Sugar

By Bridget Hoida

             When they take your tattoo off they give you yellow plastic goggles and a foam ball, you know, to squeeze in case it hurts too much. And it hurts like a motherfucker. Forget what they say about bee stings and rubber band snaps. This is a fucking laser burning your flesh and it smells about the same, though you can't exactly be sure because you've never smelled burning skin up close before, but from now on one thing's a fact: if ever you smell it again you will know.

             And you will smell it again. In five to six weeks because taking off a tattoo is slow work. It takes ages and aloe-wraps and repeated trips to the clinic—which is located in a strip mall between a Hallmark and a K-Mart—and even with five trips under your blouse it still doesn't really disappear, but rather it fades into a sickly blue tattoo, like the kind guys give themselves in prison, but not as sloppy around the edges. The craftsmanship remains, it’s just that the color goes fainter.

             Janice—she’s the certified dermatological laser consultant, there's a plaque above the door—insists on the foam ball. It doesn’t have cooties, she says pointing to a jar filled with clear liquid and five or six other balls bobbing around inside. We disinfect them after each patient. It's okay, you tell her. I want it to hurt. And then she says something strange, something you didn't expect her to say. She says, Yeah, most usually do.

             The tattoo was a five-year-old dare. You were in bed but not in bed. It had been stated (by him) that there would be three more visits and then he was calling the whole thing off. You itch your ankle and wonder where he came up with such an arbitrary number. Why three and not five, or fifteen or five hundred? you asked. He said, because there are rules.

             You are in bed but not in bed. This is meeting number two of the long goodbye. Tryst number one was a complete failure. You threw bottles of rubbing alcohol and tried to bite off his ear. You’re surprised he came back at all. A deal’s a deal, he said when he knocked on the door. You let him in. He is sitting on the bed trying to smooth out the covers with his long hands. You are under the covers. Completely. You are trying to pretend he is not there but you are equally afraid he might leave. Under the covers that you have pulled tight up over your head you are imagining what he is doing next by the sound of him moving. This has not been a brief affair. You know him surgically well.

             He, as much as you can figure, is taking off his clothes. It is afternoon. Sunday. And you can see shadows through your multi-climate down comforter and you are sure you heard his shoe drop and then the other fall too. He always keeps his socks on. Every day before today you thought keeping his socks on was cute. You like to sleep with your feet bare sticking out from beneath the covers. He likes to be eternally hot. His socks help keep him heated. You say, I’m not coming out unless you take off your socks. He says nothing. You hear very little movement until suddenly two feet are fighting their way under the covers to be with you. You can’t quite imagine how he managed this. He must be on the floor, legs up like the number seven, toes beneath your blanket. You wiggle about under the sheets until you are facing his feet. You let in a little more light and you gasp. On the top of his toes are the most beautiful tattoos you have ever seen. Each one is a teeny, tiny, perfectly drawn bird with full detail. He was hiding an aviary beneath his socks. His big toe is a pelican. You pull it hard until it pops and then you emerge. You have an idea. You say, if you leave me I’ll get a tattoo of your feet on my back and I’ll show it to everyone and everyone will know about the two of us and your wife will leave you and you’ll come back to me.

             He says, if you were to get a tattoo, the one you’re describing, you’d have to go to Long Beach and make an appointment with a man named Tuttle. He’s the only one who will know how. He says all this as though it’s perfectly all right with him. As if he knows you’ll never go through with it. As if he loves you. That is until he says, But good luck. Lyle Tuttle only inks Hell’s Angels and Rock Stars, anymore.

             It’s the anymore that stings. As though there was a time when Lyle Tuttle inked regular people like husbands and infidels and university grad students.

             When you call the shop you don’t fuck around. You put on your best Barbie voice and say, I need to talk to Lyle. The guy on the other end says, Yeah honey, what about? You say, Who the fuck do you think this is? Guy says, just as sec and in a sec Lyle is on the line and in another sec you have an appointment on Tuesday at eight. It’s just that easy.

             Saying goodbye, however, is not. Easy. He arrives earlier and stays longer than usual. You promise yourself that you will not cry or beg and you do not. You have sex. You have sex again. And then you shower. And then he showers. Then you sit on the floor and ask him just what exactly he plans to do when he sees you in the halls. Just exactly the same thing I do now, he says. But it will be different, you say. No, he says, before it was different, after today it will be like getting back to the same of how it was initially. Initially it was awkward and fraught. Maybe he’s forgotten this, or maybe he’s right. It will be getting back to more of the same of how it was in the beginning. And besides, he says, it’s almost Christmas and so there will be a recess. He doesn’t call it a break like everyone else in the academic universe he calls it a recess and pronounces it like it was the beginning of recession. There is a decided lack of joy.

             You know in the recess that you will not get over it, even if there is time. It’s not like he’s walking out your door and out of your life forever. Not that that would be exactly desirable, but it might be better. Better than seeing him at the grocery, a cart full of kiwis and brie. Better than standing two people behind him in the espresso line at the café. Better than those horrible halls. It’s not, you tell him, as if you’re moving to Italy. You will still live just down the hill.

             Lyle Tuttle’s tattoo parlor is in the back of a bike shop in Bellflower. The bikes are all Harleys and shiny with chrome. Tacked up to a grease-stained wall are a grip of hand-drawn girls in bikinis and one-piece suits, stretched up against palm trees or lounging in inner tubes. Some have super-short cut off’s with small dangleys of denim touching their thighs and others have coconuts or half-shirts tied in a knot above their navels. All have high heels and coifed hair and looked as though they were waiting to be slapped against the freshly scrubbed bicep of a seaman from the 1950’s.

             You seek Lyle out in the last days of recess. In New York or New Jersey these days would be called the cold slushy days of January, but in Los Angeles they are just regular days. You have spent the last three weeks drunk and in the beds of various men you have at one time or another been attracted to or repelled by. Basically you are just looking for dick. Any dick. A replacement. You know better, of course, but you like the idea of word getting round that you recessed drunk and fucking. You intentionally fuck as many boys in the department as you are able. You are a mild success and when there are no more boys you stop fucking and stop eating too.

             Your faculty advisor is concerned about your newly acquired habits. I eat coffee you say, with milk. She seems satisfied and it is also mostly true.

             Lyle Tuttle is in the back and when someone hollers that you’re here, he doesn’t keep you waiting. So sugar, what’s it gonna be? he asks, eyeing first your hips and then your breasts. You pull from your purse a children’s book and flip it open to page thirteen where you have marked a single gull with a post it. You hold it out to Lyle but he doesn’t take it. Instead he readjusts the bandana that is holding back his ponytail and he grunts. He has a ridiculous amount of armpit hair, the most you have ever seen, and he smells sticky or like bologna and you like the smell. Sit down he says pointing to a barstool with a swivel seat and no back. You sit down and soon learn Lyle Tuttle doesn’t do custom orders, especially not custom orders taken from a picture book for children. Lyle Tuttle gives you the tattoo he thinks you need and he doesn’t care particularly if you want it on the small of your back or circling your wrist. Lyle Tuttle gives you the tattoo he thinks you need in the place he thinks you need it and when he tells you to take your shirt off, you do. And when he tells you your bra strap is getting in the way, you take off your bra as well.

             Naked, from the waist up, in the back room of a Harley shop, you sit on a stool with a swivel top and watch Lyle carefully add black ink to a steel vile attached to a gun. He turns it on and off twice and he says to you, Ready?

             Lyle Tuttle is positively hulking. Hulking is not a word you have ever used in a full sentence, but it seems to be the only word that will work on Lyle. It’s not that he’s fat, it’s that he’s tall too. He picks up another stool, identical to yours, and sets it down in such a way that when he sits he’s straddling your small body like a hug.

             You have never felt more safe in your life.

             Ready, you say to Lyle who switches the gun to his left hand before switching it on. Lyle has decided you need a moth, no bigger than a nickel, on the left back blade of your shoulder. Le papillon de nuit, you hear him say. The gun is on, in Lyle’s left hand, and it humms. Lyle is not left-handed but this does not concern you. With his right hand Lyle grabs your right shoulder and begins to squeeze while massaging the muscle in a circular motion. With each small circle he inches his index and pointer fingers closer to the line where the sharp curve of your breastbone is lost behind the fatty skin of your boob. With his left hand he inks the moth and with his mouth he makes quiet words into your ear. Can you feel it pushing against your skin, ripping into your flesh. Do you want it deeper. Longer. Harder. Sugar.

             You do not fuck Lyle though you maybe almost want to. You do not fuck Lyle although you know it’s probably part of the gig. Part of your way around not being a Hell’s Angel or a Rock Star. Because you do not fuck him he uses brown institutional paper towels to blot at the blood that has formed in the crevices of the delicately drawn wings on your back. You deserve this. You say, Ouch.

             Lyle says, don’t use Neosporin. Don’t sun. That’ll be $175. You wish you could pull three perfectly rolled hundred dollar bills from someplace magical, like your cunt, but unfortunately you hadn’t the foresight to think of such a thing. You write Lyle a check for $300. The moth’s worth probably four times more.

             It’s January in Los Angeles so you wear a tube-top and walk the halls of your department. In New Jersey in January you would be quite a sensation. In Los Angeles it is 77 degrees and sunny. You are just another girl with a back that burns like a motherfucker and a purse full of pharmaceuticals.

             Things will go on and off for four years until you settle down with a dentist who specializes in crowns. Some moments of particular distinction: driving the shores of Croatia in a rental car with a keg in the back and beating the bloody life out of squid before chopping them into cerviche; an orange moon; a lighthouse; a ponytail; and a scab in the exact shape of a moth that is pealed off your back and fed to the man you avoid in the hall. Not that it makes any difference. He shit it back out again soon enough.

             The dentist assures you that he is above petty representations of ex-boyfriends tattooed in juvenile fits of longing onto your flesh. You correct the dentist. You do not have ex-boyfriends. You have ex-lovers. The dentist isn’t threatened. Ex-lovers don’t bother him, moths do. The dentist claims the problem is aesthetic and has nothing at all to do with the man in the hall. You bought a white strapless dress. Had you chosen a dress with sleeves or at least a dress with a back, the problem would be irrelevant, but you bought the dress you bought and you refuse to take it back. Moths, he tells you, make him physically ill. For his health you agree to have the moth removed.

             The dentist is paying for the removal procedure, which will cost roughly ten times the amount of the original tattoo. Not ten times the amount you paid. Ten times the amount Lyle Tuttle charged you. Somewhere between Malibu and Venice you will have to remember to stop at a public restroom and change the dressing on your shoulder so the blood doesn’t pool up and seep through the gauze, staining your shirt, like last time. Like the time before last time. In addition to the pain and the smell there’s an itch. The itch begins twenty minutes after the laser stops and lasts for 72 hours. In an effort to combat the itch you drive PCH in your Porsche with the top down listing to gangster rap loudly. Slappin’ the bitch and pimpin’ the hoes the itch, especially with new gauze, is uncontrollably persistent and it makes you angry. You scratch around it in a haphazard circle until the skin surrounding your recently burned flesh is blotchy and red.

             Every five weeks for seventy-two hours you remember everything, exactly as it was, and you wonder, driving PCH with a pouch of pelicans in the rearview, if this is the effect the dentist desired.