Chapter 9
DAN
The locker room at Gene’s Gym is a petri dish that smells like Old Spice and mildew.
The mint-green tile looks like it was last cleaned during the Clinton administration.
But I can’t risk running into Carson at her place, not until I figure out what I’m going to say to her after our little conversation. So the filthy gym shower it is.
I’m so pathetic.
As I tiptoe around public shower slime, Archer’s advice keeps ringing in my ears.
I’m telling you to get a friend.
I think I’d rather get a therapist. Although a therapist would probably tell me to stop avoiding my problems, and I can’t do that. Not when it’s been working so well for me all these years.
Fortunately, I have one other way of avoiding Carson.
When everything went to shit back in New York, I cancelled my last appointment with Eamon, my tattoo artist in Brooklyn.
I’d found him online, and we’d bonded over our shared Midwestern upbringing and the fact that we’d both found our place in New York.
Eamon has done several of my tattoos, including the cardinal on a snowy branch on my ribs.
It hurt like a motherfucker, but it’s gorgeous.
I’ve always been a doodler. As a kid, it helped calm my mind.
As an adult, it helps focus it. Whenever I feel like the world is too loud or my mind is too cluttered, I pick up a pen and let the ink flow.
I started drawing in margins of books and around my notes in school.
But in college, Jameson got me a sketchbook for Christmas.
At first I didn’t know what to do with it.
I wasn’t an artist. I was a mathematician.
A fucking business major. I felt like a phony holding the black leather–bound stack of crisp white paper.
But Jameson started shoving it in my bag each morning, and one day, sitting alone in the dining hall, I took it out and flipped it open.
I wasn’t homesick, but I did feel unmoored, and so I took out a pencil and sketched a cornstalk.
Soon I was carrying the sketchbook with me everywhere I went, filling the pages between classes or when I needed study breaks.
I learned that starting my day by drawing was like meditating, and soon I began every day that way.
When I filled the pages of that first sketchbook, I bought another.
And another. And another. Not only did a sketchbook serve as a distraction from my crowded thoughts, it had the added benefit of making me look busy. It kept most people from bothering me.
One day, I brought it with me to a tattoo appointment with Eamon. While he worked on a piece on the back of my shoulder, I hunched over the sketchbook, trying to distract myself from the sting of the needle. Eamon peered over at my doodles and asked if I’d ever considered tattooing.
I hadn’t.
Eamon offered to show me around a tattoo machine, and I took to it quickly.
He let me apprentice under him, and I was shocked to find that all it took to get licensed in New York was a twenty-six-dollar infectious disease prevention class, proof of a hepatitis B shot, and a hundred dollars for a permit.
I’ve been a licensed tattoo artist in the state of New York for the last three years.
Not that I’ve done it very much. I have a real job.
Or I did.
When I told Eamon that I was leaving the city to come back to Indiana, he connected me with Drake Douglas, the owner of Electric Sting, a tattoo shop in Bloomington. Drake had been his mentor back when Eamon was a seventeen-year-old little shit committing petty crimes.
I was glad Drake seemed to have no qualms about dealing with criminals, since the crimes I’d been accused of were far from petty.
He agreed to let me apprentice at Electric Sting, and I’ve been sneaking off to Bloomington to tattoo for months.
As a relative newbie with a limited portfolio, I’ve mostly been relegated to tattooing infinity symbols and angel numbers on sorority girls, but I love it.
I love the focus and concentration it requires, the precision.
I love that whomever I’m tattooing is usually too focused on themself—their decision, their pain—to pay any attention to me.
It keeps me busy and out of the house, a real bonus after I nearly swallowed my foot while talking to Carson.
Electric Sting is located at the edge of downtown in a shabby little strip of commercial buildings.
It looks like your typical tattoo shop: lots of black paint, walls decorated with sheets of colorful flash, and black-and-white checkerboard flooring that looks dingy but is actually clean enough to eat off of.
Drake keeps the shop immaculate and sterile while still maintaining a trademark gutter punk look.
It’s so different from the sleek glass high-rise of my former office, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t prefer it.
If only it paid as well as my old job.
I’d prefer to be here for a different reason, but all in all, I could be doing worse. I remember hearing about a whistleblower who ended up working at a call center in Delaware, fielding fraud reports for a consortium of credit unions after he got blacklisted from every bank in New York.
I think I’d sooner work a drive-through window.
Rosie, our front desk attendant, greets me like usual. And by that, I mean very unusually.
“Hey, Dan. I need to learn how to do a Jacob’s ladder. Interested in being my guinea pig?” she asks as soon as I walk in the door.
I’m used to Rosie’s bluntness. She’s a little twenty-two-year-old pixie with green hair and a face full of metal studs.
She’s training to be a piercer. She’s on the autism spectrum, which seems to make her particularly adept at it; she’s methodical and works cleaner than anyone I’ve ever seen, and her blunt manner of speaking seems to put clients at ease.
Turns out people like knowing exactly what to expect before needles are driven through their faces.
“Someone already beat you to it,” I tell her. An aspiring piercer in Eamon’s shop got to my dick three years ago. I made it to three barbells before I said no more. I like them now, but at the time I was not prepared for the experience of having a needle driven through my cock.
Zero stars. Would not recommend.
Rosie’s eyebrows rise. “Seriously? Tall, dark, and grumpy is packing steel?”
“Rosie, that’s an HR violation,” Drake barks from his office just off the lobby. He leans out the door. “We talked about this.”
“You also told me I need to learn,” Rosie says. “How am I supposed to do that without a volunteer?”
“I’ve got a list of people willing to be guinea pigs in exchange for free body art. I’ll send out an email. You’ll get your chance. Stop harassing the staff,” Drake says.
“Fine.” Rosie turns back to me. “If you ever want to add an apadravya, I need to learn that too.”
“Rose!” Drake barks, but I just laugh. Well, I laugh and wince, because the thought of a needle going through my entire cock, top to bottom, makes my knees feel weak. A Jacob’s ladder is just the skin. The glans? Fuck no.
“It’s okay,” I tell Drake, then turn to Rosie. “But I’ll pass on that.”
“I don’t blame you. Six months out of commission? No thank you,” Drake says.
Rosie’s brow furrows. “The book says eight to twelve months. You risk infection from an incomplete fistula.”
“Some people heal fast,” Drake says, but he’s already bracing himself. Rosie’s best quality as a body mod artist is her adherence to rules, but Drake has been doing this for so long that he tends to operate more on gut instinct.
“Drake, do you know what can happen if you get an infection in your penis? You could lose function, to say nothing of sepsis. You risk death.”
“Losing function is death,” Drake grumbles.
“First of all, you just agreed with me, so thank you. And secondly, that’s incredibly gender essentialist of you.”
Drake sighs. He’s old, but I’ve been surprised by his willingness to learn from his younger staff. He takes getting called out like a champ. “Sorry, kid,” he says.
Rosie shrugs. “Thanks for hearing me,” she says. “Do you want an apadravya?”
“Fuck no,” Drake replies, then rushes back into his office like he’s scared Rosie might succeed at talking him into it. And knowing her, she might.
“You doing walk-ins?” Rosie asks me.
I nod.
“Excellent. You need anything?”
I’m telling you to get a friend.
“Rosie, are we friends?” I ask.
She looks at me for a long time, her brows furrowed.
“Not a trick question,” I assure her. “I just…I think I need to take inventory.”
She nods. “Do you like D&D?”
“I’ve never played, so I don’t know.”
“Hmmm…do you read manga?”
I shake my head.
“Watch horror movies?”
I wince. “I can do slashers, but paranormal shit keeps me up at night.”
“It’s not looking good for our friendship, Dan,” Rosie says apologetically. “But we can be work friends. You can’t be my work husband, because Andrew is already my work husband. But work friends. Work acquaintances at worst.”
“Thanks,” I say with a laugh. “I’ll take work acquaintances. Maybe we can make our way up to work friends.”
“If you let me give you an apadravya, I’ll bump you all the way up to real friend,” she says, eyebrows raised.
“Tempting,” I say, laughing. “But no.”
“Your loss,” she says, going back to the manga open on the counter, and I’m not sure if she means the piercing or the friendship.
I head back to my booth, the one by the bathroom that everyone calls the loser stall, since nobody wants it.
Every time someone flushes, it sounds like a tsunami in the walls, and it takes nerves of steel not to jump—a real problem when you’re wielding a tattoo machine.
I share this space with Natalie, another newbie tattoo artist who only works weekends.
During the week, she tends bar at a fratty shithole where she makes bank.
I drop my gym bag and start by wiping the entire place down with antiseptic spray.
I check the supplies in the drawers and restock what’s low.
I pull out my iPad and send a couple of new sketches to the printer to add to my bulletin board of flash.
I’ve been doodling weeds a lot lately in response to all the florals people request, and I’ve had a few people ask for my dandelion and clover tattoos.
It’s not much, but at least my original art is on someone’s body.
I’ve only gotten to do it a handful of times, but every time feels a little bit sacred, like there are people out there in the world carrying around little parts of me.
While I wait for walk-ins, I turn to my iPad and start some new sketches of weeds.
I begin with an attempt at Japanese knotweed, which has these branching white flowers.
It can grow up through concrete, damaging the foundation of a house.
I’m working on a little vine when Rosie pops her head into my booth.
“Walk-in?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I was actually thinking that you can be my friend. You don’t have to let me give you an apadravya.”
“Oh. Well, thanks,” I say. “What changed your mind?”
She shrugs. “You’re really quiet. I like that.”
I nod, smiling. “Then friends, I guess.”
She nods. “Friends.” Then she disappears.
Take that, Archer.