Adventures in Regret IV

For a while, the corporate attorney and new Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery Home resident Tiny Ewell got first keenly interested and then weirdly obsessed with people’s tattoos, and he started going around to all the residents and the outside people who hung around Ennet House to help keep straight, asking to check out their tattoos and wanting to hear about the circumstances surrounding each tattoo. These little spasms of obsession-- like first with the exact definition of alcoholic and then with Morris H.’s special tollhouse cookies (until the pancreatitis flare), then with the exact kinds of corners everybody made their bed up with--these were part of the way Tiny E. temporarily lost his mind when his enslaving Substance was taken away. The tattoo thing started out with Ewell’s white-collar amazement at how many of the folks around Ennet House seemed to have tattoos. And the tattoos seemed like potent symbols of not only whatever they were pictures of but also of the chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.

Because the whole thing about tattoos is that they’re permanent, of course, irrevocable once gotten--which of course the irrevocability of a tattoo is what jacks up the adrenaline of the intoxicated decision to sit down in the chair and actually get it (the tattoo)--but the chilling thing about the intoxication is that it seems to make you consider only the adrenaline of the moment itself, not the irrevocability that produces the adrenaline. It’s like the intoxication keeps your tattoo-type person from being able to project his imagination past the adrenaline of the impulse and even consider the permanent consequences that are producing the buzz of excitement.

Tiny’ll put this same abstract but not very profound idea in a whole number of varied ways, over and over, obsessively almost, and still fail to get any of the tattooed residents interested, although Bruce Green will at least listen politely, and the clinically depressed Kate Gompert usually won’t have the juice to get up and walk away when Tiny starts in, which makes the little attorney seek her out vis a vis tattoos, though she hasn’t got a tattoo.

But they don’t have any problem with showing Tiny their tatts, the Ennet House people with tattoos don’t, unless they’re female and the thing is in some sort of area where there’s a Boundary Issue.

As Tiny Ewell comes to see it, people with tattoos fall under two broad headings. First there are the younger scrofulous boneheaded black-T-shirt-and-spiked-bracelet types who do not have the sense to regret the impulsive permanency of their tatts, and will show them off to you with the same fake-quiet pride with which someone more of Ewell’s own social stratum would show off their collection of Dynastic crockery or fine Sauvignon. Then there are the more numerous (and older) second types, who’ll show you their tattoos with the sort of stoic regret (albeit tinged with a bit of self-conscious pride about the stoicism) that a Purple-Hearted veteran displays toward his old wounds’ scars. Ennet House resident Wade McDade has complex nests of blue and red serpents running down the insides of both his arms, and is required to wear long-sleeved shirts every day to his menial job at Store24, even when the store’s heat loses its mind in the early a.m. and it’s wicked hot in there, because the store’s manager believes his customers will not wish to purchase Marlboro Lights and Massachusetts Lottery tickets from someone with vascular-colored snakes writhing all over his arms. McDade also has a flaming skull on his left shoulder blade. Doony Glynn has the faint remains of a black dotted line tattooed all the way around his neck at about Adam’s-apple height-- along w/ instruction-manual-like directions for the removal of his head and maintenance of the disengaged head tattooed on his scalp--from the days of his skinhead youth, which now the tattooed directions take patience and a comb and three of April Cortelyu’s barrettes for Tiny even to see.

Actually, a couple weeks into the obsession Ewell broadens his dermo-taxonomy to include a third category, Bikers, of whom there are presently none in Ennet House but plenty around the area’s AA meetings, in beards and leather vests and apparently having to meet some kind of weight requirement of at least 300 pounds. Bikers is the metro-Boston street term for them, though they seem to refer to themselves usually as Scooter Puppies, a term that (Ewell finds out) non-Bikers are not invited to use. These guys are veritable one-man tattoo festivals, but they’re disconcerting because they’ll bare their tatts for you with the complete absence of affect of someone just showing you like a limb or a thumb, not quite sure why you want to see or even what it is you’re looking at.

A sort of N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody’s general descriptions, a Biker.

Within Ennet House, it emerges that the male tattoos with women’s names on them tend, in their irrevocability, to be especially disastrous and regretful, given the extremely provisional nature of most addicts’ relationships. Bruce Green will have MILDRED BONK on his jilted right triceps forever. Likewise the DORIS in redly dripping Gothic script just below the left breast of orange-haired Emil Minty, who, yes, apparently did love, once. Minty also has a palsied and amateur swastika with the caption KIL NIGERS on a left bicep he is heartily encouraged to keep covered, as a resident. Chandler Foss has an undulating banner with a red-inscribed MARY on one forearm, the banner now mangled and necrotic because Foss, dumped and badly coked-out one night, tried to nullify the romantic connotations of the tatt by inscribing BLESSED VIRGIN above the MARY with a razor blade and a red Bic, with predictably ghastly results. Real tattoo artists are always highly trained professionals--Ewell gets this on authority after a White Flag Group meeting from a Biker whose triceps’ tattoo of a huge disembodied female breast being painfully squeezed by a disembodied hand that is itself tattooed with a disembodied breast and hand communicates real tattoo credibility, as far as Tiny’s concerned.

What’s sad about the gorgeous violet arrow-pierced heart with PAMELA incised in a circle around it on resident Randy Lenz’s right hip is that Lenz has no memory either of the tattoo-impulse and -procedure or of anybody named Pamela.

Charlotte Treat has a small green dragon on her calf and another tattoo on a breast she’s set a Boundary about letting Tiny see. Hester Thrale has an amazingly detailed blue and green tattoo of the planet Earth on her stomach, its poles abutting pubis and breasts, an equatorial view of which cost Tiny Ewell two weeks of doing Hester T.’s weekly chore, but overall searing-regret honors probably go to Jennifer Belbin, who has four uncoverable black teardrops descending from the corner of one eye, from one night of mescaline and adrenalized grief, so that from more than two feet away she always looks like she has flies on her, Randy Lenz points out. The new black girl Didi N. has on the plane of her upper abdomen a tattered screaming skull (apparently off the same stencil as McDade’s, but minus the flames) that’s creepy because it’s just a tattered white outline: Black people’s tattoos are rare, and for reasons Ewell regards as fairly obvious they tend to be just white outlines.

Live-in staffer Johnette Foltz has undergone two of the six painful procedures required to have the snarling orange-and-blue tiger removed from her left forearm and so now has a snarling tiger minus a head and one front leg, with the ablated parts looking like someone determined has been at her forearm with steel wool. Ewell decides that this is what gives profundity to the tattoo-impulse’s profound irrevocability: Having a tatt removed means just exchanging one kind of disfigurement for another.

Nell Gunther refuses to discuss tattoos with Tiny Ewell in any way or form.

Ennet House alumna and counselor Danielle Steenbok once got the bright idea of having eyeliner-colored tattoos put around both eyes so she’d never again have to apply eyeliner, not banking on the inevitable fade that’s turned the tattoos a kind of nauseous green she now has to constantly apply eyeliner to cover up. Jennifer Belbin reports that Allston Group matriarch Martha Goolrick has--from back when Martha G. was a debased young speed freak in the 1960s or maybe ‘70s--the vestiges of what Martha ruefully reports is this thing that looks like an inverted peace sign on her staggeringly wrinkled midriff, except the peace sign is inverted and each of its three spokes obtrudes from the enclosing circle and ends in an arrow, pointing irrevocably if fadedly at both her breasts and her pudenda, which humbling physical datum she shared with Jennifer B. to express with AA’s vaunted empathy her regret over the un-unringable bell of Jennifer B.’s teardrop tatts.

For a while, Tiny Ewell considers live-in staffer Don Gately’s homemade jailhouse tattoos too primitive to even bother asking about. He’d made a true pest of himself, though, Ewell had, when at the height of the obsession this one synthetic-narcs-addicted kid came in who refused to be called anything but his street name, Skull, and lasted only about four days, but who’d been a walking exhibition of high-regret ink--both arms tattooed with spider webs at the elbows, on his fishy-white chest a naked lady with the same kind of overlush measurements Ewell remembered from the pinball machines of his Watertown childhood. On Skull’s back, a 2-foot-long skeleton in a black robe and cowl playing the violin in the wind on a crag with THE DEAD in maroon on a vertical gonfalonish banner unfurling below; on one bicep either an ice pick or a mucronate dagger, and down both forearms a kind of St. Vitus’ dance of leather-winged dragons with the words--on both forearms--HOW DO YOU LIK YOUR BLUE EYED BOY NOW MR DAETH!?, the typos of which, Tiny felt, only served to heighten Skull’s whole general tatt-gestalt’s intended effect, which Tiny presumed was simply to repel.

In fact Tiny E.’s whole displacement of obsession from beds’ hospital corners to tattoos was probably courtesy of this kid Skull. On his second night in the newer male residents’ five-man room the kid had shed his muscle shirt and was showing off his tattoos in a boneheaded and regretless first-category fashion to Ken Erdedy while R. Lenz did headstands against the closet door in his jockstrap and Ewell and Geoffrey Day had their credit cards spread out on Ewell’s drum-tight bunk and were trying to settle a kind of admittedly childish argument about who had the more prestigious cards--Skull flexing his pectorals to make the overdeveloped woman on his chest writhe, reading his forearms to Erdedy, etc.--and Geoffrey Day had looked up from his AmEx (Gold, to Ewell’s Platinum) and shaken his moist pale head at Ewell and asked rhetorically what had ever happened to good old traditional U.S. tattoos like MOM or an anchor, which for some reason touched off a small obsessive explosion in Ewell’s detox-frazzled psyche.

Probably the most poignant items in Ewell’s survey are the much-faded tattoos of old Boston AA guys who’ve been sober in the Fellowship for decades, the crocodilic elder statesmen of the White Flag and Allston Groups and the St. Columbkill Sunday Night Group and Ewell’s chosen Home Group, Wednesday night’s Better Late Than Never Group (Non-Smoking) at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital two blocks down from the House. There is something queerly poignant about a deeply faded tattoo--see, for example, White Flag’s cantankerous old Francis (“Ferocious Francis”) Gehaney’s right forearm’s tatt of a martini glass with a naked lady sitting in the glass with her legs kicking up over the flared rim, with an old-style Rita Hayworth-era bangs-intensive hairstyle. Faded to a kind of underwater blue, its incidental black lines gone sooty green and the red of the lips/nails/ SUBIKBAY’62USN4-07 not lightened to pink but more like decayed to the dustier red of fire through much smoke. All those old sober Boston blue-collar men’s irrevocable tattoos fading almost observably under the low-budget fluorescence of church basements and hospital auditoria--Ewell watched and charted, moved. There are lots of good old USN anchors and several little frozen tableaux of little khaki figures in GI helmets plunging bayonets into the stomachs of hideous urine-yellow bucktoothed Oriental caricatures, and screaming eagles with their claws faded blunt, and SEMPER FI , all autolyzed to the point where the tattoos look like they’re just under the surface of a murky-type pond.

A tall hard silent old black-haired BLTN-Group veteran has the terse and hateful single word DIE in what’s faded to pond-scum green down one liver-spotted forearm; but yet the felllow transcends even stoic regret by dressing and carrying himself as if the word simply weren’t there, or were so irrevocably that there was no point even thinking about it: There’s a deep and tremendously compelling dignity about the old man’s demeanor with regards to the DIE on his arm, and Ewell actually considers approaching this fellow re the issue of sponsorship if and when he feels it’s appropriate to get an AA sponsor, if he decides it’s apposite in his case.

Near the conclusion of the two-month obsession, Tiny Ewell approaches Don Gately on the subject of whether the jailhouse tattoo should comprise like a whole separate phylum of tattoo. Ewell’s view is that jailhouse tattoos aren’t poignant so much as grotesque, that they seem like they weren’t a matter of impulsive decoration or self-presentation so much as simple self-mutilation arising out of boredom and general disregard for one’s own body and the aesthetics of decoration. Don Gately’s developed the habit of staring coolly at Ewell until the alcoholic little lawyer shuts up, partly to disguise the fact that Gately usually can’t follow what Ewell’s saying and is unsure whether this is because he’s not smart or educated enough to understand Ewell or because Ewell is simply out of his mind. Don Gately tells Ewell that your basic-type jailhouse tatt is homemade with sewing needles from the prison canteen and some blue ink from the cartridge of a fountain pen promoted from the breast pocket of an unalert public defender, is why the jailhouse genre is always the same night-sky blue. The needle is dipped in the ink and jabbed as deep into the tattooee as it can be jabbed without making him recoil and mess up your aim. Just a plain ultraminimal blue square like Gately’s got on his right wrist takes half a day and hundreds of individual jabs. How come the lines are never quite straight and the color’s never quite all the way solid is it’s impossible to get all the individualized punctures down to the same uniform deepness in the, like, twitching flesh. This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done on rainy afternoons by sadistic children.

Gately has a blue square on his right wrist and a sloppy cross on the inside of his mammoth left forearm. He’d done the square himself, and a cellmate had done the cross in return for Gately doing a cross on the cellmate. Oral narcotics render the process both less painful and less tedious. The sewing needle is sterilized in grain alcohol, which Gately explains that the alcohol is got by taking mess-hall fruit and mashing it up and adding water and stashing the whole mess in a Ziploc just inside the flush-hole thing of the cell’s toilet, to like foment. The sterilizing stuff that results can be consumed, as well. Bonded liquor and cocaine are the only things hard to get inside of Massachusetts penal institutions, because the expense of them gets everybody all excited and it’s only a matter of time before somebody goes and sings to the screws. The inexpensive oral narcotic Talwin can be traded for cigarettes, however, which can in turn be got at the canteen or won at cribbage and dominoes (prison regs prohibit straight-out cards), or got in mass quantities off smaller inmates in return for protection from the romantic advances of larger inmates. Gately’s arms are the size of Tiny Ewell’s legs. His wrist’s jailhouse square is canted and has sloppy extra blobs at three of the corners. Your average jailhouse tatt can’t be removed even with laser surgery because it’sincised so deep in. Gately is polite about Tiny Ewell’s inquiries but not expansive; i.e., Tiny has to ask very specific questions about whatever he wishes to know and then gets a short specific answer from Gately to just that question. Then Gately stares at him, a habit Ewell tends to complain about at some length up in the five-man room. His interest in tattoos seems to be regarded by Gately not as invasive but as the temporary obsession of a still-quivering alcoholic psyche that in a couple weeks will have forgotten all about tattoos, an attitude Ewell finds condescending in the extremus. Gately’s attitude toward his own primitive tattoos is a second-category attitude, with most of the stoicism and acceptance of his tatt-regret sincere, if only because these irrevocable emblems of jail are minor rung bells compared to some of the really irrevocable impulsive mistakes Gately’s made as a drug addict, not to mention their consequences, which Gately’s trying to accept he’ll be paying off for a real long time.