I knew I wasn’t going to like what was inside his shop.
“I didn’t know you were bringing anybody with you,” Pit commented, and I noticed his tongue sported a pointed silver post. “What’s your name?”
“Chuck.”
“He’s one of my assistants,” I explained. “If you have a place to sit, he’ll wait.” ‘
Taxi was a pit bull, a brown and black square block of muscle on four legs.
“Oh, yeah;’ Pit was pointing out a corner of the room where there was a TV and a sitting area. “We gotta have a place for the customers to wait for their appointments. Chuck, you just help yourself. Let me know if you need change for the Coke machine.”
“Thanks,” he said, subdued.
I didn’t like the way Taxi stared at me. I would never trust a pit bull no matter how gentle its owner said it was. To me, the mixture of bulldog and terrier had created the Frankenstein of breeding, and I had seen my share of tornup people, especially children.
“Okay,. Taxi, tummy rub,” Pit said in a cooing voice.
Taxi rolled over, legs in the air, and her master squatted and began rubbing her stomach.
“You know”-he looked up at Chuck and me-“these dogs aren’t bad unless the owners want ’em to be. They’re just big babies. Aren’t you, Taxi? I named her `Taxi’ because some taxi driver came in here a year back and wanted a tattoo. Said he’d trade me a pit bull puppy for a Grim Reaper with his ex-wife’s name under it. So that’s what I did, didn’t I, girl? Kind of a joke that she’s a Pit and I am, too. We ain’t related.”
Pit’s shop was a world I didn’t know and couldn’t have imagined, and I’d visited some very strange places in my career. Walls were covered with flash, every example edgeto-edge. There were thousands of Indians, winged horses, dragons, fish, frogs and cultist symbols that meant nothing to me. Pit’s Trust No One . and Been There ,Fucked That opinions were everywhere. Plastic skulls grimaced from shelves and tables, and tattoo magazines were placed about for brave hearts to flip through while they waited for the needle.
Oddly, what I would have found so offensive just an hour ago suddenly took on the authority and truth of a creed. People like Pit and probably much of his clientele were outlaws who bucked anything that took away the right of people to be who and what they are. Out of place in all of this was the dead man whose flesh I was carrying in a jar. There was nothing countercultural or defiant about someone dressed in Armani clothes and crocodile shoes.
“How did you get into this?” I asked Pit.
Chuck began browsing sheet-flash as if he were wandering through an art museum. I set the bag on the countertop by the cash register.
“Graffiti,” Pit replied. “I bring a lot of that into my style, sort of like Grime at Primal Urge out in San Fran, not that I’m saying I’m anywhere near as good as him. But if you combine bright, more graffitilike images with the bolder lines of the old school, that’s me.”
He tapped his finger on a framed photograph of a nude woman smiling slyly, arms provocatively crossed over her breasts. She had a sunset behind a lighthouse on her belly.
“Now that lady there;” he said, “she comes in here with her boyfriend and says he’s giving her a tattoo for her birthday. She starts out with this little itty-bitty butterfly on her hip, scared to death. After that she comes back every week for another one.”
“Whys” I asked.
“It’s addicting.”
“Most people get more than one?”
“Most who get just one want to tuck it somewhere, usually out of sight. Like a heart on a butt or a boob. In other words, that one tattoo has special meaning. Or maybe the
person got it when they were drunk-that happens, too, but not in my shop. I won’t touch you if you smell like booze.”
“If someone had one tattoo on his back and nowhere else on his body, as best I can tell? Important? Maybe something more than bravado or being drunk?” I asked.