Roads, Mills, Laps

I went inside a tattoo parlor for the first time in my life yesterday. I didn’t get a tattoo and neither did the person I was with. We were just there to observe; we were along for the ride.

The parlor used to be someone’s house. It had those AC units you see in ramshackle homes hanging out of the windows like man-made ledges. Squares of siding dangled from its walls; they were beige in color and had spent too long in the sun, their cracked surfaces had deep fissures that looked like the pale, scaled bellies of skinned alligators.

When we went inside, we were greeted by a saleswoman who was sitting behind a glass counter meant for the display of baseball cards. She was reading some obscure piece of fantasy: Dragons were on the cover of the book; they flew around a scantily-clad heroine who wielded a sword that radiated an aura of ‘magic.’ The saleswoman’s name was ‘Ma.’ Everyone in the parlor called her ‘Ma.’ She carried a two-way radio and would call her employees downstairs from doing whatever they did upstairs whenever a customer entered. There was no doubt that she was in charge. The conversations never used proper military radio protocol such as “Roger,” “Over,”",Out,” etc.; instead, they went like this:

Ma: “Jake, customer downstairs needs a piercing.” (Not us.)

(squelch despite 15 meters of straight-line distance between radios)

Jake: “You got it Ma. I’ll be right down.”

Heavy feet then pounded down the stairs of the house and a bearded Jake appeared from behind some door that led to the old kitchen. He was older than Ma which left the whole affair with a Freudian air of uncomfortable uncertainty. Jake wore cutoff denim jeans and a backwards baseball cap; faded blue and gray ink filled every space of his body. He had been around tattoos for a lifetime. He obviously knew what he was doing. Some would say his body was a work of art, but I say it looked like it had been dipped too long in an inkwell. There was no free space; the tattoos ran together and spilled down even the bony parts of his slender body. Too much of anything is one big, runny mess, especially so: tattoos.

Jake slipped on surgical gloves and beckoned the customers (not us) into the back room from whence he came.

We looked at the walls of the shop which advertised tattoos. I put my hands behind my back, acting like a gentle, erudite Swiss naturalist chancing upon a rare orchid in the Everglades. Most people stare at tattoo options with arms crossed, symbolizing perhaps indecision or internalized conflict brought on by an overactive conscience. But I was just there as an observer, one who lived in a Germanic country to boot, and so I made my Germanic gesture as I was taught by Jurg and his Robin Hood/eco band of Green Party thieves.

I studied the advertised samples focusing on the most ridiculous ones, the ones which caused me to pause in amazement wondering the intent and IQ of the respective artists and the customers. I gravitated to the overt religious ones first. An opened-mouth righteous angel with a fancy shiny halo and fluffy marshmellow wings held a scimitar. It was bringing the blade to bear making those ’slashing’ anime-esque lines depicting movement. It held a shield emblazoned with a giant red Maltese cross of crusader power; it was nothing more than a crude drawing depicting dumbass Billy Bob hick righteousness; it reminded me of either a piece of Choose Your Own Adventure artwork or something you’d find in the later versions of D&D guides (circa. 1988), back when TSR’s art budget was 50% of what it was in the glorious early 80s. It belonged on the atrophied arm of some truck-driving Gomer Pyle.

Jesus was there–His sacred heart exposed, His two fingers held up, the rest of them facing down in that classical holy pose that you can find on the sooty, incense-stained, mosaic ceilings of 4th Century A.D. Byzantine churches, his body and heart aglow. To the left of Jesus, a flaming cross for sale. I peered closer and contemplated the irony of my recent thought: Constantine, the first Christian Byzantine emperor, converted upon supposedly seeing a flaming cross zipping across the sky with the following words: “In hoc signo vinces” (translation: ‘By this sign, conquer’). I guess it was a street blimp, Byzantine-style.

By this sign, BUY!

Sadly, though, the tattoo’s motto was depressingly philistine: “Repent now!” No fancy Latin, no street blimp pimps, no Byzantine emperor contemplating the vast wealth generated and number of Ranger bass boats that could be purchased (Roman Ranger bass boat equivalents of course, sans gas-powered trolling motors–eunuch slave powered back then) by an ignorant populace galvanized by a fresh belief construct….no historical background on this one–just an okely-dokely evangelical dictate, just insipid Dubya mandates, just more ironic blah.

Jesus was available in comic book form too. You could pay for Him to be a superhero on your arm or your ass. You could pay to have him in his cape or as the guy I saw in front of me on the wall, coming off his cross, one muscular arm ripping out the nails like The Incredible Hulk coming through a wall, the other pointing at YOU, the pathetic, hedonistic, sinning scion of Adam,making YOU feel like shit for having to sit there and watch it all draped in your selfish cloak of original sin–dropping the mother of all Hiroshima guilt bombs as it is always dropped. (There was a lot of red on that tattoo.) The Son of Man looked like a WWF (WWJD ?) wrestler on that one–it was horrendous. God, isn’t man is a sad creature or WHAT?

To the left of the superterrific Hulk Jesus, was one depicting two hands clasped together in the classic prayer gesture; the hands were wrapped in rosary beads. The beads wrapped around the hands like constricting vines. I’ve seen these ones before. They usually sit on the giant, golden brown prison yard-pecs of buffed Mexican convicts. Mexican convicts love these things: they love overt, gratuitous depictions of their faith inked on them after having killed three people–gangland style, to the back of the head with a stolen Mossberg inside an immaculately cleaned bathtub: I don’t get THAT; I never will.

Heaven was on this particular wall, and so I turned around and walked over to hell, over to the other side of the shop where skulls and skeletons mixed with snakes and fire. Like everything in life, tattoo parlors are Manichean–classic examples of the struggle between good vs evil, light vs dark, skulls vs clasped hands in prayer, pleasured flesh vs the ascetic devotion to live without.

The samples in this wall of hell had lots of fire. I stared at ten-thousand depictions of evil and death, some crude, some real works of art: all were grotesque. Death and evil are always ugly. Some people like them: I don’t.

Ma called on the radio for a piercing (a newly arrived couple this time, not us); stairs pounded and another guy appeared from behind the kitchen door. He was an inkwell too; he welcomed the couple back to do his work which involved shoving a sanitized silver needle into the pink erectile tissue of the nipple. The girl customer was a walking pin cushion complete with pierced nose, eyebrows, and tongue; her paramour had enormous oval discs wedged inside his earlobes causing them to hang down gangly; he resembled a chance tribal leader from Papua New Guinea photographed for a 1930s edition of a National Geographic, back when the world was smaller and its inhabitants more disparate–back in the day….back when all American men wore fedoras and suits and none of them contemplated tribal earlobe spacer things.

These people had gone completely tribal in the middle of Bush country.

We did what we had to do. By the time that we were done, Ma was reading from a different book: It was something about the history of the tattoo and had ancient, black and white tintype photographs of inked-up Victorian men and women flashing their art in naughty poses–rare pictures indeed proving that people don’t change and never will; civilization is a facade; man is, at heart, a salacious tribal being (Heart of Darkness and all that…peace out, Conrad).

Ma looked up from her book and wished us well. I closed the door to the house and let the screen door fall against the door jam. Some new customers had just gotten out of their car and passed us going the opposite way, paying Ma a visit. They mentioned something about a skull.

We left and drove to the mall.
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There’s a new fashion trend that I didn’t know about. I haven’t followed fashion lately; the TV’s off most of the time and I don’t stare at magazines with beautiful people in them, so it was all news to me: the fashion is called ‘deconstructivist.’ I needed some clothes and so I tried on some deconstructivist ones. It was a mess. Essentially someone draped in deconstructivist clothing looks like a Russian peasant during the reign of the Tsar. I don’t think the Manhattan snobs who thought up this desconstructivist haute couture would like me comparing it to Tsar-era Russian peasantry, but so be it. Fuck them; I despise them and their vanity anyway. Deconstructivism sucks. I’m still waiting for the resurgence of pocket watches and top hats. Maybe some day I will get lucky and will need clothes just when the Manhattan snobs think of bringing those things back. Until then, I’m sticking with no manblouses and no Fiddler on the Roof peasant garb.*

*I did come close to buying a tee shirt that showed a gollygee 1950s couple cutting a wedding cake. It said, “DON’T DO IT!” That sentiment wasn’t deconstructivist; it was realist which is why I almost bought it.

I’m down with realism.