For keeps

Here is something a lot of people don’t know about me. In fact, except for my wife, I really don’t think anyone knows this about me at all. I love tattoos. I even remember when the fascination started. I was a kid, very young, and was washing my hands at a restroom sink when an older man started washing his hands in the basin next to mine. Wriggling from his working muscles was a tattoo of an anchor with rope wrapped around it and an eagle perched on the crossbar. Stenciled above the eagle was UNITED STATES NAVY and below the anchor PACIFIC. He was a WWII veteran. Even as young as I was, I understood that. And I was drawn to that tattoo. It was faded to green and almost transparent, rough-looking, and I remember thinking it must have really meant something to him. From that moment on, I wanted a tattoo.

Much to my mother’s displeasure, I sought after rub-on tattoos at every fair, festival, or vending machine I went to or could find. My mother thought they made me look dirty, which was exactly the cool look I was going for (at least we understood each other). But the darned things faded so fast, and a tattoo hardly looked butch when it peeled away from your skin. Rub-ons just didn’t cut it.

Needless to say, about five minutes after I turned 18, I was in the chair of a tattoo parlor in Chicago under the gun of a guy named Spider (not kidding, his name was Spider). Spider had some type of skin-colored growth the size of a nickel on his neck that he had tattooed into an eyeball. Crafty. For the three hours I was in that chair that eye stared at me, affirming my decision. Spider, an eyeball tattoo, a guy in the chair next to me, smoking while getting a dragon inked around his leg from ankle to thigh. It was everything I dreamt of and more. Before we started, I asked Spider what a tattoo felt like. Without answering, he took his gun and zapped me with it and said, “Like that.” Terrific! Let’s do it.

My tattoo is on my upper right arm (just under the shoulder) and is of three Japanese letters, and I have no idea what it says.

Shortly before I got my tattoo, I was ruminating over what I should get. I’m partial to tattoos of words over pictures (given my interests, go figure, right), so I knew I wanted to start there, only I couldn’t think of the appropriate message to permanently display on my body. I was going to have this my whole life. I couldn’t screw it up. And given my mom’s opinion on the matter, “Love Mom” was out of the question.

One afternoon a girl I was dating at the time came over to my house immediately after school and gave me something she made me in art class. It was three Japanese letters painted on a little plaque. She told me it meant happiness. I loved it and thought it would make a perfect tattoo. Only I didn’t know much about the Japanese language and apparently neither did my then-girlfriend, because I learned later that in most of those Asian languages, one symbol equals one word. On her plaque there were three. And later I discovered the real Japanese symbol for happiness is two symbols (幸福). And neither one of them is on my arm today.

A few weeks after I got my tattoo, my family took a vacation to Disney World. Hot weather, lots of swimming, I was eager to show off my tattoo to all who cared to notice it. While standing in line for a ride, a group of Japanese tourists came up next to me and, after a little while, noticed my tattoo. They nodded at it, whispered among themselves, and chuckled. Just great.

For all I know, my tattoo says “I’m an idiot” or “kick me.” But I still like it and have changed its meaning to mean something to me personally. Go ahead, call it rationalizing, but when you have something permanent on your body that you put there and have no idea what it says, you can only fall back on rationalizing.

I still love tattoos and had I had money in my twenties, I think I may be a walking book, words tattooed all over my body like actor Guy Pearce in Memento, who tattooed notes all over his body due to his character’s short-term memory loss.

Now that I’m in my thirties, my position on getting tattoos is somewhat different. I’m a little more restrained. Or so I thought.

At Easter breakfast, my sister-in-law proudly announced that her daughter (my niece) “is now officially a tattoo artist.” Apparently, my niece did her first two tattoos the day before Easter. I didn’t know this about my niece, and I don’t think my family did either, because our reaction was kind of similar to the reaction Molly Ringwald got in 1988’s For Keeps, when her character at the dinner table said, “I’m pregnant. Can you pass the turnips?” We were shocked, is all, and once that passed and everyone was saying congratulations, I was quietly thinking, family discount.

Chris La Pelusa
Managing Editor

---

---