•••
KATHLEEN GETS DRESSED, grabs the picture of Rodney for the portrait, and heads out. The neighborhood feels particularly congested. It’s a weekday, and people hurry home. She heads down 18th Street to Valencia, turns toward the shop. Valencia has a bike lane flanking the traffic on both sides, which was supposed to ease the friction between the warring factions, but it’s only made things worse: Bikers yell at cars, sometimes kicking bumpers, spitting on windows, while the autos trundle down the road, drivers too dumb or distracted to check blind spots before making turns, opening doors, almost breaking the bikers’ necks with every action. Kathleen has seen fistfights about the rules of the road. All of it makes her happy to be a serial pedestrian. She’s never had a car in San Francisco, and she’s too clumsy to hop on a bicycle.
She walks down Valencia, sees phalanxes of diners starting to line up outside the posh places, sighing and checking the time on their phones every ten seconds; she sees a mother wearing a Baby Björn, her hands massaging the baby’s head; she sees hipsters smoking outside the bars, which makes her miss being young — back then she could have a drink and it was fun, a cocktail or two, nothing that would ruin her life; she sees a cop tucking a ticket under a parked car’s windshield wiper and sees a woman with tarot cards laid out on the sidewalk, sitting Indian-style, her iPhone playing a gypsy jig, a note on a typed piece of paper with an outstanding font saying KNOW YOUR FUTURE.
She sees all this and wonders what happened to the homeless in the Mission, the caravan of stolen shopping carts, the currency of empty bottles and cans, the bodies huddled in doorways after the close of business, the handwritten signs — not typed with pompous fonts — that asked for help, any help, any human grace? They used to be everywhere, and she assumes the police were ordered to kick them out. Obviously, San Francisco is trying to clean up the Mission; they’re doing it to the whole city and she’s heard the project being called “a reboot,” which makes it so much worse, using the parlance of the industry that’s taking over.
She sees the construction cranes downtown, looming across the skyline like huge prehistoric birds. The development is driving out all the character, and sometimes Kathleen imagines these cranes scooping up artists and plopping down tech employees in their place. She knows it’s only a matter of time until she’s ladled up, too, replaced by a twentysomething making six figures for speaking computer code, the only foreign language that matters. What happens, she wonders, to a city — especially one like San Francisco, a place that has always been composed of immigrants and outcasts and transients and artists, a whole surrogate family of people who weren’t wanted other places — what happens when it becomes as homogenous as a suburb?
She doesn’t want to leave this town, even though she doesn’t like what’s happening. But she likes even less the prospect of being forced out. This is her home, and she’ll do all she can to stay.
She enters the tattoo shop, and Deb is there listening to an old Cramps record. She looks up at Kathleen, but doesn’t turn off the tattoo gun, only holds it a couple inches off her client’s skin.
“Permission to come aboard the bridge, captain,” Kathleen calls.
“Permission granted,” says Deb.
Her client is a young white man, one of the enemy. Kathleen’s eyes dart to his laptop bag, his hilarious T-shirt that says CTRL+ALT+DELETE. He’s even wearing those douchey shoes that have individual toes, making his feet look webbed. His oversized, probably cosmetic black eyeglasses are the perfect way to tie all his trying-too-hard together.
“We’ll be done in fifteen minutes,” Deb says to her.
“Pretty sweet, huh?” the man says to Kathleen, nodding at the tattoo on his bicep. “It’s an Irish cross.”
“Celtic,” Deb says.
“Same thing,” he says, wiggling his webbed toes.
“It’s not,” she says. “This is on your body. You’re going to wear it forever; you should know what it means.”
“It means that it looks cool,” he says and alerts Deb that their conversation is over by picking up and fiddling with his phone.
Deb purses her lips and nods at Kathleen. “And how are you?”
“I have incredible news.”
“What?”
“This.”
Kathleen shows the picture of Rodney. “This is how I’m going to contact him.”
“I could get the phone.”
“I’ll mail him a letter once you tattoo this picture on me.”
Deb takes her foot of the tattoo gun’s pedal, shop going silent, the guy still mesmerized by his phone. “The pony express went belly up. It’s a post-mail world.”
“I’ll mail him a letter and a picture of my tattoo.” Kathleen hands Deb the portrait. “Would you put this on my back?”
Deb takes and studies it. “This will make a good tattoo.”
“Let’s do it once you’re done with him.”
“Let’s wait. I never tattoo someone who’s emotional. That’s one of my rules. Like I don’t tattoo drunk guys.”
“Why not?”
“Drunk guys bleed too much.”
“I mean why not me?” Kathleen asks.
“Don’t push me, or when I finally do it I’ll add a Chinese character that means ‘farter.’”
The man looks up from his phone. “Do you really think they have a character for that?”
“People fart all over,” Deb says. “I’m sure there’s a Celtic word for it too. I can add it on your arm if you want.”
The guy smirks sarcastically, goes back to his phone. Deb hands the picture back to Kathleen and fires up the gun again.
“I need your help,” says Kathleen, the photo in her hand uselessly. “I want him to know how much I’ve been thinking of him.”
“What’s wrong with email?” Deb says.
“Why can’t you be more supportive?”
Deb starts laughing, looks at her client. “She says to her AA sponsor.”
The guy flashes that techie smirk again.
“Right now you’re just my friend,” Kathleen says. “Not my sponsor.”
“I’m always your sponsor, sugar. If I wasn’t, I’d be a shitty one.”
Kathleen has a plan to instigate contact with her son again, and it’s a good one. She’d banked on Deb’s eyes and ink and needles, banked on a portrait to show her son, his likeness forever on her flesh. Look, she’ll be able to tell him through the tattoo, I’ve always loved you and I’m sorry and let’s start over.
That’s impossible, she knows. There’s no such thing as starting over. It’s a ruse. Memories are time machines, zooming us through our experiences, and because of this, people are never clean of their yesterdays. There is no transcendence. One minute, we’re forty, then six, and ten, and twenty, and twelve. We remember our shames and humiliations. We remember trauma. Rodney might not recall one thing about Kathleen except that she left. All the good she did throughout the first twelve years of his life might be erased, and if not outright expunged, at least painted over. Covered up. It’s the opposite of Deb tattooing cancer survivors, making the damaged skin into art. Kathleen is a breathing scar, her whole life hardened over by that one mistake.
All of this whizzes through her head as she stands there holding the portrait.
Deb dips the gun into a glass of water, flushing out her needles, then plunges it into an ink cap full of black, goes back to work. “If you mail him a picture of the tattoo, so what?”
“So what?” Kathleen asks.
“Why would that make him feel better?”
“Because it shows I’m thinking about him.”
“The tattoo is for you,” Deb says. “Calling and starting the healing process — that would be for him.”