Rough Beginning

It used to be that a tattoo didn’t have to mean fucking anything. If I got tatted up with motorcycles and naked chicks, it could just mean that I liked motorcycles and naked chicks, right? But after all those goddamn tv shows where these chicks get on just to get off about the big long weepy story behind the fucking tweety bird on their hip, nothing is safe. I didn’t used to give a shit that people believed everything they saw on tv, even when it meant that they assumed I was trying to fuck them sideways every time I got under their cars, because let’s face it- I usually was. Usually am. Fucking verb tenses, anyway you get where I’m going with this right?

I go anywhere these days, and people want to know the story behind my tattoos. It got so bad that every time I get dressed in the morning I take some duct tape and tape my sleeves to my wrists, just to make sure that if I have to stand up on the subway- which I always do- they won’t slip so that some salaryman asshole catches a glimpse of the ink under there and decides he wants to find out what dead homie that motorcycle is for and what bitch that married some other asshole that is riding it. They really ask me that, as if you know I’d be blind to the symbolism of a dead friend fucking an ex-girlfriend. I may spend my days under cars, but there is oxygen down there too.

The funniest part of it isn’t that I get hassled by schizophrenics all day- they can’t decode basic symbolism or so I read somewhere- it’s that the best stories aren’t in the tattoos. No, the best shit is what gets told while the tattoo gun is buzzing and some poor motherfucker is screaming. You ask people what the manliest place on the planet is, they’ll tell you it’s the bar or the gym, maybe even an autobody shop like mine but that’s all bullshit. Bars and gyms, that shit is all peacock posturing and flexing. The only place that compete with the tattoo shop is those barber shops full of crazy old negroes in the Bronx, and most of them have checkered floor tiles too.

What separates tattoo shops is that once you get under that needle, when it’s ripping through your epidermis six hundred times a minute, all that posturing and bullshit just evaporates. You can’t put up a front, and you’d be an asshole for trying. The truth of the situation is that under the right circumstances, a mystical bond develops between the tattoo artist and his client. I’m sure you want to laugh at that shit but you have to respect that tattooing has some truly mystical fucking origins.

Back in the day in Japan, before they started running storefronts with walls of flash like they’re LA or something, you didn’t even get to pick what they put on you. You had to be introduced to the guy who was going to tattoo you, you had to bring him gifts. It was like wooing a chick, you had to have a relationship before he’d stab you with a steel tipped bamboo needle.

The guy who did my back piece- nutty guy who calls himself Yayo- he’s a callback to that shit. He’s as white as rice, but he gets that bond. The tattoo doesn’t have to mean shit, but the tattooing does. It’s all about the experience, he tells me. You ought to remember the getting it done the same way you remember the tattoo.

He’s got this one story he’ll tell you on the second session of a backpiece, once you’re committed to him and are too scared shitless of walking around with a half done back to leave once he digs into the real crazy. He assures me this story is one hundred percent true, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t make me regret harassing him for three hours to tell me why he calls himself Yayo when he looks like he hasn’t shoved anything up his nose since he could talk and he’s got “Gotham City” tattooed across his back.

“So you really want to know why they call me Yayo?” he asked while he was changing machines, from the nice little pussycat of an eight needle he was using for linework to the hellcat of a sixteen magnum for the colour on the devil chick he was gouging into my back.
“Sure as shit I do,” I said, watching him in the mirror.
“Well, what do you know about vampires,” he asked me, squirting out some red ink into a little plastic cup.
“You mean those gothic weirdos that post up pictures of themselves smeared in ketchup on that emo-kid version of myspace?”
“No,” he said with a laugh. “I mean the real as hell Bram Stoker kind,” coming at me with the hellcat. I wasn’t sure if I should be more worried about the implications of his last statement or the needle he was about to rake against my back. I tensed up as the needles, cut into my skin. People always want to know what that’s like. A liner, that’s just like getting a fucking needle dragged through your skin, but a hellcat magnum like that? It’s like Jack Bauer coming at you with a lit cigarette and twenty questions about a nuclear bomb, so I think you can forgive me for my less than thorough questioning of his story.
“You’re trying to tell me that there’s vampires running around out there?” I asked him between more than a couple winces.
“I am suggesting just that,” he said. “It was about six months after I moved to LA. I was working at a coffee shop down by Venice Beach where you get absolutely all kinds. Back then I used to start work so early that if I timed it right I could take my first break of the day just as the sun was coming up. I’d just sit out there in the sand with the tourists, the junkies, and rollerbladers and watch one of the most spectacular sunrises a man could ever see.

It sounds kind of sick, but the colours you see reflected off the haze of smog? The pinks, purples, and yellows? They’re fucking gorgeous. I could never say for sure, but you know I think that’s where those nutty highlights you see in new school stuff come from, the sunrise over the smog. So anyway, it was one of those mornings when I had just come back from that sunrise and was totally lost in my own shit, just throwing up drinks in complete autopilot until she walked in.

The sun was just up, so I figure she must have been feeling and thinking that she was about three different kinds of shit, but in that moment she looked so much more. Picture this, she’s like five-three and within twenty of a hundred. Hair like it’s about to catch fire and burn the whole place down. I lose it so bad that I’ve got boiling hot water pouring down my hand and I need the cashier tugging on my apron to realize it. This is LA, the city where you know they front like they invented the idea of the beautiful woman but it’s more like LA is the city where that idea came to die, and here I am burning my hand off because here comes one of the last really beautiful women in the world. I guess I should have noticed that she was pale like she was carved out of alabaster on Venice Beach, but I reiterate that there was something really transcendent about how this girl looked and my hand was about ready to fall off.