As are tattoos. Almost always gotten on impulse, tattoos are vividly, chillingly permanent. The shopworn ‘Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure’ would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos. For a while, the new resident Tiny Ewell got first keenly interested and then weirdly obsessed with people’s tattoos, and he started going around to all the residents and outside people who hung around Ennet House to help keep straight, asking to check out their tattoos and wanting to hear about the circumstances surrounding each tattoo. These little spasms of obsession — like first with the exact definition of alcoholic, and then with Morris H.’s special tollhouse cookies until the pancreatitis-flare, then with the exact kinds of corners everybody made their bed up with — these were part of the way Tiny E. temporarily lost his mind when his enslaving Substance was taken away. The tattoo thing started out with Tiny’s white-collar amazement at just how many of the folks around Ennet House seemed to have tattoos. And the tattoos seemed like potent symbols of not only whatever they were pictures of but also of the chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.
Because the whole thing about tattoos is that they’re permanent, of course, irrevocable once gotten — which of course the irrevocability of a tattoo is what jacks up the adrenaline of the intoxicated decision to sit down in the chair and actually get it (the tattoo) — but the chilling thing about the intoxication is that it seems to make you consider only the adrenaline of the moment itself, not (in any depth) the irrevocability that produces the adrenaline. It’s like the intoxication keeps your tattoo-type-class person from being able to project his imagination past the adrenaline of the impulse and even consider the permanent consequences that are producing the buzz of excitement.
Tiny Ewell’ll put this same abstract but not very profound idea in a whole number of varied ways, over and over, obsessively almost, and still fail to get any of the tattooed residents interested, although Bruce Green will listen politely, and the clinically depressed Kate Gompert usually won’t have the juice to get up and walk away when Tiny starts in, which makes Ewell seek her out vis-à-vis tattoos, though she hasn’t got a tattoo.
But they don’t have any problem with showing Tiny their tatts, the residents with tatts don’t, unless they’re female and the thing is in some sort of area where there’s a Boundary Issue.
As Tiny Ewell comes to see it, people with tattoos fall under two broad headings. First there are the younger scrofulous boneheaded black-T-shirt-and-spiked-bracelet types who do not have the sense to regret the impulsive permanency of their tatts, and will show them off to you with the same fake-quiet pride with which someone more of Ewell’s own social stratum would show off their collection of Dynastic crockery or fine Sauvignon. Then there are the more numerous (and older) second types, who’ll show you their tattoos with the sort of stoic regret (albeit tinged with a bit of self-conscious pride about the stoicism) that a Purple-Hearted veteran displays toward his old wounds’ scars. Resident Wade McDade has complex nests of blue and red serpents running down the insides of both his arms, and is required to wear long:sleeved shirts every day to his menial job at Store 24, even though the store’s heat always loses its mind in the early A.M. and it’s always wicked motherfucking hot in there, because the store’s Pakistani manager believes his customers will not wish to purchase Marlboro Lights and Mass. Gig-abucks lottery tickets from someone with vascular-colored snakes writhing all over his arms.[72] McDade also has a flaming skull on his left shoul-derblade. Doony Glynn has the faint remains of a black dotted line tattooed all the way around his neck at about Adam’s-apple height, with instruction-manual-like directions for the removal of his head and maintenance of the disengaged head tattooed on his scalp, from the days of his Skinhead youth, which now the tattooed directions take patience and a comb and three of April Cortelyu’s barrettes for Tiny even to see.
Actually, a couple weeks into the obsession Ewell broadens his dermo-taxonomy to include a third category, Bikers, of whom there are presently none in Ennet House but plenty around the area’s AA meetings, in beards and leather vests and apparently having to meet some kind of weight-requirement of at least 200 kilos. Bikers is the metro Boston street term for them, though they seem to refer to themselves usually as Scooter-Puppies, a term which (Ewell finds out the hard way) non-Bikers are not invited to use. These guys are veritable one-man tattoo festivals, but when they show them to you they’re disconcerting because they’ll bare their tatts with the complete absence of affect of somebody just showing you like a limb or a thumb, not quite sure why you want to see or even what it is you’re looking at.
A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody’s general descriptions, a Biker.
W/r/t the Stoic-Regret group within Ennet House, it emerges that the male tattoos with women’s names on them tend, in their irrevocability, to be especially disastrous and regretful, given the extremely provisional nature of most addicts’ relationships. Bruce Green will have MILDRED BONK on his jilted right triceps forever. Likewise the DORIS in red-dripping Gothic script just below the left breast of Emil Minty, who yes apparently did love once. Minty also has a palsied and amateur swastika with the caption FUCK NIGERS on a left biceps he is heartily encouraged to keep covered, as a resident. Chandler Foss has an undulating banner with a redly inscribed MARY on one forearm, said banner now mangled and necrotic because Foss, dumped and badly coked out one night, tried to nullify the romantic connotations of the tatt by inscribing BLESSED VIRGIN above the MARY with a razor blade and a red Bic, with predictably ghastly results. Real tattoo artists (Ewell gets this on authority after a White Flag Group meeting from a Biker whose triceps’ tattoo of a huge disembodied female breast being painfully squeezed by a disembodied hand which is itself tattooed with a disembodied breast and hand communicates real tattoo-credibility, as far as Tiny’s concerned) real tatt-artists are always highly trained professionals.
What’s sad about the gorgeous violet arrow-pierced heart with PAMELA incised in a circle around it on Randy Lenz’s right hip is that Lenz has no memory either of the tattoo-impulse and — procedure or of anybody named Pamela. Charlotte Treat has a small green dragon on her calf and another tattoo on a breast she’s set a Boundary about letting Tiny see. Hester Thrale has an amazingly detailed blue and green tattoo of the planet Earth on her stomach, its poles abutting pubis and breasts, an equatorial view of which cost Tiny Ewell two weeks of doing Hester’s weekly Chore. Overall searing-regret honors probably go to Jennifer Belbin, who has four uncoverable black teardrops descending from the corner of one eye, from one night of mescaline and adrenalized grief, so that from more than two meters away she always looks like she has flies on her, Randy Lenz points out. The new black girl Didi N. has on the plane of her upper abdomen a tattered screaming skull (off the same stencil as McDade’s, but w/o the flames) that’s creepy because it’s just a tattered white outline: Black people’s tattoos are rare, and for reasons Ewell regards as fairly obvious they tend to be just white outlines.
Ennet House alumnus and volunteer counselor Calvin Thrust is quietly rumored to have on the shaft of his formerly professional porn-cartridge-performer’s Unit a tattoo that displays the magiscule initials CT when the Unit is flaccid and the full name CALVIN THRUST when hyperemic. Tiny Ewell has soberly elected to let this go unsubstantiated. Alumna and v.c. Danielle Steenbok once got the bright idea of having eyeliner-colored tattoos put around both eyes so she’d never again have to apply eyeliner, not banking on the inevitable fade that over time’s turned the tattoos a kind of nauseous dark-green she now has to constantly apply eyeliner to cover up. Current female live-in Staffer Johnette Foltz has undergone two of the six painful procedures required to have the snarling orange-and-blue tiger removed from her left forearm and so now has a snarling tiger minus a head and one front leg, with the ablated parts looking like someone determined has been at her forearm with steel wool. Ewell decides this is what gives profundity to the tattoo-impulse’s profound irrevocability: Having a tatt removed means just exchanging one kind of disfigurement for another. There are Tingly and Diehl’s identical palmate-cannabis-leaf-on-inner-wrist tattoos, though Tingly and Diehl are from opposite shores and never crossed paths before entering the House.