The Fold-O-Rama Wars at the Blue Moon Roach Hotel and Other Colorful Tales of Transformation and Tattoos
her stool to completely face me, her knees almost touching my jeans-covered hip. Brushing her pale, stubby fingers (her nails were short, with no white tips remaining) through her hair, she said softly, urgently, “Does it give you strength? So no one thinks you’re an easy mark anymore, in the ER? Or anywhere? Do people...fear it?”
I ground my butt into a mash of filter before replying carefully, mindful of her abrupt intensity, “The little kids who come in are fascinated by it. Some guys have asked me where I had it done. Only complaint I ever got was from an old woman—and she had a head and feet on her fox stole, so I didn’t take her too seriously—”
The girl smiled, slightly, perfunctorily, before going on, “Yeah...I suppose a flower wouldn’t do that to people.... But they must think you’re strong, right, to go through with it?”
“Well...yes, the children I see sometimes ask if it hurts, but that’s about it. I guess that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
The girl nodded vigorously, her right hand wrapped around the weeping glass of cola. Suddenly the gritty sidewalks and the panhandlers in the subway didn’t look so bad, nor did the air seem too coarse. Sliding some bills across the bar, toward the distant bartender, I shifted in my seat saying, “It’s been nice, Miss, but I have to be—”
“I’m sorry, y’know?” the girl said quickly, before turning to stare at the sputtering sign, where the “B” was on the verge of winking out.
My head wasn’t swimming then; it pounded in time with the blood-roar in my ears.
I’m sorry, y’know?
With her face turned to the bar, and her eyes focused away from me, I finally recognized the girl. From the ER. Clothing made a big difference; when someone is nude, your eyes instinctively go to the parts you can’t see otherwise, the parts you shouldn’t really stare at, but do anyhow. And being a doctor, I was supposed to look there. Her face wasn’t a primary concern, until her teeth were sunk in my skin.
Were still sunk in my skin.
“I don’t know how many of them there were...just a blur of dicks and faces, crowding in on me...looking. That was the worst, y’know? Their bodies wouldn’t remember me, but their eyes would. I was so...exposed. Like I was transparent, and they could see all of me. What I was, inside. What made me me. Nothing hidden, nothing I could hold dear to me, nothing I could choose to reveal anymore. Everything was naked about me. And for a long, long time there weren’t enough clothes in the world I could wear. All at once. It was like the clothes weren’t enough to cover me, make me not naked anymore.” She made the word “naked” sound hideous, filthy.
“You went to get help,” I asked rhetorically, my voice not rising at all at the end of my sentence, and I was mildly surprised when she nodded, took a gulp of cola, and replied, “Oh yes, I did get help...it took a long time, but...I think it’s okay now. At least...I...at least—” She chewed flaky skin off her bottom lip, then went on quickly, her voice a gentle, yet triumphant whisper, “—at least I don’t have to worry about being naked again. That’s why I asked you, but maybe it isn’t the same for you—”
“What ‘isn’t the same’?” I fumbled another cigarette out of my pack, and patted my chest, feeling for my lighter, all the while not taking my eyes off the girl, as she casually, innocently loosened her raincoat, undoing the belt just enough to let the top gape. With her dark sweater coming down to her wrists and up to her neck, the gesture was somehow unsexual, unprovocative. I smelled a strong tang of sweat, and in the dim glow of the globe candles near her elbow, I finally saw—
That she was naked...naked, but covered. Completely.
The tattoo ran from just below the hollow of her throat down to her raincoat-belted waist, then down, down, into a mass of darkness, until her indigo blue legs met with her crumpled cotton socks. The pattern of the tattoo was dense, fabric-complete; and when I leaned a couple of inches closer, I saw why her “sweater” bore a pattern of brown dots. Two of the dots were her nipples. And when she pushed up her plastic sleeves, I realized that she’d removed the hair from her forearms, had most likely removed the hair elsewhere on her body—permanently, no doubt. There were even pocket lines and seams on her lower limbs. I could just make them out under the green folds of her raincoat. One look, even two, and you’d see clothes, clothes so sexless you wouldn’t bother to look a third time.
And she acted as if she were covered with them, layer on top of layer, never to be naked again. And she wouldn’t be, never, never again. Not if she took care of them, kept them from the sun.
I hadn’t had my scar removed because I couldn’t get rid of the memory of it, the ugly sights and sounds of that evening in the ER. I’d covered it, made it something pretty, something whimsical for a doctor, something to charm frightened young patients. But I still had the scar. I wasn’t strong enough to make it go away.
But she’d made herself strong...made herself clothed, forever. Never to be truly naked again—it was a heady thought, a powerful concept.
Does it give you strength? So no one thinks you’re an easy mark anymore.... Do people...fear it?
I wanted to tell her that it was a toss-up: yes for the strength, but no for the fear—unless a person was easily frightened by an ultimate show of discipline, of wanting to be whole again in such a desperate way, such a beautiful way. Never again would a bruise ruin her, show her to be weak. Never again would she be quite so exposed.
I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, comment on how strong she must have been, to endure her nakedness for one last time, while the person who did her tattoo worked...and worked on her (it took a “long time,” she’d said—but how long, how very long?). But she got up before I could speak, placed some money on the bar, and was gone, out the door and onto the dark, sour-smelling streets.
As I was watching her, the lights went dim, dimmer, then remained brownish-yellow. Through the distant window, I saw the whole city darken, guttering like a dying candle. But I didn’t watch where she went. She was clothed, and she was strong. I went back to my beer.
It was that kind of night, y’know?
AFTERWORD TO “TATTOO”
Of all the works in this collection, this is the one readers might be most familiar with, since it’s appeared in two anthologies (Sinister: An Anthology of Rituals, Horror’s Head Press, 1993, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, 1994), as well as in a very-limited collection of my own work published in 2007 (2008 by the time the book was actually printed, but the copyright date says 2007) which is by now out-of-print and—since I was thoroughly displeased with both the collection and certain things and people connected with it—unlikely to see publication again, so I’m not bothering to even name it here. Originally, the story was titled “Strength,” and under that title it was almost published by two different magazines, one a tattoo-oriented publication, and the other, a now defunct magazine run by two of the most unprofessional and reprehensible individuals who ever ran a self-owned publishing house...the story was dumped (along with many other contracted works) after I dared to complain about the editor’s writer/editor wife writing a review of my first novel The Amulet which not only contained many falsehoods and instances of misinformation, but several outright lies (including the assertion that she had never spoken to me, when I had the phone bill which listed a call I’d made to her a couple of years before which ran for over half an hour; and some statements about me and my book which were totally 180º out from what I’d both told and written to her about said novel)—rather than admit that Mrs. Perfect had written something in error, he negated all the contracts and wrote a vicious letter saying I was the one who’d somehow “slandered” his wife by even claiming she had done something wrong. Their little publishing empire in the Pacific Northwest is now long-gone, and after a brief burst of literary acclaim (but some negative reviews along the way), both of them have been more or less off the radar for a while. I’ve spoken to and written to several other writers who were similarly burned by these two; one person said she thought their publishing house resembled a cult with two leaders. Others also had their work dumped after long periods of holding