Read A Good and Useful Hurt Online
Authors: Aric Davis
A Good and Useful Hurt
BY ARIC DAVIS
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright ©2011 Aric Davis
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN: 978-1-61218-202-5
Dedicated in memory of Marissa Emkens and Kamrie Heeren Dantzler.
“Fuck art, this is war.”
That’s what Jack had always said right before he and Mike would open Jack’s old shop in North Carolina. A line would be waiting for them before they opened and wouldn’t disperse until long after their advertised closing time, a line of men coming to or leaving port, looking for a souvenir. Jack was dead now, killed by lung cancer just three years after their stupid argument over who was going to buy ink, and Mike had always felt bad that their estrangement had carried over to a place where neither could say he was sorry. It had been a dumb argument, but it had provided the push that got the rest of his life moving. If it hadn’t been for that, he might still be sitting on Jack’s old stool, smoking an endless chain of butts and tattooing an endless line of sailors. Jack’s retirement plan had gone exactly as he’d intended: he’d always said he wanted to die before he had to quit work.
Jack, for better or for worse, was the past, and Mike blinked the old memories away. As good as it was to remember his old teacher and friend, his old axioms in particular, today was going to be busy. Mike had an all-day appointment with a man working on covering an entire arm with Japanese dragons, and the two men who worked for him, Lamar and Darryl, both had packed schedules as well. Mike watched Darryl push a mop across the floor and returned to his art table.
The problem with designing a large-scale tattoo is with the layout. Paper is flat, and people are not. It’s one thing to know how to tattoo and another to know how to make art—good art, real art—into a tattoo. That was something Mike had never imagined to be possible for him. Except for his daily joke before throwing open his door for business, Jack had never spoken of art; they’d simply tattooed all that old navy stuff, day in and day out. Mike would on rare occasion look at his stack of childhood doodlings that had led to his interest in tattooing in the first place, but he never spoke to Jack of it. It wasn’t until after he’d moved back to Michigan, and after he’d watched his first attempt at opening a studio crash and burn, that he finally picked up a trade magazine. What he saw floored him.
Jack had taught him everything he’d ever known about the craft, and underlying it all was that art and tattoos were two entirely different animals. The magazine proved in two pages that Jack had been wrong. Page after page of photo-realistic portraiture, Giger-esque suits of biomechanical twists and turns, and even some of the old designs reworked with color and in a style better befitting modern times. Jack had railed against body piercing, but Mike hadn’t known of a studio that didn’t offer it since he’d left the Carolinas.
The dragon sleeve was difficult for two reasons. The first was that the customer had very specifically insisted that both dragons be red. In just about every version Mike had drawn, the dragons looked mashed together. The lines were distinctly separate, but when both were colored the finished product looked like he’d just added an extra head and tail to a single beast.
Mike had finally worked it out by taking advice from an unlikely source—Darryl the piercer, who hadn’t a lick of drawing ability—who’d said simply: “Put one head on the guy’s wrist and the other at the top of his arm, then wrap the tails around one another at the elbow.” He’d been right—the idea cleaned up the design.
The other, not-so-easily-fixed problem was that the customer wanted the dragons to look as different as possible from one another, yet he still wanted them both red and Japanese. That was the issue Mike had found himself railing against for the past two weeks. He’d finally stumbled across a painting by Horiyoshi III, one of the Japanese masters, of a dragon that was very Japanese but also quite different than one would expect. It was older, wizened, its hairs were thinning, and its eyes looked almost rheumy on the page. Mike had mixed it with his own dragon last night and was working on the final version when the doorbell signaled an entry. He scowled and looked up. Both Darryl and Lamar were off doing something. He gave the drawing one last look—
not too bad
—and walked to the front of the store.
“We’re not open for about ten minutes, friend. Is there something I can help you with?” The man wore a pea coat atop a suit, his tie was loose, and even at about fifteen feet Mike could smell the gin.
“I’m looking for someone named Mike. They said to ask for Mike.”
“I’m Mike.”
Mike extended his hand, and they shook. The man was uncomfortable, which wasn’t surprising—lots of people were when they came in—but this was different.
“Wes, Wes Ogden. I never wanted a tattoo.”
“Lots of people don’t until they find out they do, Wes.”
The man smiled thinly, and Mike gestured to an old black couch that made up most of the furnishings in the lobby. What was ten minutes? The man needed them to be open. He sat on the couch, and Mike settled onto the arm opposite him.
“I’m looking for something specific, and I want you to know that if you won’t do it, I’ll find someone who will.”
“Well, we don’t do anything racist, gang-related, outlaw biker, or any shit I just find plain old-fashioned offensive. You don’t look the type for any of that, so tell me what it is you’re looking for.”
“My son Josh was killed in a car accident last spring. We were driving back from T-ball practice, and some idiot bitch on her phone hit us. It’s odd what you think about after something like that, but Josh had wanted to stop for ice cream, and if we had…”
The man coughed hard twice against his hand and continued.
“Well if we had, then he’d be alive, wouldn’t he? Josh was all I had left of my wife—she passed from breast cancer just after his first birthday. He and I were best friends, and there wasn’t a day we didn’t spend together after she died. I want that back.”
“Are you thinking of a portrait? If you are, I’m the wrong guy. Lamar does them all the time, though, and he’d be more than happy to—”
“No, I don’t want that.”
The man pulled a small vial from his pocket; it was full of gray dust. For a very brief moment Mike had a thought that the man was about to snort a line of heroin.
“I want a tattoo of a baseball, a small one on my bicep, and I want some of this in it.” He smiled, a weak thing, and shook the vial. “This has some of Josh’s ashes in it. I’d like you to mix some ink in with the ashes and tattoo me with that.”
Mike had fallen into deep thought, wondering about safety and how the ashy ink would hold in the skin, when the man stood. “Hold on there, Wes, I was just thinking about how we could do this for you.”
The man dropped back onto the cushions, a fresh blast of gin and neglected personal hygiene washing over Mike.
“I don’t think it’ll be a problem, to be honest. You’ll need to buy the ink, probably cost about ten bucks, and I want you to know that I can’t guarantee if some of the line weights will be off because of the larger particles in the pigment, but beyond that, yeah, I think I can do it.”
“I’d like to set up a time then.”
“How big you want the baseball?”
“About the size of a half-dollar.”
“I’ve got a big one on Thursday, but if you want to get here about quarter to noon, I can fit you in right before we open. I’ll need you to stick around until our counter girl gets here today. She can get a deposit and put you in the book. Probably cost—”
“That’s immaterial.”
“Well, that’s fine, but you’ll be looking at sixty—ten for the ink, you can keep the bottle, of course, and fifty for the tattoo.”
“That sounds fine.”
“Well then, Wes, it was a pleasure to meet you. Becky should be here in a few to set you up.”
Wes extended a hand. “Thank you, Mike.”
“Not a problem at all.”
“What do you think?”
“Honestly, dude, when I was locked up, dudes used ash to make black all the time. One guy I knew melted a fucking checker and used that as ink. Shit stayed, too. People is resilient.”
“I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse.”
“Think about it this way: All day, every day, you push pigment. A good chunk of that is black. You don’t know what’s in that bottle—you goin’ on blind faith just like everybody that what they say is in it is what’s in it. The fact is we don’t know—could be all cremated kids.”
“That’s morbid.”
“How long we known each other?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Lamar. I guess I met your dumb ass about five years ago.”
“Well then listen, man, I trust you, and you trust me. Just be comfortable with it. You don’t like death, nobody do. But people die, Mike. You know that, I know that, this man sure as fuck knows that. Just help him out, dude. It’s a good deed.”
“What have you got today?”
“Finish up a portrait of a guy’s dad on his back. His old man’s still alive—isn’t that fucked up?”
“I suppose.”
“It’s like, if you so worried your dad don’t know you love him, a tattoo ain’t gonna do shit.”
“I gotta draw this baseball.”
“You be nice to that guy. He’s in a bad place, and you know that better than anybody.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
Depending on which of the two you asked, either Lamar had found Mike or Mike had found Lamar. The particulars were irrelevant, but the men jousted like an old couple.
Lamar had been an idiot as a kid but had walked out of juvie knowing two things: he had no desire to go back, and he could really draw. He’d made a living sketching portraits of kids his first couple of years, and he spent the last couple using a spoon, tape player, and guitar string to tattoo them. With the usual bravado of someone with the world clasped by the balls after getting out, he’d sauntered into the just-above-water studio Mike had been running as a solo act, and he’d been tossed out almost immediately. Two weeks later, and after a bit of neighborhood fact-checking, he’d come back with a sketchbook and a little humility. Mike had hired him as an apprentice on the spot.
Lamar enjoyed doing realistic tattoos. His favorite stuff was vivid black and gray wildlife scenes, and he also dug on the occasional memorial piece, as long as the baggage was kept to a minimum. His arms were laced with old lock-up work, but after a year of working with Mike he had his friend and teacher ink the words “Never Again” on both forearms. Lamar’s back was covered in Mike’s first complete backpiece, a scene depicting two samurai returning from battle with one carrying the other.
Lamar had never had a white friend and Mike had never had a black one, but the two were well past seeing color as a barrier. For them it was the art—everything was art—and finding someone with the same respect for it had been more a shock of cold water than a breath of fresh air. That love of creation made skin color immaterial, and both men learned quite a bit in those first few weeks, both about themselves and about the inherent racism they’d been raised in. Just as Lamar had to deal with the usual bullshit that accompanies an apprenticeship, Mike was called every manner of white slur that existed, most of which he’d never heard before. It was less than a month into the apprenticeship, long before Lamar had held a real tattoo machine and months before Mike would allow him to, that they settled in.
Lamar had missed Mike’s divorce but had been there for his boss when Mike’s girlfriend, Sid, shot herself. If they hadn’t been friends before that, they were inseparable afterwards.
“Hey, Mike.”
“Hey, Wes, why don’t you have a seat.”
Wes sat in the tattoo chair; Mike could smell no booze and was happy for that small blessing.
Nervous about a tattoo for the first time in years, he thought about what Lamar had said and poured an ounce of warehouse black into a two-ounce bottle.
“You nervous?” he asked Wes.
“A little. Like I said, I never planned on getting a tattoo.”
“Do you have those ashes?”
“Yeah, here.”
Mike poured a small amount of the grayish powder into the bottle and shook it twice before squirting a bit of the jet liquid into a tiny plastic cup. He picked up a disposable razor from his cart.
“Right arm?”
“Yeah, where a T-shirt will cover it.”
Mike wet Wes’s arm with a spray of green soap, and then he scraped the hair and dead skin from it. He took the piece of carbon paper with his simple sketch of a baseball and pushed it onto Wes’s arm to let it sit for a moment before peeling it off.
“Mirror’s by the door.”
Wes stood to look, and then he turned to Mike.
“It looks fine.”
“Well then have a seat, and let’s get to it.”
Wes sat, and Mike turned his power supply on and tamped the foot pedal that controlled the motion of the needle twice before dipping it into the ink. He smiled at Wes, spread the skin taut on his arm, and began.
Wes was quiet for the perimeter of the baseball, but when Mike began to make the little lines of stitching, he said, “You know, when my wife passed, it was hard. But we knew she was sick for about six months before the cancer really spread. The doctors were all amazed at how quickly it got bad for her, and I thought so too, but after Josh my opinion changed.
“He was gone so quick. With Jen, we were together for months. We had a chance to say our goodbyes. She even made videos for Josh to watch at different points of his life—you know, first school dance, before he got married, things like that.
“He got to watch one.
“I had time with her. I didn’t know it at the time, and I certainly wouldn’t have wished the pain she had on Josh, but I wish I could have told him one more time how much I loved him, and how much his mom loved him. I guess my only hope would be that he can be with her in some way or another.
“The first cop I talked to at the hospital, after Josh was pronounced dead, they were trying to figure out what to do with the girl, and he kept talking about the kind of coincidental luck it took for my car to be hit in that exact way. Just about anywhere else on the vehicle my son would have been fine, but instead we were hit in just the right spot, he said. He kept on, and the whole time he’s talking all I could think was how if it was anything it was
bad
luck—we weren’t hit in just the
right
spot, we were hit in just the
wrong
spot. I didn’t say it, but I thought it, you know? I wish I would’ve said it. He was just so numb to my situation, perfectly happy to talk about the dumb luck that needed to happen to kill my boy.”
“That’s awful.”
“It was. It is. Every day I think about them, and every day those wounds are as raw as the day before.”
“Do you think this will help?”
“I don’t know. You know, I heard something about doing this with ashes, about how it can be therapeutic. And I just figured I had nothing to lose by trying. I’m just going to end up dying alone and miserable if I can’t move on a little bit. I don’t need to get married again or have more children to be happy; I just need to accept that some bad things happened and that I can move past them. I need to learn to be thankful for the time I had and not be so angry about the time I lost.”
“We’re done.”
Wes stood and turned to the mirror.
“It looks good, but I think my son would think I’d gone crazy.”
“Nah, kids think tattoos are cool.”
Wes smiled.
“Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome.”
Mike peeled off his gloves and stood to shake Wes’s hand, but was instead grabbed in an embrace.
