, cut, slices
of body dragged into a scar or scab?
Mother never said which touch is truest. We’re
so alike. I still tingle to those tiny kisses,
explosions turned to oil, spoiled skin, permanent heat
all the way down to the bone.
Tattoo Thoughts
DZVINIA ORLOWSKY
Because of lightning
on a young waiter’s bicep
I lied and said I forgot my sweater,
left my family with our menus,
followed after him, outside,
into the parking lot,
rain coming down,
a few cars, one tree with ugly branches,
clouds tensing into pig shapes
then releasing—I waited for him.
I’ve thought about the long vine
that like a motorcycle
on an open road
would begin at my shoulder
I do anything I want
how words like chrysalis
squirm into blossom, how a body willingly
takes on its own unnatural blue—
bare winter breasts,
veins like phone wires
beneath my wrist.
Yes, tattoo thoughts.
Yes, better than another small dog.
Once, a woman flinched
when I touched her skin
lightly with my finger.
She must’ve sensed
the entire small fires in me—
stranger heart,
barbed wire,
Sweet Jesus,
looking buckshot into her eyes—
like I knew she was
going to miss me,
like I’d already left.
The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle
SYLVIA PLATH
There are other tattoo shops in Madigan Square, but none of them a patch on Carmey’s place. He’s a real poet with the needle and dye, an artist with a heart. Kids, dock bums, the out-of-town couples in for a beer put on the brakes in front of Carmey’s, nose to the window, one and all. You got a dream, Carmey says, without saying a word, you got a rose on the heart, an eagle in the muscle, you got the sweet Jesus himself, so come in to me. Wear your heart on your skin in this life, I’m the man can give you a deal. Dogs, wolves, horses and lions for the animal lover. For the ladies, butterflies, birds of paradise, baby heads smiling or in tears, take your choice. Roses, all sorts, large, small, bud and full bloom, roses with name scrolls, roses with thorns, roses with Dresdendoll heads sticking up in dead center, pink petal, green leaf, set off smart by a lead-black line. Snakes and dragons for Frankenstein. Not to mention cowgirls, hula girls, mermaids and movie queens, ruby-nippled and bare as you please. If you’ve got a back to spare, there’s Christ on the cross, a thief at either elbow and angels overhead to right and left holding up a scroll with “Mount Calvary” on it in Old English script, close as yellow can get to gold.
Outside they point at the multicolored pictures plastered on Carmey’s three walls, ceiling to floor. They mutter like a mob scene, you can hear them through the glass:
“Honey, take a looka those peacocks!”
“That’s crazy, paying for tattoos. I only paid for one I got, a panther on my arm.”
“You want a heart, I’ll tell him where”
I see Carmey in action for the first time courtesy of my steady man, Ned Bean. Lounging against a wall of hearts and flowers, waiting for business, Carmey is passing the time of day with a Mr. Tomolillo, an extremely small person wearing a wool jacket that drapes his nonexistent shoulders without any attempt at fit or reformation. The jacket is patterned with brown squares the size of cigarette packs, each square boldly outlined in black. You could play tick-tack-toe on it. A brown fedora hugs his head just above the eyebrows like the cap on a mushroom. He has the thin, rapt, triangular face of a praying mantis. As Ned introduces me, Mr. Tomolillo snaps over from the waist in a bow neat as the little moustache hair-lining his upper lip. I can’t help admiring this bow because the shop is so crowded there’s barely room for the four of us to stand up without bumping elbows and knees at the slightest move.
The whole place smells of gunpowder and some fumey antiseptic. Ranged along the back wall from left to right are: Carmey’s worktable, electric needles hooked to a rack over a Lazy Susan of dye pots, Carmey’s swivel chair facing the show window, a straight customer’s chair facing Carmey’s chair, a waste bucket, and an orange crate covered with scraps of paper and pencil stubs. At the front of the shop, next to the glass door, there is another straight chair, with the big placard of Mount Calvary propped on it, and a cardboard file drawer on a scuffed wooden table. Among the babies and daisies on the wall over Carmey’s chair hang two faded sepia daguerreotypes of a boy from the waist up, one front view, one back. From the distance he seems to be wearing a long-sleeved, skintight black lace shirt. A closer look shows he is stark naked, covered only with a creeping ivy of tattoos.
In a jaundiced clipping from some long-ago rotogravure, these Oriental men and women are sitting cross-legged on tasseled cushions, back to the camera and embroidered with seven-headed dragons, mountain ranges, cherry trees and waterfalls. “These people have not a stitch of clothing on,” the blurb points out. “They belong to a society in which tattoos are required for membership. Sometimes a full job costs as much as $300.” Next to this, a photograph of a bald man’s head with the tentacl
es of an octopus just rounding the top of the scalp from the rear.
“Those skins are valuable as many a painting, I imagine,” says Mr. Tomolillo. “If you had them stretched on a board.”
But the Tattooed Boy and those clubby Orientals have nothing on Carmey, who is himself a living advertisement of his art—a schooner in full sail over a rose-and-holly-leaf ocean on his right biceps, Gypsy Rose Lee flexing her muscled belly on the left, forearms jammed with hearts, stars and anchors, lucky numbers and name scrolls, indigo edges blurred so he reads like a comic strip left out in a Sunday rainstorm. A fan of the Wild West, Carmey is rumored to have a bronco reared from navel to collarbone, a thistle-stubborn cowboy stuck to its back. But that may be a mere fable inspired by his habit of wearing tooled leather cowboy boots, finely heeled, and a Bill Hickock belt studded with red stones to hold up his black chino slacks. Carmey’s eyes are blue. A blue in no way inferior to the much-sung about skies of Texas.
“I been at it sixteen years now,” Carmey says, leaning back against his picturebook wall, “and you might say I’m still learning. My first job was in Maine, during the war. They heard I was a tattooist and called me out to this station of Wacs…”
“To tattoo them?” I ask.
“To tattoo their numbers on, nothing more or less.”
“Weren’t some of them scared?”
“Oh, sure, sure. But some of them came back. I got two Wacs in one day for a tattoo. Well, they hemmed. And they hawed. ‘Look,’ I tell them, “you came in the other day and you knew which one you wanted, what’s the trouble?’”
“‘Well, it’s not what we want but where we want it,’ one of them pipes up. ‘Well, if that’s all it is you can trust me,’ I say. ‘I’m like a doctor, see? I handle so many women it means nothing.’ ‘Well, I want three roses,’ this one says: ‘one on my stomach and one on each cheek of my butt.’ So the other one gets up courage, you know how it is, and asks for one rose…”
Dorothy Parker's Elbow Page 15
