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| ISBN-13: | 9781569764916 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2004 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 266 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Snake Hips
Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love
By Anne Thomas Soffee
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2002 Anne Thomas SoffeeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56976-491-6
CHAPTER 1
It's Gonna Be a Generation Xmas ... or Not
Farewell to the Tiki Lounge
"Is this yours?" a foot-high plastic statuette of the X-Men's Wolverine is held up for me to peruse. I nod mutely and it is carried out to the truck.
"How about these?" Melissa motions toward a set of Godzilla figurines marching across the top of the bookcase. Mothra, Gidjrah, Megalon, the Atomic Monster. I paid for all of them but I don't want to take them with me because they remind me too much of Chris, with his full-sleeve tattoo of Godzilla serving the severed head of Felix the Cat to a bound and gagged Bettie Page. I shake my head. She starts throwing Bettie Page magnets into a box, and I want to protest but I just don't have the energy to explain. I let her pack the magnets even though I never want to see them again. Damn Bettie Page. Damn Bettie and Felix and Ganesh and Elvis and every other super-hip icon in this stupid house. Oooooh, we're just so cool, with our tattoo parlor and our black Volkswagen and our painfully ironic decor. We were the coolest things in Winston-Salem for six glorious months — and that and eighty bucks bought me a U-Haul ride back to Richmond to live with my parents, broke, brokenhearted, and too cool for words.
* * *
Two years ago, I moved in with Chris, when he was a short-order cook and I was a high school teacher at a psychiatric hospital. We met at the modern-day version of the soda shop — an AA meeting. His story was edgy and dramatic — art school at sixteen, time on the road with the rock band GWAR, a year in New York as an animator for a hip gross-out cartoon, a hitchhiking trip down south that left him in a ditch, OD'd in a hospital gown. It was such a good story that I never questioned the inconsistencies and contradictions that popped up each time he retold it. Besides, my own story was less interesting. My stint as a small-time heavy metal flack in hairband-era L.A. had left me with a propensity for other people's prescriptions and a drinking program that edged my freelance journalism work right off my schedule. I came skulking back to Richmond by way of rehab, bloated and broke, looking like a miniature Ozzy Osbourne and doomed to a future of glamorous Friday nights in church basements, making coffee and cleaning ashtrays after the Serenity Prayer.
By the time Chris showed up on my recovery radar, things were looking up. I had gone back to school and gotten my master's degree, lost the beer weight, and found that I had a gift for teaching hard-knock kids. In my English class, I had junior felons reading Shakespeare and runaway girls writing their anger out in epic poems. I might have lost my chance at heavy metal glory, but life was OK. And when I met Chris, it looked like it was getting even better.
Six months ago I had quit my job and moved with him to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, so that he could apprentice as a tattoo artist at the Ink Well. It had seemed like the perfect answer to the eternal artist's dilemma — how to make a living at your art. We thought that the apprenticeship would be our first step on the road to financial independence, artistic freedom, and, eventually, happily ever after. Two weeks ago, casually and coolly, with the Royal Crown Revue's "Hey, Pachuco" playing in the background, he told me to go home. So, for the past two weeks, home has been my childhood room at my parents' house, where I huddled, tearstained and crushed, awaiting my thirtieth birthday ... alone.
I never saw it coming, though by all accounts I should have. Business was great. After tattooing for only six months, Chris was already working by appointment only. Every multi-pierced hipster in town wanted custom work from the hot new artist. Everybody at the coffee shop, the small-town raves, and the Greensboro nightclubs knew who he was, and he ate it up. He started getting into the role. He cut his curly, shoulder-length hair into a slicked-down Caesar, bleached it out, and grew a goatee. He started smoking high-priced imported cigarettes ("They're part of my image"), wearing bowling shirts, and listening to Sinatra. Our living room was always full of twentysomething guys with shaved heads and their barely legal stripper girlfriends, playing Nintendo and eating our food. It was hard not to notice that, in my own house, I no longer fit in. More and more often, I was inventing reasons to retire to the spare room when company showed up — e-mails to return, auctions to monitor, any excuse not to sit on the floor watching my boyfriend bond with kids barely older than my former students over Tomb Raider and Korn. I had become the Cynthia Lennon of the Winston-Salem tattoo scene, a bespectacled, frumpy reminder of life before cool.
I tried, however weakly, to get with the program. I traded my passé round schoolteacher frames for saucy black cat's-eye specs. I thrift-shopped on weekends for just the right touches for our happy hipster home — a fleet of vintage chrome toasters, a Formica dinette, a curvaceous doublewide 1950s stove (though I drew the line at letting him paint flames on the sides). I even helped out at the tattoo parlor as much as I could, making runs to Bojangles' and Burger King for the artists, picking up Vaseline and gloves when supplies were low, and handing out tiny tubes of Bacitracin and care sheets to the satisfied customers. I cannot pretend that I enjoyed my job all of the time. More than once, while waiting in the Taco Bell drive-through lane for half an hour or more — only a few hours south of Richmond, the pace of everything in Winston-Salem is decidedly more Suhth'n — I caught myself thinking, So this is why I got a master's degree? So that I can pick up tostadas for a former biker who, even as we speak, is sketching a Taz on some trailer bride's ass?
Not that I didn't like Bishop, the owner of the shop and Chris's boss. In fact, one of the few things I enjoyed about spending twelve hours a day there was bantering with Bishop, who possessed that dry, languid wit that seems to come so naturally to beefy tough guys. Still, it was not lost on me that, in the hierarchy of the Ink Well, I was dead last on the roster, well below Bishop and Chris, not to mention Bishop's wife, Renée, a sulky former stripper with a tongue full of metal and a midriff-baring wardrobe left over from her pole-dancing days.
Renée was the shop piercer, a position that, unnervingly enough, can be filled by anyone who chooses to pick up a needle. The APA (American Piercing Association) offers weekend seminars in safety and procedure, but attendance at a seminar is above and beyond shop requirements and strictly up to the discretion of the piercer — if she has any. Due to certain nuances of credit and taxation, Renée was also listed as sole owner of the Ink Well, a detail that rarely escaped mention during her daily knock-down-drag-outs with Bishop in the back room.
From the start, my presence at the Ink Well had been somewhat uneasy. More than once I had been taken aside and reminded that it was not in the best interests of the shop for me to recommend that someone "go home and think it over." My inability to come up with a decent poker face had not gone unnoticed or uncommented on by Bishop and Renée. When a customer asked for a particularly ill-advised piece of work — a new girlfriend's name, the logo of a band destined for near-immediate "where are they now" status, or a flaming marijuana leaf on the side of his neck, my rolling eyes and pursed lips inevitably made public my opinion and won me no points in the parlor. The tattoo business was about closing the sale fast, before the customer had a chance to think twice, and talking the customer up if possible — never down.
Chris's smooth patter and nice-boy good looks led more than one hapless female to leave the shop with more than she bargained for. One moony-eyed eighteen-year-old Chiclet, still schoolgirl homely in a retainer and halter top, was so taken with Chris and the attention he was lavishing on her that she allowed herself to be talked up from a dimesized yin-yang symbol on the back of her shoulder to a five-inch-high full-color Virgin of Guadalupe between her smallish breasts. No ordinary Mother of God, this proud Mary had the ears and whiskers of a tabby cat under her halo, and floating above her clasped hands was a steaming cup of joe.
While Chris was tattooing, if there were no sales to be rung, fast food to fetch, or supplies to be purchased, I would spend my time lounging on the rented purple leather couch in the lobby, reading back issues of Skin & Ink and Easyriders. Having exhausted the thrift shopping possibilities, the one coffee shop, and the utter and complete banality of the Hanes Mall, I was finding Winston-Salem to be sadly lacking in entertainment value. It is a city that runs on NASCAR, Goody Powder, and the smoke of numerous huge factories — Sara Lee, R. J. Reynolds, Hanes — and a far cry from any place I had lived before. In fact, I was finding about as much satisfaction in the city as I was in our new circle of "friends."
Chris's hangers-on from the tattoo parlor were, for the most part, young, white, and blandly trendy. Decked out in whatever was considered "alternative" that week, the pink-haired girls and baggy-jeaned boys showed up at our door at all hours, wanting to bask in the glow of the Ink God. Chris never hesitated to humor them, occasionally throwing "ink parties" in our living room where all of the local tattooists would, just for fun, treat each other to new tattoos on whatever blank patch of skin they could locate. "Just surprise me" was a common request while rolling up a pants leg or doffing a shirt. In between rounds of PlayStation and Mountain Dew, they would add freehand, stream-of-consciousness sketches to their friends' already overcrowded extremities. A coffee cup. An evil insect. A bulldog in a top hat and tails juggling three bones. The challenge was to come up with the most ludicrous visual possible ... and stick your friend with it for life.
I have one tattoo. It is a vestigial reminder of my heavy metal days, a faded tribute to the two years I spent in L.A., lurking backstage at Danzig shows and knocking back Jagermeister at the Frolic Room with would-be guitar gods. The tattoo is a crappy red-and-black tribal-style scorpion, its tail curling around my left nipple, the red claws now faded almost pink. In truth, it looks more like an anemic crawfish than anything else. It was a first-date present from a pretty-boy rehab biker whose Harley I hopped on the back of on Hollywood Boulevard. It was one of those decisions that would have been instantly regrettable if not for the anecdotal value. Of course, the story always carried that unspoken caveat: Now, though, I am old enough to know better.
When I fell in love with Chris, I never thought that being old enough to know better would become my fatal flaw. "You're not any fun anymore," he told me the night we broke up. These words stand out as the basic foundation beneath the litany of my sins he recited as he gave me my leave. Tattoo magazines and PlayStation cartridges littered the living room floor. A black-light poster of the Devil in a paisley smoking jacket loomed overhead. This was what our life together had become. This was the fun that I was not. I looked numbly at the flaming checkers etched on the side of his neck, "King Me" inscribed underneath them on a curling scroll, and wondered how I came to get my heart broken by a man who could pass a double-A battery through his earlobe. Somehow the universe must have made a bad mistake. This, obviously, was never supposed to happen.
A year ago, we had been blissful in our tiny warehouse apartment in downtown Richmond, an achingly cute geek couple who spent quiet evenings listening to jazz, reading Bukowski, and drinking coffee. Our matching overalls and glasses led the Panda Garden deliveryman to mistake us for siblings. On my birthday, Chris had presented me with hand-drawn tributes, self-portraits of him serenading me with birthday songs of love, accompanied by good old Felix the Cat.
The main thing that had attracted me when I met him was his seriousness. He seemed unimpressed with the riot-grrrl waitresses who flirted with him as they poured his coffee at the diner. There was something unpretentious about him. I felt that I was finally reaping the rewards that AA's dusty Big Book promises those who trudge the path of happy destiny with nary a drop of assistance from John Barleycorn. This was the happily ever after that everyone was talking about. I didn't feel like I was asking for too much — I didn't need a doctor or lawyer for a beau, and I had no desire for a sprawling McMansion in the suburbs. NPR on the radio and a good cup of Colombian Supremo together in our tiny apartment were my personal gold ring.
When Chris proposed the idea of learning how to tattoo, it seemed the perfect solution to the problem he wrestled with daily — how to make a decent living without selling out. Tattooing, while not the most highbrow of the visual arts, paid well and would allow him to set his own hours and promote his own original work, both on the flesh and on the flash — the sheets of preprinted designs that are displayed on the walls of tattoo parlors. Sure, there would be the salad days, the humble beginnings where most of his time would be spent inking in another artist's flash, or the usual public domain designs — hearts, roses, and the omnipresent cover-any-ex-girlfriend's-name cure-all, the black panther. But I had faith in his talent, and I knew that if we could stick it out for the first few months, the investment would pay off.
The first shop to offer Chris an apprenticeship was in Greensboro, North Carolina. A block up from the site of the Woolworth's Civil Rights Movement sit-in, Forever Yours Tattoo occupied a run-down storefront in a run-down block of downtown Greensboro. Tic Toc, the shop's proprietor, was a beady-eyed pit bull of a kid, probably not much older than twenty. Decked out in Fubu baggy jeans and a Chicago Bulls cap, he looked like a redneck caricature of an L.A. street tough. Tic Toc kept a six-pack and a loaded nine-millimeter under the counter and laid down the rules as he shaded a grinning skull on a Marine's bicep.
"You run errands, clean the shop, make needles. If you do OK, in about a month you can start on grapefruits, then chickens, then your own legs. When 'em's full, we'll see if we can use you."
Chris joined Tic Toc's cousin Dave on the bottom rung of the Forever Yours crew. Dave was apparently so dim he couldn't even be trusted to make needles, so his duties were mostly janitorial. He seemed thrilled just to be allowed to hang around the shop, fetching beers and stacking magazines. Dave was covered with samples of Tic Toc's dubious artistry, including a full-back illustration of an ample blonde in a string bikini seated atop a lifeguard's chair. Behind a pair of mirrored aviator shades, the blonde's face was a grinning skull, which seemed to be something of a leitmotif at Forever Yours. Then, as if any further embellishment was needed, above the blonde, across Dave's scrawny shoulders in two-inch-high block letters, was the subtle legend "LIFEGUAD OF DEATH."
"I already know he forgot the r," Dave warned us, almost apologetically, as he raised his shirt to show us his prize. "Cain't exactly erase it, though."
Through all of this, Forever Yours' other artist, Bishop, sat stoically by, shaking his head and painstakingly lining up needles in groups to be welded together. Six-foot-four, bald, and perpetually shirtless, Bishop communicated in drawled asides and raised eyebrows. One night, when I had run out of magazines to pretend to read, I worked up the courage to ask to examine his tattoos. Checking out each other's art was a new etiquette ritual that I had picked up from watching Chris as he met and schmoozed with other artists. As far as I could tell, it was sort of a cross between the way Japanese businessmen bow to each other and the way dogs sniff each other's butts. Bishop patiently slid his stool back from the counter and lifted a beefy arm, turning it first one way and then the other.
"They ain't all that," he drawled as he displayed one grinning skull after another, interspersed with the odd evil clown and one particularly fetching chromed motorcycle engine. "They're mostly old, left over from when I was a Harley-ridin' redneck." He rubbed his fingers fondly over the lines of the engine. "Thet's as opposed to a regular redneck, like I am now." Bishop had been tattooing for almost ten years, supporting a wife and two kids working at various East Coast parlors for kids who were still doing time in detention hall when he started inking. He was mainly a flash artist and had no pretensions about joining the big leagues — for Bishop, tattooing was a technical skill, not a means of expression. He recognized Chris's potential right away.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Snake Hips by Anne Thomas Soffee. Copyright © 2002 Anne Thomas Soffee. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,INTRODUCTION Behind the Veil Cairo Comes to the Holiday Inn,
1 It's Gonna Be a Generation Xmas ... or Not Farewell to the Tiki Lounge,
2 Blood Is Thicker than Sand Crawling Across the Desert in Search of Nejla Ates,
3 "Your Daddy Ought to Smack Your Face" Nice Girls Don't Undulate,
4 "Sheeeeeeeeva!" Sequins and Sheet Cake at the Lakeside Moose Lodge,
5 Peeking Under the Tent Big Day on the Midway,
6 Putting It On and Taking It Off Or How My Belly Ended Up in the Mall's Lost and Found,
7 Dancing Sheik to Sheik Dating Adventures in Arabia, Part One,
8 Moose Lodge Redux The Desert Jewels,
9 They Don't Serve Hummus in the Faculty Lounge Dating Adventures in Arabia, Part Two,
10 Tassel Twirling 101 and Loving the Beast Debkeing Around the Clock in Norfolk,
11 This Is Planet Earth Pink Floyd and Potato Skins in the Strip Mall,
12 From Oil Sheiks to Jesus Freaks Dating Adventures in Arabia, Part Three,
13 Have Zils, Will Travel Riding on the Marrakesh Express with Anthea,
14 Belly Dancer Like Me Making Nejla Proud,
Epilogue My Ya'ha Just Gets Sit-tier With a Few Snakes and Guns to Balance Out the Schmaltz,
Other Hip Shimmy Stuff,
Belly Dancers,
Musicians,
Reads,
Links,
Baba Gha-Who? — The Words You Didn't Know,