Dorothy Parker's Elbow Page 6

  blows its blue dragon breath down toward his heart.

  “When I was a kid…”

  LARRY CRIST

  When I was a kid the only people who had tattoos were cons, bikers, and sailors. My slightly older crime mentor gave me two tattoos at my buzzed request. Having made the decision, I drank heavily as he prepared the needle and India ink. On two separate occasions, Jim placed a 13 on my shoulder, and FUCK down my middle finger. At fifteen I was obsessed with the word, as well as becoming acquainted with the act. I thought it would look cool on my right hand, on that particular finger where I also sported a brass ring made in jewelry class with FUCK going across.

  My mother was only too happy to help pay for its removal, which cost a small fortune, also requiring two trips to the doctor to the tune of a thousand bucks—a lot of money then, a lot of money now. Not only that, but the skin graft deleted only the letters U & C. The F & K over the knuckles required sanding. The doctor did some, but the remainder I had to sand myself using fine sandpaper, and then swathing the bloodied knuckle in bleach-soaked gauze.

  Twenty-five years later there is a slight scar, the F & K indistinguishable, obscured by other scars—the fighting knuckle. The U & C gone completely but covered with hair due to the skin graft.

  The 13 is still where Jim put it. I never see it on my shoulder, nor did my mother, so it survived. The same cannot be said for Jim, who died at eighteen in a CAMP marijuana raid.

  For Lysa, Who Tattoos Me

  in Her Miami Living Room

  LISSETTE MENDEZ

  Across Washington Avenue, limousines

  disgorge their starched and shimmery

  occupants in plumes of laughter and hunger

  into a landscape confettied with sex and paste jewels.

  “I dreamt this,” she tells me, straddling my right knee,

  her needled machine poised near the hollow

  between my shoulder and my clavicle, and I smell

  the incense and tobacco suffusing her T-shirt

  but we’re not touching and behind us is Monday

  night’s parade of moon and sea, palpable

  in this room of six windows where a steel table

  serves as altar: bottled pigments, paper towels,

  Vaseline, surgical soap in its squirter.

  Snap and pull of latex gloves within the blue

  glow from the street lamps, tattoo of lacquered nails

  against a cheap lighter, hiss of flame against

  the mouth of the cigarette, clang of glass and metal

  against the city’s midnight machinery

  while practice stencils flutter to the floor.

  “I dreamt this, you have perfect skin,” she tells me again

  as the thump of hip-hop blurs into the needle’s whine

  and my eyes decant salt pearls that fall and fuse

  with the ink and blood welling along the delicate strokes

  of the kanji that will anchor me.

  Lace

  MICHAEL WATERS

  It was nothing, really, just a story

  overheard at some party, the speaker

  an attractive woman with a tattoo—

  a miniature bluebird—bruising her left ankle.

  How the hot needle had hurt, the bluebird

  swollen and suppurated, but—

  here’s the part I can’t forget—

  how in the waiting room she’d thumbed

  through glossy photographs of flesh

  the artist had illustrated,

  and come upon a torso

  tattooed with a filigree of lace,

  lace over breasts and back and waist,

  a blouse so fine-spun and subtle

  its bearer might slip among us,

  not even the sober able to tell…

  I don’t know why this story

  stayed with me through cheap whiskey,

  the late hours, the heartbreak

  of losing touch with a lover, but

  I still can’t shake the image of her

  below a lattice of wisteria,

  wearing nothing but light, milky

  cursive, language sewn onto her skin

  that I would begin to decipher,

  given the chance again,

  filament by filament,

  until I might make sense of lace,

  the ephemeral attachments that exist

  between one person and the next,

  between stories we embrace,

  each story becoming our own.

  Triangle Tattoo

  CHERYL DUMESNIL

  Wood-planked floors, twelve-foot

  ceiling, a wall of glossy snapshots—

  dragonfly, water lily, barbed wire

  spiraling a woman’s thigh. The artist

  bends over my lover’s shaved leg,

  his palate of paper cups filled with ink.

  Through her skin, three finches

  emerge on a blackberry branch,

  ink mixed with blood beading her calf.

  For the third time, I run downstairs

  to the car, slap the gearshift into

  neutral, roll over the parking cop’s

  chalk mark, buying us time. Hours

  I sat beside them, telling stories,

  changing the music, rubbing color

  back into her fingertips. Now I

  lean against the car and listen—

  the buzz of the needle piercing

  her skin, the heart-shaped sign

  swinging its rusted chain. This is

  my job—he will change her body

  forever, I will love what she becomes.

  It’s Bad Luck to Die

  ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN

  Maybe you wonder how a Jewish girl from Des Moines got Jesus Christ tattooed on her three times: ascending on one thigh, crucified on the other, and conducting a miniature apocalypse beneath the right shoulder. It wasn’t religion that put them there; it was Tiny, my husband. I have a Buddha round back, too. He was going to give me Moses parting the Red Sea, but I was running out of space. Besides, I told him, I was beginning to feel like a Great Figures in Religion comic book.

  He got dreamy-eyed when he heard that. “Brigham Young,” he said. “And some wives”

  I told him: “Tiny, I’ve got no room for a polygamist.”

  Tiny himself had been married three times before he met me, one wife right after the other. I only had him, the one, and he’s been dead six months now.

  I met Tiny the summer I graduated high school, 1965, when I was eighteen and he was forty-nine. My cousin Babs, who was a little wild, had a crazy boyfriend (the whole family was worried about it) and he and some of his buddies dared her to get tattooed. She called me up and told me she needed me there and that I was not to judge, squawk, or faint at the sight of blood. She knew none of that was my style, anyhow.

  We drove to Tiny’s shop over on East 14th because that’s where Steve, the crazy boy, had got the panther that had a toehold on his shoulder. The shop was clean and smelled of antiseptic; Babs and I were disappointed. Sheets of heavy paper in black dime-store frames hung on the walls—flash sheets—arranged by theme: one had Mickey Mouse and Woody Woodpecker; another, a nurse in a Red Cross cap and a geisha offering a drink on a tray. A big flash by the door had more ambitious designs: King Kong and Cleopatra on the opposite sides of one page, looking absentmindedly into each other’s eyes.

  Tiny was set up on a stool in back, smoking a cigarette, an itty-bit of a man next to a Japanese screen. He was wearing a blue dress shirt with the cuffs turned back, and his hands and arms were covered with blue-black lines: stars across the knuckles, snakes winding up under the sleeves. The wide flowered tie that spread out over his chest and stomach might’ve been right on a big man, but on Tiny it looked like an out-of-control garden. His pants were white and wrinkled, and there was a bit of blue ink at the knee; a suit jacket, just as wrinkled, hung on the coat rack in back.

  He ey
ed our group, scowled at Steve and his two friends, and solemnly winked at me and Babs.

  “So,” he said. “Who’s the one?”

  “Me,” Babs said, trying to sound tough. She told him what she wanted: a little red-and-black bow on her tush. He asked her if she were old enough; she got out her wallet and showed him her driver’s license.

  Steve and his friends were buzzing around the shop, looking at the flash and tapping the ones they really liked.

  “Keep your hands off the designs, boys,” said Tiny. “I can’t tattoo a fingerprint.” He turned to Babs. “Okay. Come back of the screen” There was something a little southern in his voice, but I couldn’t pick out what it was. He jumped off the stool, and I saw that he was about a full foot shorter than me. I’m six feet tall, have been since eighth grade. I looked right down on top of his slick black hair.

  We all started to follow him. Tiny looked at us and shook his head.

  “You boys have to stay out here.”

  “I’m her boyfriend,” said Steve. “I’ve seen it before, and I’m paying.”

  “If you’ve seen it before, you’ll see it again, so you don’t need to now. Not in my shop, anyhow. You”—he pointed at me—”come around to testify I’m a gentleman.”

  He beckoned us back of the screen to a padded table, the kind you see in doctors’ offices, only much lower. Tiny turned around politely while Babs lowered her blue jeans and clambered up. He spun back, frowned, pulled down just the top of her yellow flowered underwear like he was taking fat off a chicken, and tapped her. “Right here’s where you want it?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Honey, is it fine, or is it what you want?”

  Babs twisted to look, careful not to catch his eye. “That’s what I want.”

  He squirted her with antiseptic, got a razor and shaved the area good. I sat on a folding chair across from them.

  Tiny loosened his tie, slipped it off, and hung it, still knotted, on a peg on the wall. “Hey Stretch,” he said, looking at me. “What’s your name?”

  “Lois.”

  “Lois. Like Louise?” He rolled his shirtsleeves up further. Babs was holding on to the table like a drowning sailor, and Tiny hadn’t even got the needle out yet.

  “Lois,” I answered, and fast, because I had to talk to him over Babs’s hindquarters and that made me a little selfconscious, “after my Uncle Louis. I was going to be named Natalie, after my Uncle Nathan, but then Louis died and Mom liked him better anyhow.”

  “My name is Tiny. No story there but the obvious” He picked up an electric needle from a workbench and hunted for the right pot of color.

  “I’m Babs,” said Babs, reaching around for a handshake. Tiny was looking elsewhere, and he dipped the needle in some black ink and flipped it on. “For Barbara?” he asked, setting into her skin.

  “A-a-a-a-bigail. Ouch.” She gripped the table.

  “Honey,” said Tiny, “this doesn’t hurt. I got you where you’re good and fleshy. Might sting a little, but it doesn’t hurt”

  “Okay,” said Babs, and she sounded almost convinced.

  “For Abraham,” I said suddenly. “Abigail after Abraham”

  “Pretty girls named after men,” said Tiny, taking a cloth and wiping some ink off of Babs so he could see what he was doing. “Thought that only happened in the South”

  Looking back, it seems like he took an hour working on Babs, but now I know it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. He looked up at me from time to time, smiling or winking. I thought that he was just one of those flirty types, one of those bold little guys, and that if he had been looking at Babs in the face instead of where he was looking at her, he would’ve flirted with her the same. Years later he told me that he was bowled over by all those square inches of skin, how I was so big and still not fat. “I fell for you right away,” he said.

  Up until then, I’d always thought it was oily sensible to fall in love with tall men so that I wouldn’t look like so much of a giantess. That way we could dance in public, in scale, no circus act. It didn’t matter, though: I never had a date all through high school, couldn’t dance a step. I spent my time in movie houses, because most movie stars looked pretty tall, even if it was only a trick of the camera, a crate under their feet in love scenes.

  Tiny, no doubt, no tricks about it, was short, but he charmed me from the start. His charm was as quick and easy as his needle, and he could turn it on and off the same way. On the Tuesday afternoons I visited him before we got married, I saw all types jangle the bell on the front door as they pushed it open: big men, skinny kids, nervous couples gambling on love forever. Most of them asked the same thing: “Does it hurt?” To people who rubbed him wrong, he’d say, “If you’re worried about it, I guess you don’t really want one”; to those he liked, chiefly the women, he’d drawl, “I could make you smile while I do it.” He could, too; he could tell your background by the feel of your skin, and would talk about ridiculous things—baseball scores, recipes for homemade beer, the sorry state of music—anything but the business at hand.

  He could even charm my mother, who, on meeting Tiny, this little man only two years younger than her, was grieved to discover she liked him.

  When he was finished with Babs, he put on a bandage and handed her a little white card that said How To Take Care Of Your New Tattoo. It had his name and address at the bottom. She read it and nodded. He turned and gave me a card, too.

  “Anything for you today?” he asked me.

  “No, no. I’m a chaperon, that’s all.”

  “Too bad. You’d tattoo great. You’re pale—high contrast” He reached up and tapped me on the collarbone.

  Babs looked a little white herself now, standing up, zipping her pants. Tiny got his tie and put it back on, tightened it as we walked around front.

  “I like to look natty,” he told me. Then he said to Steve, all business, “Eight dollars.”

  The boys crowded around Babs, who was suddenly looking pleased and jaunty, shaking her head: no, it didn’t hurt; no big deal; no, not now, I’ll show it to you later. I’m still the only member of the family that knows she has that tattoo.

  “You wanna stick around and chat awhile?” Tiny asked me, pocketing Steve’s money. “Tuesday’s my slow day.”

  The boys turned and looked at me, like I was the tough one all of a sudden; I could see Babs was jealous.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Careful, Lois,” said Steve. “By the time that character gets through with you, you’ll be the tattooed lady.”

  But he didn’t give me my first tattoo till a year later, the day after we were married: a little butterfly pooled in the small of my back. Five years later, he began referring to it as his “early work,” even though he’d been tattooing for twenty-five years before he met me. That didn’t rankle me as much as you might think—I liked being his early body of work, work-in-progress, future. That little butterfly sat by itself for a while, but in five years’ time Tiny flooded it with other designs: carnations, an apple, a bomber plane, his initials.

  When I told my mother about that first tattoo, she said, “Oh Lord. Is it pretty?” Like all good mothers, she always knew the worst was going to happen and was disappointed and relieved when it finally did. But she didn’t ask to see that tattoo, or any of the ones that followed. Sunday afternoons, when I went to have lunch with her, I dressed very carefully. I covered myself whenever I left the shop, anyhow: I hated nosy women in the grocery store trying to read my arm as I reached for the peas; I suspected all waitresses of gossiping about me in the kitchen. On my visits to my mother, though, I was extra wary. Through the years, my sleeves got longer, the fabrics more opaque. I never wore white when I visited her: the colors shimmered through.

  How could I explain it to my mother? She has always been a glamorous woman, never going anywhere without a mirror, checking and rechecking her reflection, straightening, maintaining. When I was a teenager, there were days that I didn’t look
in a mirror at all; I avoided my shadow passing in shop windows. Makeup hated me: mascara blacked my eyes, lipstick found its way onto my teeth and chin. At best, on formal occasions, I would peer into the rectangle on my lipstick case, seeing my mouth and nothing more. Tiny changed that. He caught me kneeling on the bathroom counter trying to get a glimpse of part of my back between the medicine chest and a compact, and he went on a campaign, installing mirrors, hiding them. He put a triple mirror from a clothing shop in our bedroom, put a full-length mirror over the bathtub. Once, I opened the freezer and saw my own reflection, chalked up with frost, looking alarmed in a red plastic frame in front of the orange juice.

  Most of Tiny’s own tattoos were ancient things that he’d done when he was just starting out. He learned the art traveling with the circus in the thirties, could only practice on himself or a grapefruit, and sometimes there wasn’t a grapefruit around. The top of his left thigh was almost solid black with experiments.

  When we were first married, he revealed a different tattoo every night, all of them hidden away: one night, a rose on a big toe; next, a banner that said E PLURIBUS UNUM half-furled in the hinge of his armpit; the next, his own signature, crooked and ugly, on the inside of his lip. One night, he said, “Are you ready?” and before I could answer he turned his eyelids inside out, and there was a black star floating on the back of each one, isolated, like a scientific experiment.

  “Flipping them up,” he said, turning them back, “hurts more than the needle does. I was young and drunk and crazy when I had those done, and the guy who did them was younger and drunker and crazier. I’m lucky he stopped there, didn’t tattoo my eyeballs scarlet red”

  He showed me all these designs like he was performing magic tricks, and sometimes I expected him to wave his hand over his toe and the rose would disappear and end up cupped in his palm; or the banner would finish rolling out from under his arm straight into the air, and go up in a flash of fire; or his name would unwrite itself; or I would fall asleep and find, in front of my own eyes, those floating stars, as black and unruly as Tiny’s hair.