Tattoo Eeewwwww!

Arturo Aguirre is talking about a former friend, a guy who has fallen from his good graces:

“He’ll stand right there and spit on the sidewalk! Right in front of old ladies! Man, that could be my mother, you know? The guy has no respect for anyone.”

Outrage over hawking loogies from a man whose physical appearance might be enough to send many an old lady into cardiac arrest.

Aguirre looks like a cross between a pro wrestler, an outlaw biker and the Wolfman. His shaved head is studded with multiple piercings of the most severe sort. His face is framed by a satanic-looking beard that hangs halfway down his chest. Porcelain fangs have been implanted over his incisors. His hugely muscled, intimidatingly bejeweled body is covered with tattoos and more piercings, not to mention brandings and scarification.

Yet this is a man who can be so polite, so thoughtful that a gal could bring him home to meet mom, and mom would be thrilled.

If mom were blind.

“We all are guilty to one degree or another of labeling or categorizing a person from his or her general appearance,” says Aguirre, who, at 38, certainly is in a position to know. “A lot of times, people come across me and have a reaction like, ‘Wow, this guy’s a freak,’ or, ‘He’s dangerous,’ or, ‘He’s been locked up.’ They don’t know what to think. But if people are open enough to give me the opportunity, I’m the first one to shake a hand, I’m the first one to give respect, I’m the first one to give them a smile.

“Then that throws them for a loop.”

It works the other way, too: “I love it when I talk to people on the phone and later they meet me in person and I see their expression.”

We’ve all seen the Arturo Aguirres of the world walking down the street. Who is this guy? Why does he look like that? What does he do for a living? Maybe we’d better cross over to the sidewalk over there. . . .

There was a time when crossing the street might not have been a bad idea. Aguirre has a violent past. Diagnosed with cancer at an early age, he threw himself into living life “to the fullest,” as he puts it. He would follow his impulses wherever they would lead him, and they weren’t all nice and friendly places. Even after he kicked the cancer, his nasty habits didn’t subside.

These days, though, he is anything but a thug, anything but a bully. On the contrary, he has been the first person to come to the aid of someone assaulted in a bar or harassed on the street. And as part-owner of Superfly West Tattoos in downtown San Diego, he says he is doing quite well financially.

A “piercing artist” for 13 years, he declines to disclose his income but estimates he has punched holes in thousands of people. At Superfly, where pierces range from $25 to $60 apiece (including the jewelry), he averages 20 clients a day.

“There’s really no average customer,” he says. “I pierce people from 18-year-olds to clients in their 70s--who got genital piercings. They were looking for that extra little spark or jolt in their sex life.” (Aguirre is adamant in his refusal to work on anyone 17 and under, even though piercing minors is legal with parental consent.)

Every month at a local nightclub, Aguirre and a group of associates supplement their income with “The Freak Show,” a sort of piercing performance-art extravaganza where they play tug of war and suspend one another through fresh-hooked piercings; do fire dances; and (yeow!) even suture their lips and eyelids closed, live onstage (they unsuture them later). The next show is Wednesday night.

Aguirre explains that the shows are based on Indian rites of passage and that the feats are accomplished through yoga, meditation, special breathing techniques and “learning to program your mind to transcend the physical self.”

He views “body modification” as an art, a mode of expression--physical, spiritual or whatever.

“It’s all about a love of life,” he says, “a primal urge I strongly have. People who used to look like me a long time ago were one-percenters, ex-cons, outlaw biker types. It’s not like that anymore. It has to do with what’s inside you, what your heart is about. Our exterior is just a form of expression of our individuality.”

And though he allows that he’s “always been one to go against the current,” he also notes that tattoos and pierces have become so commonplace in the ‘90s that much of their shock value has worn off.

But what of the gawkers? What of the double takes?

“Everybody wants to stop you, talk to you, touch you, ask about you,” he acknowledges with a chuckle. “I have no problems talking to people about it--explaining who I am and what I’m about--as long as I feel the energy from that person is really curious and that he or she wants to know why, not to judge or point fingers or ridicule.”

No, it hasn’t all been friendly curiosity. Yes, some people have reacted with unvarnished hostility. But through the years, he says, he has learned to deal with it.

“Like, some guy walked by the shop the other day and turned around and looked at me and said, ‘You look like [excrement].’ And I looked at him and thought, ‘Why am I gonna bother with him?’ So I said, ‘Hey, you know what? Thanks. Have a nice day.’

“What more could he say after that? I didn’t feed his anger, I didn’t feed his insecurities. He might have had a little liquid courage in him and he wanted to test the waters. That’s what happens a lot of times in bars. Many times I’ve left my beer at a bar and walked out because I don’t want an altercation over some fool.”

Illness Clarified a Lot of His Ideas About Living

He hasn’t always been so willing to turn the other modified cheek.

The son of Arturo “Dinamita” Aguirre, featherweight champion of Mexico from 1959 to ‘61, he had come by his fighting instincts naturally and over the years had been an amateur boxer. But any notions of following his father into a professional career were curtailed when, at 17, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a form of lymphatic cancer.

He was given fewer than six months to live.

“I wound up beating it.” Two years of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment left him cancer free. But the experience “brought out a lot of anger, a lot of religious questions.”

“I was violent before I had cancer, but the cancer made me more violent. I was brought up Catholic and told that the Lord is loving. . . . Then I get hit with this thing. And I’m growing up in a neighborhood with drug dealers and prostitutes and junkies. Why me instead of some drug dealer or prostitute? It made me question my faith and everything I was brought up to believe in Catholic school.”

It was around that time that he got his first tattoo (a skull and crossbones on his right biceps) and piercings (his nipples). He also founded the (since-disbanded) San Diego Skinheads.

“This was traditional skinheads,” he says. “A punk thing. It wasn’t like you have skinheads now, Second Coming of Hatred and all that racist [stuff].” Still, Aguirre’s group developed a reputation for its skirmishes with other skinhead organizations and attained local-legendary status one night when it fought with, knocked out and urinated on members of a touring punk rock band. Aguirre says the musicians had hurled ethnic slurs from the stage at him and other Latino skinheads.

“You get that rage,” he recalls, “and the endorphins get going.”

He adds: “I don’t regret anything I did in those days, but I’ve mellowed out. I’ve changed. I guess it just comes with experience, maturity--and the realization that we’re in a different day and age now. Now, some guy will stick a piece in your face over some stupid look. In the old days, it was mano a mano. You got a problem? Step outside, and we’ll take care of it hand to hand.”

He says he heard the leader of that old punk band on the radio recently.

“One of the questions they asked him was, ‘What’s the most horrifying experience you ever had?’ And he said, live on the radio, ‘It was in San Diego. The San Diego Skinheads beat the holy [stuffing] out of me because I was running my mouth. . . .’

“See? He’s grown up, too.”

The next “Freak Show” is Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. at Rich’s, 1051 University Ave., San Diego. Admission: $6. (619) 218-2852.