The Tattoo (second edit, comments welcome)

“I’m surrounded by white bigots. How can you trust them?” I say to Garth. 

“I have something to tell you,” Garth says.

I look up at him and wait. I have a feeling he’s going to tell me something, a new perspective maybe or his take on racial relations. “You’re white.”

“Am not!” I say, laughing. “Wait.” I call out to a builder chick at the other end of Strictly’s parking lot. “He says I’m white! What you think?”

“You? Na!” she shouts back.

“See? Maybe you better have your one seeing eye checked.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” he says and I put my arm around his waist. My hand goes as far as his back pocket which I look my thumb in. I tell him about Abie saying “so you hooked a jungle monkey at the gym” and to make sure Garth uses protection. “He says if I get AIDS he’s never going to let me see the girls again. And he says he’s not a racist, it’s a cultural thing.” 

 “Your husband is an asshole,” he says in a smooth voice.

“He’s not my husband, well, he is, but not in here,” I say touching my heart, “besides he’s lived in Europe for five years. How can a man live in all of Europe? What does he do, drive from country to country, town to town? Yeah, you know that’s what he does, he stays until he gets kicked out.”

Garth says maybe Abie’s like one of those guys who’s tired of being rich and decides to give poverty of try. But I’m stuck on Abie’s AID’s threat. When I turned forty, I got hooked on the idea of getting a tattoo. I’d prance around Gold’s checking out tattoos on forearms, biceps, triceps’ heads—triceps are that big, taking up more space on an arm than biceps, those peaks of speckled grey rock submerged in a country lake. The slippery formation sloping all the way down to lake’s bottom is the tricep. I’d strut right up, each time using the same phrases rehearsed with random stops and starts for the sake of spontaneity and freshness. The guys liked talking about themselves and they were really soft-spoken. Of course you had to know never to interrupt a set or a superset or when a builder was psyching himself up or just after a set when he was either proud or pissed off. But when he was just sitting it out, waiting two or three minutes between heavy sets, not into the third minute of course, and you slid a comment into the second minute just quick and easy-going, like “Hey man, cool tattoo. Where’d you get it?” And he’d say, “Oh you mean this?” and then you’d get a feel whether you could lift some info or not. 

Mostly I looked in the yellow pages or drove around the east end. I’d make appointments in the filthiest dives and never show up. Until I saw a place on the Danforth that had “Artistic Tattoos” burnt into a wooden plaque above a weathered black door.  Beyond the door, a room lay breathlessly waiting, a replica of my parents’ den or of any good Jewish communist’s living room with its Scandinavian modern arm chairs and teak coffee table. Even the standing lamp fit in. Against the longer west wall, a book shelf, also teak with height-adjustable shelves, boasted such prizes as Bresson’s black and white photography and a pink soft-cover copy of Toffler’s “Future Shock” that Abie had only skimmed through but kept on his night table for show, and I never read although I’d heard an in-depth review on Peter Gzowski’s morning show. The book of Van Gogh’s prints and pot lights clinched the deal. 

Four months later I was training at Golds in Ajax with Bill the young kid who used to work behind the desk at Fitness Connection on Esna Park Drive. Seventeen gyms and eight coaches—their sequence constantly shifting, I keep better track of the men I’ve fucked, not that they were more important. At Fitness Connection on Don Mills, I’d hold a straight bar on my shoulders as I did two circuits of walking squats on the green rubber running track surrounding the weight machines. One early afternoon, possibly spring or fall and certainly not summer or winter (because the gym wasn’t hot like Ron’s Gym where you had the vapors in the summer and chills in winter), a round-faced man rested between leg press sets while three women in halter tops and matching spandex tights and a man in a shiny turquoise gym suit looked on. 

“He sure as fuck looks pleased with himself and only four plates a side,” I said. 

“That’s because he’s Ben Johnston.”

“I’m going over.”

“You can’t just go over to Ben Johnston.”

“Watch me,” I said as I walking lunged my way along the track until I was directly behind the leg press.

“Hey man, how many sets you got left?” I said. 

“Three or four, won’t be long,” the guy in the shiny suit said. 

Bill’s hand’s was going wild with his palm facing me and his fingers motioning me over, curling in and out like he had a bad case of the shakes.    

“You crazy, you know that? That’s Charlie Francis.”

“Look if I could invite the Hell’s Angels over for supper, I could tell Ben Johnston to get off the leg press.” 

“You’ll tell me about the Hell’s Angels another time.”

“It’s all going in my book, you and your peroxide hair and Ben Johnston with his juiced-up pie-face, it’s all going in.”

Also the tattoo of a scorpion Bill got on his right ass-cheek. How we walked along the Danforth, fresh snow thick as sponge cake on the sidewalk. We were an Ed Sullivan scene, the one where James Brown falls to the floor and Ed walks to centre stage, lifts him up, then picks up the gold cape and places it around James’s shoulders—of course I was James without the cape and Ed was Bill although I never had the hots for Ed like I had for Bill. 

Behind the receptionist’s counter in the lounge, two swinging restaurant doors led into the tattoo parlour with its chrome and leather dentist’s chair and metal roll-away table displaying vials of paints and what looked like an electric carpenter’s drill. I kept my clothes on. 

“I’d like something creative,” I told the tattoo artist whose public school art teacher’s mentality was probably the art equivalent of “now finish everything on your plate.” “I’d like something with a whip and cufflinks, I mean handcuffs, yeah, that’s it, but not too obvious, you know. And I want it here,” I said, lifting my hair and touching a spot below my neck and just above the first bump of my spine. “I have to hide it from my husband.”

“You wear your hair down?”

“Always, even when I train.”

“Might be painful, above the spine,” the tattoo man said.

“I’m a builder,” I said.

The tattoo is a flower, no colour, just ink, with a whip winding through the stem and a pair of handcuffs like two kiss-curls at the bottom. I never thought much of it. But the process, man, oh the process. 

Abie is the one who gets us going on excursions. In this scene, Abie, Josie, Caroline and I stand poised at the top of a forest trail with its overlay with sienna wood chips, and to complete the scene, two atmospheric details referring to the sweeping wind and brooding medieval sky. There’s a storm brewing. Like a stormy sea laying claim to a small boat docked recklessly on the sand, the north wind winds through my hair. My arms stretch out take-me-I’m yours to the elements.  At this moment we stand linked and free. 

And then Josie says, “What’s that on your neck, Mom?”

And I say, “Nothing sweetie, it’s nothing.” I take her hand.

The wind is not on my side.

“A tattoo! It’s a tattoo!”

“Nah, it’s a rub-on, like the ones we buy at Shopper’s.”

“Let’s see that.” Abie pours some water from his old camp water thermos on his fingers.

On the way home, I sit in the back between the girls. “I’m sorry, Mom,” Josie whispers.

“That’s OK, sweetie. It’s all OK.” I say, sighing and staring up, blinking then skimming round and round the shiny silver rim of the ceiling light.  

“Girls,” I say. “How about you go to the park for a swing and a few times down the slide, so your dad and I can talk?”

Abie walks into the kitchen and sits with his back to the sliding balcony door and the forest behind. I sit across the table facing him and the tree tops beyond the balcony. 

“Are you a fucking idiot?” he says, his voice low and sneering. “What the hell were you thinking!” I’m thinking just for a moment, when I’m about to answer, that he might be a friend. So I tell him about the year before and watching the parade of tattoos. I don’t tell him about Bill and his scorpion. I feel like an interpreter—my life is a foreign language. So I modulate my tone, I polish it until it sparkles while I translate feelings into solid sentences.

He stands and leans across the table toward me. He smiles. Then he slaps me across the face.

My body standing is one taut line. My head almost touches the ceiling. My throat, long like a Modigliani, its corridor contracting, too narrow for words trapped without air, jostling each other at its base. Single file, single file, I say, and with my will, I pull each word up and out in the open air. Even though they stand naked and shivering, I announce each one. “You . . . Have . . . Lost . . . Me.”

He walks around the table, his arms puffed out. 

“You are a joke,” he says and walks out the kitchen into the foyer, its parquet floor lying broken under the forest green wall-hanging from our first apartment, and up the brown wall-to-wall carpets with their clumps of white Pyrenees fur in the corners of each stair. He stands at the top of these stairs, poses with his left hand on the banister and delivers his closing edict.

“You will give me the name and address of your HIV parlour. I will report them and have their joint raided. And you. You will get yourself tested tomorrow and two times after that at six month intervals. And, are you listening, Janice?”

 I’m remembering a song Pete Seeger sang in English and Russian, was it Russian? Four simple lines by four-year-old boy. Maybe it was in Japanese. Did it have to do with Hiroshima? May there always be sunshine; may there always be blue skies; may there always be my Mama; may there always be me. It was Russian. Yes it was. 

Now he’s saying if I have AIDS, and the girls, he’s going to take the girls, because I’m crazy and oh yes he has the documents to prove it, signatures aren’t hard to get; he’ll take them away and have me committed. He’ll have me locked up and he’ll take my girls. Away. If I have AIDS, he says. 

I take care of the girls. I sing to them and make the streets talk the way I always do. I dash off silly jokes every morning and put them in their orange tiger lunch boxes. When I can’t think of any more jokes, I walk over to Shoppers and buy a Reader’s Digest Book of Jokes, Laugh Harder, Live Longer with the Funniest Jokes Ever. I cry a lot. Walking on empty through the house, after I drop the girls off to school, at the Supermarket shopping for smooth-skinned navel oranges, I break down, my knees give way, strange sounds that scare and thrill me—deep full-bodied howls, low rhythmic moans. After the second test, I say I'm not taking another. And during all that time I let him fuck me. I thought shooting up his load would make him nicer. Also I noticed he never wore a safe.