By Brian Fink
Winter 2011 Kaplan Award Winner
My mother swears that had she not smelled the smoke, I would’ve burned everything. I was still an infant and doing my business as usual, screaming and spitting and blowing my undeveloped brain out through my nose, in protest against nap-time. She routinely ignored me. Feeling betrayed, I clenched the wooden bars of the crib and shook and rumbled the damn thing until it crashed against the electric heater on the wall. At some point, neglected, I abandoned my tantrum and turned my attention to the books around me. I was still prelinguistic, just starting to babble, so words meant nothing to me. Something about having them around was calming, though. Laying out the stiff cover on my blankie, I was mesmerized by the pictures and pages before me. When my mother whooped and rushed in to rescue her baby from the burning crib, she found him fast asleep with his arms wrapped around a cardboard book.
Tattoos seem to cover his entire body, so I ask him how many he has.
“It would probably be better gauged by hours of tattooing done.”
Jacob Bevan has hair, I realize just then, trimmed and slick, looking like the black front lawn of Lucifer.
“I would guess that would be 60-plus hours.”
He loves this bar because the owners are up-front about their intention in opening it: keep the drinks cheap and the lights low.
“Everyone looks good in the dark.”
He throws back the whiskey as the light catches the corgi on his right hand. Before he gave him up to move to Brooklyn, he had called him Pid, short for Piddle, the nickname of Ein, the docked version of his real name, Einstein.
The Indian woman farther up never knew him. She appeared in New York. How unsettling it must be to share the intimate space of a stranger, surrounded by other strangers, without ever being able to escape them, no matter how beautiful or abominable they may be.
I have no tattoos. I can’t commit to one. No, that’s not it—I can’t decide on one long enough to want to commit to one. My interests are always changing. I have wanted to be a business owner, a doctor, a lawyer, an archeologist, an author, a teacher, a poet, a botanist, a park ranger, an astronaut, and nothing at all. Then I went into middle school, discovered philosophy, and forgot that I was ever supposed to be anything in the first place. I’ve wanted one, though. OK, on second thought, I thought I’ve wanted one. Do I still want one? I used to want one—was it definite? I don’t remember. Got it: I cannot place in permanence that which I know is temporary. That’s a meaningless fight.
How is it that Jacob can have so many tattoos and want so many more? When I asked him whether he had a favorite tattoo, he told me, “That’s a hard question to answer. It’s like picking your favorite child. Typically, my newest tattoo is my favorite. Until I get another.”
When I look at his arms and his neck, all slathered in permanent ink, I see chaos. Nothing is really distinguishable from across the table, not until he shows me one: a woman’s head on his left hand, above which is written heartless.
“Not that women are bad,” he says, “but to keep your guard up.”
Without going into specifics, he mentions an alcoholic mother and crazy ex-girlfriends.
We break and go outside for a cigarette. It’s dark. Two women in tight elastic skirts saunter toward us, enjoying the bubbly night around them. Upon seeing Jacob, one of them stops and squints. She eyes him for a few seconds.
“You’re not who I thought you were,” she declares and walks into the bar with her friend.
Before they vanish, he turns to me and says, “That about sums up all my relationships with women.”
Up on his wrist sits an anchor with pops written in it.
“The meaning there, simple as it may be, is that my father has a been a grounding person in my life.”
As he explains some of the stories behind his tattoos, I begin to notice that the chaos is turning into identity, and that it’s not really chaos at all.
Just an apple and a sewing needle taken to a flame were all it took to get the first holes in my ears. Over the next few months, those holes expanded. I pierced my labrum too, that skin between the bottom lip and the chin. I was fine with piercings because they could always be removed. There was something less stigmatizing about them.
What fulfills Jacob about tattooing is the feeling of completing something he’s started.
“It’s an addiction with controlling and changing you’re body to what you want and love.”
What I want and love. That’s a tough thing to figure out sometimes. Say I want everything, how do I tattoo that? Say I want that which is impossible or doesn’t exist, how do I tattoo that? Say I want nothing, how do I tattoo that? Everything I want is always changing.
My ears are naked now, my labrum scratchy and plain.
I am addicted to books. I can’t seem to help it. Alcohol, nicotine, coffee—I’ve done the three big ones and I just can’t be consistent. But, who-wee, how I love them books.
In my tiny studio apartment, I have three bookshelves. The small one with three shelves is for poetry and hardcovers with interesting spines. The one that looks like it’s made of pine is strictly for fiction, alphabetized by author’s surname, each arranged by year published. The final and classiest looking one, five shelves tall like the previous one, stores all my non-fiction, books about politics, history, philosophy, language, media, anthropology, and gardening. I arrange these using the Library of Congress cataloguing system. And, of course, usually engaged in at least six or seven books at once, there are several laying around—I see a García Márquez without a dust-jacket on top of Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey, and beside those a Thomas Jefferson biography and collection of poems by Wislawa Szymborksa. Grabbing the laptop, a small book of fiction is revealed, recommended to me by a friend.
And, just think, I buy new ones all the time, even when I know I can’t afford them.
Offering you a glimpse of my own habitual indulgence, I feel a bit like the anonymous Reader of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, in which the narrator makes assumptions about him based on observation of his books.
Numerous volumes are scattered, some left open, others with makeshift bookmarks or corners of the pages folded down. Obviously you have the habit of reading several books at the same time…It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels. Is this enough to say you would like to live several lives simultaneously? Or that you actually do live them? That you separate your life with one person or in one environment from your life with others, elsewhere? That in every experience you take for granted a dissatisfaction that can be redeemed only in the sum of all dissatisfaction?
Isn’t OK to just simply love reading?
This bar is familiar. I have been here before. Not inside, I mean, but outside, what with its resemblance to a cave, a bar’s way of saying to the unhip: keep out.
It’s in Capitol Hill. Meticulously dressed scenesters appear perfunctory outside, flicking American Spirit ash onto the sidewalk smoothed by millions of flat-soled steps. The ones with their cuffs rolled up to their elbows expose sleeves of black and green and blue and spirally, indecipherable wonders; those in V-necks show off their chest pieces, their never-English phrases, protection against the familiar. How symmetrically they’re spaced from one another, I notice as I walk around them, breathing in their smoke. I will never be like you. It’s not who I am.
“At times I would like to remove tattoos so I can put different ones in there, but that would defeat the whole purpose of getting tattooed to me.”
That whole purpose has changed over the years. When he started this habit of tattooing, Jacob was sixteen.
“I really can’t remember any more justification than thinking they were cool.”
A friend’s older brother, just released from jail, inscribed some kanji onto his lower back.
“I had a plan to do lettering up my back and decided that the word ‘balance’ would be a great base. The tattoo stinking hurt. I was happy with it when I first got it. I went through a period of hating it and not showing it to people. I mean the tattoo says ‘balance’ and is unbalanced on my body. But, over time, I’ve realized that it was a part of my laugh, and I think it’s completely hilarious. I love it now.”
Jacob doesn’t examine his tattoos until now.
“They all mean something to me in different ways, but the meaning lies in the memories of the time in my life when I got it. All my tattoos remind me of different journeys, stages, and trials of my life.”
He sees his body as an unfinished canvas. Each tattoo is a piece of art that both stands on its own and represents just one brushstroke of the painting. I see what he’s saying, but I think instantly of a continuously written story. Humbug, as my mind drifts toward books.
It’s easy for me to summarize his experience before I even know him. He must be troubled or have something he’s trying to hide. His in-your-face outward artistic expression must symbolize some inner battle and prevent the outside from penetrating that. Here’s a guy who must be taking all that torture of the soul and what not and cramming it into squiggly marks and colorful shades as some form of control. Remember what he was saying about balance.
He’s just a tattoo junky, is all.
Sure, I could be Calvino’s judgmental narrator, but I’m no better. I can look at my books and muster up ideas that were floating in my head when I got them, people who had told me about them, where I was living and what I was doing, how sad or curious I was feeling. All those Latin books—when I dropped out of community college and was feeling this lacuna in my appetite for education, trying to find an escape from the weed smoke all around me, wanting to connect to literature in a meaningful and spiritual way. These books are my tattoos. Yes, they will gather dust, paper will tear, covers will bend, and eventually they’ll disintegrate, but they’re permanent to me. Tattoos die with the body, and books die with the reader.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give them up. Jacob, on the other hand, he’s going to run out of room. He’s already refused to tattoo on his face and scrotum. When he’s old and saggy, he’ll have to confront these decisions of his.
“I would hate to think that I would regret what I have done. I too will age. I feel my tattoos and I will age together. In the end, I would assume I would look back and remember the times, places and feelings my tattoos bring. And probably be thankful that I got them.”
Memories, I am thinking, looking at his tattoos interlaced and weaving through other tattoos, are not replaced by new memories, but enriched with new experience.
“A constant reminder of my life.”