Dorothy Parker's Elbow Read online

  tempting, but none

  of them me. What noun

  would you want

  spoken on your skin

  your whole life through?

  I tried to picture what

  I’d never want erased,

  and saw a fire-ring corona

  of spiked rays,

  flaring tongues

  surrounding—an emptiness,

  an open space?

  I made my mind up.

  I sat in the waiting room chair.

  Then something (my nerve?

  faith in the guy

  with biker boots

  and indigo hands?)

  wavered. It wasn’t fear;

  nothing hurts like grief,

  and I’m used to that.

  His dreaming needle

  was beside the point;

  don’t I already bear

  the etched and flaring marks

  of an inky trade?

  What once was skin’s

  turned to something made.

  Written and revised

  beneath these sleeves:

  hearts and banners,

  daggers and flowers and names.

  I fled. Then I came back again;

  isn’t there always

  a little more room

  on the skin? It’s too late

  to be unwritten,

  and I’m much too scrawled

  to ever be erased.

  Go ahead: prick and stipple

  and ink me in:

  I’ll never be naked again.

  From here on out

  I wear the sun,

  albeit blue.

  To the Engraver of My Skin

  MARK DOTY

  I understand the pact is mortal,

  agree to bear this permanence;

  I contract with limitation; I say no

  and no then yes to you, and sign

  —here, on the dotted line—

  for whatever comes, I do: our time,

  our outline, the filling-in of our details

  (it’s density that hurts, always,

  not the original scheme). I’m here

  for revision, discoloration; here to fade

  and last, ineradicable, blue. Write me!

  This ink lasts longer than I do.

  Dyeing a Three-Dollar Bill

  FRANK MARTINEZ LESTER

  A row of metallic lockers. Oversized safety pins hang from the slats of the doors, holding various articles of quietly declarative and utilitarian gym clothing, navy blue, striped gray and red, tank tops, socks, workout shorts. I sit cooling off, draped with a towel, from a half hour in the sauna. A man appears at the end of the aisle, drops his bag on a portable plastic seat and quickly vanishes. The bag is yellow mesh. It is filled with various articles of gym gear, all in color-coordinated variations of pastel. A dispenser of lotion, a bottle of shaving cream, a water bottle. Something about this bag tells me he is gay. The bag sits on the chair for ten minutes. The man doesn’t come back. He hasn’t even opened his locker. He won’t be back until I’m gone.

  The tattoo on my left shoulder, which he has just seen, would cause a lot more consternation and tension in the city where the Master Locks in this gym are manufactured than they do here in San Francisco. In Minneapolis, I would probably be a scandal; in Tulsa, a pariah; in Montgomery, seeping blood from a blunt head wound. Even here, though, in the city-state of tolerance, in a public gym known for its past reputation as a haven of public sex and drug activity, a place that in the seventies and eighties rivaled famous bathhouses for debauchery, I get overly lengthy stares, askance looks, sidelong glances, rudely slammed doors, sharp barks of “Excuse me” from irritated fellow patrons. I tell myself it is not nearly as bad as it would be almost anywhere else, but even here it is not always certain that I am safe, not certain that someone is not going to erupt in rage one of these days when I am showering or steaming or lifting weights. It is that old junior-highschool-gym fear at large again, the buzzing tension, the unavoidable nudity, the assault of rank sweat when you open the door to the shower room. But have I not brought this tension upon myself? Am I not now my own junior high bully?

  The tattoo is a two-inch pentagram, simple, large, blue, with a red Pisces symbol inscribed in its center. It is not upside down. It is upright. But I cannot expect others to know the distinction. Most people, when they see a pentagram, think satanic. Mine is a declaration of faith—pagan faith to be exact. But I cannot expect others to know this. I cannot expect that taking the time to explain my tattoo to a stranger will clear up the insult. The locker room I am in is full of hardy working-class men in their forties and fifties who lumber in to steam and shuffle and discuss the murders and kidnappings on the five o’clock newscast and the box scores, along with a smattering of gay men, who quietly stuff their lockers and retreat to the shower benches and chat about upcoming trips with their lovers to Amsterdam and Ibiza. It is hard to believe that most of the men here, if not practicing, were raised Christian, and immediately react with alarm to a symbol that, after a steady barrage of television and movie images associating it with hostility to Christianity and other established institutions (I think of the Carl’s Jr. ads with scenes of a vengeful woman biting into a juicy burger, her pentagram-wearing medium watching gleefully, as meanwhile, across town, relish stains appear on a bride’s white dress), signifies an open threat, if not evil.

  Tattoos are as commonplace in San Francisco as Queen Annes and summer fog. You see them everywhere, and sometimes you wonder why you never see tattooed dogs or cats. The marks are sometimes florid, covering an entire limb, an entire chest, an entire back, an entire body from neck to toe. Usually they are subtler, a crucifix on a forearm, a Celtic ring around an ankle or a calf, a butterfly or a teddy bear on a hip. One of my roommates once got a tattoo of the cute orange tiger from the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” affixed to his rump, thinking, I guess, that it would make him, as a bottom, more winsome to tops. (He could have invested in a blue hankie and saved a few Jacksons.) No matter what, when you see a tattoo here, it is a fashion manifesto, a signal of coolness, an advertisement that you belong to a trend. This is the same way nose piercings and goatees and fisherman’s caps have gradually wound their way into the fabric of the street. Slowly, if you live here long enough, you begin to see the trends fade back into the woodwork, fewer Prince Alberts, more jokes about them. Newer trends replace the fading ones. But tattoo shops are everywhere here, in flats, storefronts, corner shops, malls, and they show no sign of vanishing, no sign of being drowned by newer fads. There was a craze for a while that involved temporary tattoos made of henna. This fever lasted about six months. There is something about permanently marking yourself (even when you know that in an emergency you could get the tattoo removed with a costly laser treatment) that seizes the imagination in a way that no dilettante dye ever could.

  The gay men who see my tattoo almost never know what to make of it, or of me. I can count at least a half dozen times that I have slept with men who, in the middle of sex, asked me whether my tattoo was a sign that I was a “devil worshipper.” I often pause when I am fucking around with someone I have just met before I take my shirt off, still, even now that I have been tattooed for over two years, trying to gauge what the reaction will be when he sees the brand. I have no way of knowing how many potential partners have taken a pass on me when they have seen the tattoo first.

  When I got the pentagram, my best friend told me, “You can say good-bye to your usual types” He was referring to my regular carbohydrate diet of wholesome, responsible, well-fed preppy fags, the ones who drive nice BMWs and Saturns and own stock options and have tastefully decorated flats in Noe Valley and walk their golden retrievers every morning through Buena Vista Park in hopes of randomly bumping into Mr. Right. The boyfriend I broke up with a few months before my pentagram was a conflicted graduate of Biola University, a premillennialist school in Southern California that shares a name with a brand of
yogurt made in Greenland and has the stated mission of “graduating followers of the Lord Jesus Christ who are equipped with technical and relational skills to live and work with integrity, diligence, humility, and spiritual discernment.” I suppose you could say that my conversion to paganism was a reaction against this boyfriend, but, on the other hand, you could also say a number of other things about my conversion, none of which have anything to do with him. However, the tattoo does provide a certain grim insurance that I will never become intimate with anyone remotely like him again. You might say I have automatically selected myself out of an entire bracket of potential suitors. Ironically, even with the enforced quarantine, the attraction of these men continues to haunt me. It might even be fiercer now that I know that they are that much more unattainable.

  I thought my first tattoo would be something along the lines of the bold black HIV+ I saw once, carved on the shoulder of an earnest-looking Hispanic man on the contents page of POZ magazine. This would be a method, I mused, of bringing up my serostatus without bringing it up. The guy I was courting, or the guy I was flirting with, or the guy I was cruising, would see the mark on my shoulder, and he would either turn and walk away, or he would overlook the tattoo and there would be no further debate, no messy questions, no complications. The mark would have the added advantage of thumbing its nose at the main legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., to the library of American political discourse, his infamous pronouncement that persons with AIDS should be forcibly tattooed on their buttocks and arms for instant identification.

  Nowadays, however, an HIV+ tattoo is about as declassé as an Alice in Chains CD. Another trend come and gone. For a while, gay clubgoers were wearing tattoos in block letters on their upper arms that spelled out HIV−. Once they seroconverted, they might or might not go back to their tattooist and get the extra slash that changed the minus sign to a plus. AIDS as fashion statement.

  My tattoo has a way of identifying me as “other” that resonates with people who see it; it puts them off balance without them knowing precisely why. “There’s just something about him” That something may attract people who savor the mystery of the riddle of discovering who I am. That something may also deflect those who know, just by seeing my bright blue stamp, that they don’t even want to think about what it represents and what I represent. It is as though I am a traveling shadow. An elaborate insect whose bright colors ward off predators. A three-dollar bill that has been stained with banker’s dye.

  I have fantasized about a world that exists behind an invisible portal, a world in which everyone sports tattoos that identify exactly who they are and what they mean. This man walking past you on the street has a tattoo that tells you that he is a raging Republican with a nasty smoking habit. This man in the café at the counter has a tattoo that tells you he likes to read William Burroughs and John Rechy. This man on the bus seat next to you has a tattoo that tells you that he secretly longs to be licked from head to toe for hours on end by someone who looks exactly like you. There is something resolutely fascist about a fantasy involving a world in which everyone is tattooed. There is also—the flip side of every fascist’s boot—a sense of order, a sense of harmony, a sense of relief. A sense of belonging. Buckley, ever the cynic, had his finger right on the pulse of that urge.

  from “The White Knights”

  WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

  Bootwoman Marisa, hater of Brandi, her sixteenth birthday more recently behind her than her conviction for assault with a deadly weapon, got a ride to North Beach to have her fourth tattoo done, waiting coolly in Bronson’s living room where meanwhile a pleasant time was had by others watching videos of Mark Pauline piercing dead dogs’ heads with remote-controlled drills, burning dead cats with a flame-thrower, firing cardboard missiles full of gunpowder, throwing switches to make dead rabbits walk backwards—“This is weird!” Marisa said, not meaning it, sitting on the couch with her felt hat beaked over her forehead, her thick black lines of eyebrows poised above a dinosaur romance. She had a very pretty oval head—I say head, not face, because hairlessness makes the boundary between head and face vanish so that there is only head, the cheeks and temples curving with inevitable naturalness around to the ears and back to the gray stubble (something other than hair) growing out from the bone. It was a finely colored head that Marisa had, clean and marbled like the freckled stone stairs fronting San Francisco houses. The lighting in Bronson’s living room caused a delicate shadow to deepen the tone of the right side, bisecting her perfect nose, which must have been crafted of special pink mollusk ceramic, like her lips. She leaned back in Bronson’s couch, knees up, blinking her dark eyes and rubbing her dirty black sneakers on the cushions. There was a bunch of safety pins stuck in her earlobes. Her black leather jacket, stuck full of badass buttons and a Hitler iron cross, glittered with galaxies of zippers.—“Man, I hate your dog,” she said. “If she bugs me again I’m gonna kick her jaw off.”—Her boyfriend was a Nazi skin in Chicago called James who blew up cars by dropping Ping-Pong balls full of Drano into the gas tank.—Six D-cell batteries in the same place will accomplish the same object, Marisa explained, although in that case the car-bomber had to be patient for the two weeks that it took for the casings to dissolve.—She bought acid in sheets and mailed them to James, who sold them at a considerable profit in Chicago, where skinheads were cool, where skinheads were organized, said Marisa, where it was all for one and one for all. He did not share these profits with her.

  The tatt was going to be a dragon, on the right upper thigh. Marisa really needed it, just as Yama needed to get more tatts on his arms (he was gonna get a Joker with an evil-ass face, like a red and black Checkered Demon). Marisa undid her suspenders and slipped her trousers off, grinning. Although she still had her shirt on, her naked thighs and her naked head made her as naked as a hairhead wearing no clothes at all; and this equivalence made her more ordinary, especially since most of her other tatts, such as the red, white and blue boot on her upper arm, were hidden by her shirt; and so, most of her Aryan props gone, she was just another naked girl. No one takes special account of Nazis when they are naked. Marisa sensed this and became tentatively, submissively young—”My legs are so fat,” she said.—Beginning to outline the dragon on her thigh (he was not ready for his needles yet), Bronson bent over her in his studio of rainbow skulls, while she half-sat, half-lay on the tattooing couch, which was actually an old trunk with a sleeping bag folded on top. Marisa stared into the yellow oval of brightness around the filament of the light bulb, Bronson’s music going “Ooooooh, bunga-bunga bunga-bunga,” and Bronson pen-sketched, holding in his other hand a fat phallus of deodorant which he applied now and then to keep the ink from rubbing off. Marisa, leaning back on her elbows, looked down at him and lay back, her head overhanging the couch, gazing now at a solar corona on canvas on the ceiling; and she played with the loose strap of her underpants. She had plump pink thighs.—“I can’t stand pain,” she said, but she wore a Nazi shirt.—“Oh, God,” she said, “it’s gonna be such a beautiful dragon; I’ve been waiting for this for such a long time now that I know I really need it on my body.” Her pubic curls were the reddish brown of dead roses.—This sixteen-year-old looked hardly like a bootwoman at all now as she lay there, all her prized difference receding to her mouth. This mouth, a hallmark of her narcissism, pouted downward, toward herself, so that one couldn’t readily tell whether she was sullen or just self-absorbed.—Bronson, who had green barbed arrows tattooed into the back of his neck, like lizard vertebrae, now began seriously to work. At the rattle of the tattoo gun, Marisa’s eyelashes suddenly fluttered, the shadows beneath them somehow darker now, bluer than they had been. I will pass over her cries and the sweat that burst out on that smooth, round skull, like that of a furry muskrat; while Bronson drilled slowly under her skin, wiping up her blood with a wad of tissue, and the sticky flesh of her thigh clung to the swab as it moved. From behind, Bronson’s ear was red and distinct against her white flesh. Her thigh was as pale an
d soft as a flounder. The needle went in. Sometimes Bronson set the gun down to yawn and scratch at the callus on the middle joint of his second finger, known to those in his trade as the Eye of the Octopus. Marisa recovered herself better with each pause, as the needle lengthened the irrevocable lines already pierced into her thigh; biting her lip bravely at these required mutilations, she smiled wider and wider, smiled wet-lipped until the dragon was outlined on her thigh in ink and blood. Now she was even more essentially and unarguably a bootwoman.—“Are you done?” she said, “are you done? I want to see! If anybody comes up, maim, kill, destroy!”, as she buckled her dirty jeans. She put her leather skinhead jacket back on, regaining more and more of herself with each button. When she’d first bought it, she’d broken it in by getting fucked on it. In the righthand pocket was her street knife. “Oh, kill, maim and destroy!” she screamed, making fists in the air. “I want to sucker-punch somebody!”

  Skin

  JOSEPH MILLAR

  for Joel

  He tightens a thin veil of plumber’s tape

  over a one-inch ebony dowel stretching the hole

  in his earlobe and shows me the steel hooks

  they stuck in his back before he was hoisted, mute

  dreadlocked carcass, over the darkening fairgrounds.

  Only the first two layers, he says, you don’t want

  the muscle to lift. If you’ve drunk enough water

  the previous month the skin loosens easily,

  “tenting” seven inches away from the bone,

  and you hang there in shock, dazed, cold, bright trails

  of plasma streaking the rib cage, body’s soft candle lit

  from within: trapped synapse, radiant icy adrenaline.

  Sioux war chief, scarred Druid, flayed Christian mystic:

  the dark Asian horse tattooed on one shoulder