by Elle Nash
Matt shifted on his feet and Frankie got up from her seat at the kitchen table.
“I seriously love that tattoo,” Frankie said. She came over and lifted my shirt. Matt leaned in to get a better look. “Where did you get it done again?”
“Glory Badges,” I touched my stomach protectively. “But the artist who did the outline split. I have to figure something out.”
“Shit,” said Matt. “That’s rough. Maybe I could do the color for you.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said.
When I got the outline done, I went back to the empty mobile home and burst into tears. I didn’t know if I was crying because it hurt so bad or if I was crying because I had failed by letting the pain hurt me so much. Matt sensed my hesitation.
“I haven’t worked that big yet,” he said. “But we can bang out something small on you first.”
“He’s so good.” Frankie grabbed a sketchbook and took me over to the couch. “Look at some of this.”
The weight of our bodies on the couch pushed us together. I could feel her torso against my own, the light, flimsy fabric of her shirt against my arm. She spread the sketchbook open on both of our laps and flipped slowly through the pages of Matt’s sketches. A lot of the pictures were similar to what I saw on the walls, but unfinished. Eventually, she flipped to a page covered with the speckled purple bells of foxglove flowers. They hung heavy and low toward the bottom of the page, with smaller buds toward the top, a thick stem and a few leaves for aesthetic balance. It struck as me as feminine, more so than any of the other half-finished drawings in the book, maybe because it was the most natural and realistic of the drawings.
“This would be so perfect on your skin,” Frankie said. “This is so you.”
Matt leaned over us. “Oh yeah, that would look good on you.”
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” I said. “Not like—a tattoo in someone’s house.”
“It’ll be fun,” said Frankie. “Matt tattooed Jenny before. Did you know that?”
Jenny never told me about any tattoo. I wondered what else she hadn’t told me.
•
We left their house in one car to go to the metal show. The Black Sheep sat on the border between the rich and the poor part of town, where the drainage in the sewer systems gets bad. We arrived late, and the second band was already playing. The stage was set against the back wall, with a few scratched-up tables and chairs and room for the mosh pit. Matt went to mosh in the pit while Frankie and I sat at a booth near the bar.
“It’s nice to be out without the baby,” she said.
I fumbled with a pack of cigarettes. She rested her face onto her knuckles, as if she also needed something to do with her hands. Our nervous energy was contained in the ways we kept our bodies occupied. I inhaled my cigarette and blew out, turning my face away from her. I did not know yet what it was like to be needed all the time.
“Is it hard for you, being with the kid all of the time?” I asked.
“It’s the treasure of my life,” she said, and smiled. I realized she’d had Jett at seventeen. I asked her if she finished school after.
She shook her head. “I’m working toward getting my GED,” she said. “And anyway, school didn’t work for me. I don’t know why. I just didn’t care.”
I agreed with her, keeping to myself that I had recently graduated with an almost 4.0 average. I offered her a cigarette and she said no. We watched Matt move through the mosh pit, enjoying the music.
Matt’s friend Patrick showed up with his girlfriend Maya. He wore a brown bomber jacket, which he unzipped to show us he’d snuck in a bottle of vodka. We all drove to the Satellite Hotel, a brutalist brick building in the shape of a three-armed star. When I was young, I thought it was called the Satellite because the biggest industry in Colorado Springs outside of Jesus was the defense industry, but later I learned it was because the top of the hotel housed some kind of radio array. The hotel was on the south end of town, near the shitty comedy club. The car rocked over the countless potholes. It wasn’t far from Lamplighter. When I was in high school, I would sneak up on the hotel roof with friends and we’d split a handle of Tullemore Dew.
We stopped at a gas station, bought a roll of electrical tape and climbed the stairs of the hotel, eleven flights up with a door that would lock behind us. I pushed lumps of black electrical tape into the hole for the latch bolt, and then taped over it after it was stuffed so we could get back out.
On top of the hotel, we passed the vodka around, the sky as big and wide as I’d ever seen it. I stood a couple feet from the edge of the building, looking out at the city. You could see the cemetery, which in two years would flood from violent summer storms, freeing coffins from their graves. On the corner was the red Conoco and Burger King. Next to that was the strip mall with the liquor store where the clerk got murdered when they turned off all the street lamps due to budget cuts, and the Pentecostal church squeezed between it and Mary’s Bar.
Frankie was the first to go toward the edge. There was no railing or lip. It fell like a cliff, and Frankie stood there, looking over it, the wind pushing her dark hair all around her face. She laughed unsteadily, like there was no edge at all. Patrick and Matt sat with their legs hanging off, swinging back and forth. Maya grabbed a bag of chips from her purse and joined them.
Patrick passed the bottle of Burnett’s, first to Matt, then Maya and Frankie, and then Frankie reached back to me. I drank long, letting it strip the saliva out of my throat. Instead of walking to the edge, I wormed my way over, crawling like a slug. I was too buzzed to trust my balance. Wind rushed up, flying. They all sat there looking over the void and all I could do was crawl.
IF YOU DON’T LEAVE YOUR HOMETOWN HIGH SCHOOL, YOU’LL JUST GET BAD TATTOOS AND DO LOTS OF DRUGS
THE SECOND TIME I hung out with Matt and Frankie, the conversation turned to what tattoo I wanted. Matt grabbed some tracing paper and started sketching. Frankie looked up some pictures on the Internet. I already knew I wanted foxglove flowers. Matt and Frankie got to pick where the tattoo went.
Matt got his supplies ready as Frankie set up a chair in the middle of the living room. She kneeled in front of me, unlaced my shoes, and then looked up. She pulled off each of my shoes and reached her hands up to my hips. I stared at her. Her fingers found the button of my jeans and I placed my hand on hers to stop her. She didn’t seem afraid to make the first move. I wondered why I was.
“Where?” I asked.
“I’ll show you,” she said. Matt glanced over, setting out the different colors of ink.
I nodded my head at the living room window, the light, the green grass outside. Frankie got up and turned the blinds. When the direction of the light changed, I saw how the dust lay on every surface in a way I couldn’t see before. My mother’s house was like this. She hid all the things that made it look dirty but didn’t wipe counters or sweep floors. When the light came in, you could see all the spots Frankie had missed, all her mistakes. Then it got darker and the dust disappeared.
Frankie leaned over me again, her hair trailing down like a hand to my throat. She traced her finger along the zipper seam of my jeans. I thought about Jenny and wondered which tattoo Matt had given her, whether it had happened the same way. Frankie picked her finger up to unbutton my jeans, but before she did I moved my hands and unzipped them for her, pulling them off halfway and revealing my black lace underwear. I’d picked that pair intentionally. She laughed, either at my actions or taste in lingerie, and said to Matt, “You should do her inner thigh.” Salt from the table had somehow made its way onto the chair, the grit sticking to the bare skin on the backs of my thighs.
Matt kneeled in between my legs. I’d never had a one-night stand or slept with a stranger, much less two. Most people I’d slept with were in my proximity, like my manager at work, which felt safe because I knew him, but also because of the lack of emotional content. That was how I liked sex to be. Frankie stared from the couch.
The plastic latex of Matt’s gloves crackled as he put the tattoo gun together and opened a fresh package of needles.
The new needles were a relief. Matt was a stranger to me; I was letting someone I did not know stick needles into my body. I imagined blood particles inside of old needles, dirty needles in dirty skin, needles in other girls or in old men who rode motorcycles who fucked girls like me who got tattoos in someone’s apartment. Needles being handled by a man who says “trust me” and so you do.
Matt’s foot depressed the pedal on the floor. There was a sudden, familiar sound, an angry rumble. He placed his cold hands on the inside of my knees and pushed my legs outward, parting my thighs. He watched me as I did this and I stared at his third-eye spot.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
I closed my eyes.
I liked doing what he told me to do. The pressure of his hands slid down the inner muscle of my thigh. The cloth was cold and smelled sterile, like hospital soap. The tissue paper of the design he drew fell against my thigh and attached hungrily, stuck to me as the purple ink transferred to my skin. Frankie told me I wasn’t allowed to look at the tattoo until it was done.
After Matt placed the tracing, the first prick of the needle dragged across my skin. He bent, concentrated on the work, and I resisted the urge to run my fingers along the stubble of his shaved head.
“Where’d you buy your tattoo gun?” I asked.
“Don’t call it a gun.” His voice was stern, the way he emphasized the word gun.
“Yeah,” Frankie said. She rubbed her hands on the couch, read-justed her body a bit. She’d been so quiet I almost forgot she was there. “The word gun makes it sound like tattooing is somehow violent.”
“Isn’t it?” I asked. “Violent, I mean.” Matt stretched the skin tight. As he moved up toward the spot where my hip and thigh met, the rawness set in. I felt the skin taut between his fingers, the latex-covered index and thumb of his left hand, the needles in between that skin space.
“Tattooing is an art,” he said. “Not marksmanship.”
Matt removed the needles for a moment and looked up at me, one eyebrow raised. My skin prickled a little, out of fear or nervousness, or because I was cold and half-naked in someone’s chair.
“Guns destroy,” he said. “This creates.”
He took the damp cloth with the hospital soap smell and wiped off the extra ink. I asked Frankie for my beer and took a swig. I imagined my fingers running across the raised skin, the new scar Matt was creating. When he moved his hands toward my hips, the tattoo burned a sudden hot I couldn’t stand. All the crevices of my body sweated as I took another drink of beer. I felt the cold and fizz on my tongue, my damp armpits, and the burn of the alcohol at the back of my mouth.
In pain all senses are heightened. The mind has to go deeper than the immediate to be okay. Pain is a form of meditation that defeats the now. It is not about being present with the pain but being beyond it, being able to breathe and function and think, being able to survive without kicking and screaming.
Matt put the needles back on my skin. I rolled my head back against the chair and raised my arms above my head. I tried to keep my legs relaxed. Every now and then, his hand rested on part of my thigh.
“Do you like tattoo sex?” Matt asked.
“What?” I said.
“Do you like tattoo sex?”
I wondered if he was going to fuck me and tattoo me at the same time. Maybe they were into weird shit like that. Matt’s head was down, eyes on the tattoo as he spoke.
“Tattoo sex is when the needle goes in and out,” he said. “When the pain feels so good you could come.”
I breathed in the skin of my thigh stretched between his forefinger and thumb, breathed in between swigs of warm beer and the pain shooting up from my pelvis. I breathed in between Frankie on the couch, the way she watched over her kingdom, and Matt on the floor. His shoulder bones moved back and forth underneath his shirt, widening and unwidening like the muscles of some large beast.
“Do you like pain?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But I bet you do.”
I looked over at Frankie and she smiled.
HOPELESS / ROMANTIC
THE BUZZING WAS IN my head. It was in my bones, my thigh bone, my hips. It was in the chair, threading up my spine. It stayed within me long after he was finally done. Matt wiped away the last of the stray ink with a paper towel. The hospital smell stung my skin and nose. Frankie went back to their bedroom to grab a full-length body mirror. As I stood up and turned around, I knew Matt would see the tattoos on the back of my thighs. He grabbed my hip first, pushing me against the back of the chair, the latex from his glove pulling my skin in a way that hurt. I was a little drunk from the beer but I surrendered in part because my body dissolved again when he touched me. My laugh sounded strange to me, like it was a sound that did not belong to my teeth and tongue once it left my mouth.
“Whoa,” he said. “Hang on a sec.”
I placed my hands on the back of the chair and straightened my arms, bending over. Matt yelled into the bedroom for Frankie, grabbing my thigh the same way he grabbed my hip, firm. He rubbed the tattoo a little, as if he could feel the ink scars underneath the latex glove. I remembered getting them done, lying on my belly with my arms curled underneath me as the artist worked, and then tracing my fingers over each of the new letters, the ridge of scarring raised gently on the skin.
“Coming!” Frankie yelled back. She lugged a full-length mirror down the hall, my reflection bouncing back and forth in it as she got to the living room. She placed it upright against the couch and let out a heavy breath.
“Okay,” she said. “Time to see your new tattoo!” She walked over and stood next to Matt.
“Look at these,” he said, motioning to my thighs, the words on them.
hopeless / romantic
I blushed and was suddenly aware of the open air all over my almost naked body. The tattoo itself was more like a wish. I didn’t feel connected to anyone in a romantic way, and most of the time sex felt like a stand-in for whatever romance was supposed to be.
When I’d slept with Sam, my manager, I felt detached from the sex even though I harbored a deep longing for his attention. He had a girlfriend; his lack of emotional availability seemed attractive. I wore skirts to work with the intention to seduce him, and after we started to fool around in the store, I shaved my legs every morning. He waited for me to turn eighteen, but even before my birthday we were flirting on the clock. When I woke up at his house one Saturday morning, I realized I felt just as detached from him as from the boy I was currently dating, and that I probably shouldn’t be dating anyone at all. I was more attracted to a person’s interest in me than to the particulars of their personalities, or the things they liked to eat, or what they liked to do when they weren’t texting me or sleeping with me. I left Sam’s apartment that morning while he was in the shower, a note on the pillow that said, had fun! see you at work. xoxo, L
Sometimes having sex with Sam hurt, in the sense that I would not be quite ready but he would want to start anyway. I would face away from him and he would enter me, and I would feel myself force an acceptance of his presence in my body. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex; more like, I wanted his attention so badly that I didn’t think I could be picky about the type of attention I received. Since I wanted to be an object of his attention, I believed that I also had to be an object of his pleasure.
Often, during sex, it would take me a few minutes to figure out whether something felt good or if it was painful. Eventually, it seemed it was mostly hurting, or that it was fine but I was empty and detached. By then so much time had passed that to stop or readjust felt like breaking an unspoken rule.
I learned to restructure these feelings of pain or detachment into a type of pleasure, and I did this by performing what I thought sounded and looked like a woman enjoying sex so that I wasn’t just lying there, emotionless and unmoving. When I was sixteen
, I’d heard a phrase at school: It’s like sticking your dick in a coffin. If I were going to live my life as a receptacle of bodies, I did not want to be a coffin.
Matt cleaned the new tattoo and bandaged me up. I wanted badly to touch it although it was an open wound. My leg felt wide and raw and the purple flowers with its thick green stems looked neon against the redness of my irritated thigh. Frankie moved me to the couch. She slipped my shirt off in the same delicate way she took off my shoes. Her fingers were gentle and cool against my skin as she lifted it up and over my head. My body tensed at the sudden way she moved me, as though I were an art doll or a mannequin. The action of removing my clothes and then placing me on the couch, first my shoulders, then the long line of my back, seemed to come so naturally to her that I thought she had done this before, or that she had done this with other women before without Matt there. Matt was on the other side of the coffee table, standing very still with his arms folded tight against his chest. It was dark outside and the light from the kitchen gave everything a dark desert tinge of yellow.
Frankie put my legs up on the couch. Her fingertips traced their way down my leg like she was studying me through touch. I watched her eyes curve up at the corners as she smiled, the gunsmoke and amber color of her eyes moving from spot to spot on my skin. When she was done, she stood next to Matt, and they both looked at me.
That was when she said it, what made me forget my name.
She said, “She’s just like Lilith.”
Matt wiped sweat from his forehead and I realized how hot it was. My skin against the velvet couch, the big body of it holding me up.
I lay there, waiting to see what they would do next, which I assumed would involve sex of some kind. I did not know who would start, or if we would start by kissing, or how I should feel. I wondered what they expected me to feel, what they expected from watching a naked girl on their couch, if the naked girl should do anything in particular.
