John Irving - Until I Find You

But (especially in Claudia’s company) the tattoo culture on display at Daughter Alice made Jack ashamed of his mother’s “art”; and many of her customers, the seeming lowlifes of Queen Street, filled him with foreboding. The old maritime tattoos, the sentiments of sailors collecting souvenirs on their bodies, had been replaced by tasteless displays of hostility and violence and evil. The skinheads with their biker insignia—skulls spurting blood, flames licking the corners of the skeletons’ eye sockets.

There were naked, writhing women who would have made Tattoo Ole blush; even Ladies’ Man Madsen might have looked away. (More than an inverted eyebrow indicated their pubic hair.) And there was all the tribal memorabilia. Claudia was fascinated by some pimply kid from Kitchener, Ontario, getting a full moko— the Maori facial tattoo. On her hip, which she proudly bared for Claudia, the kid’s emaciated girlfriend had a koru— those spirals like the head of a fern.

Jack took Claudia aside and said to her: “Generally speaking, attractive people don’t get tattooed.” But this wasn’t strictly true; Jack was speaking too generally. His dislike of the scene at Daughter Alice caused him to overstate his case.

No sooner had he spoken than a gay bodybuilder appeared; he must have been a fashion model. He gave Claudia the most cursory once-over and flirted shamelessly with Jack. “I just stopped in for a little alteration, Alice,” the bodybuilder said, smiling at Jack. “But if I knew in advance when your handsome son was going to be here, I would come by and be altered every day.”

His name was Edgar; Alice and Claudia thought he was charming and amusing, but Jack made a point of looking away. Tattooed on one of the bodybuilder’s shoulder blades was the photographic likeness of the cowboy Clint Eastwood with his signature thin cigar. On Edgar’s other shoulder blade was the tattoo in need of altering—an evidently Satanic rendition of Christ’s crucifixion, in which Jesus is chained in figure-four fashion to a motorcycle wheel. The alteration Edgar required was some indication that Christ had been “roughed up”—a scratch and a drop of blood on one cheek, perhaps, or a wound in the area of the rib cage.

“Maybe both,” Alice said.

“You don’t think that would be too vulgar?” Edgar asked.

“It’s your tattoo, Edgar,” Alice replied.

Possibly it was Claudia’s love of all things theatrical that enamored her to Daughter Alice’s world. To Jack, if Edgar wasn’t ugly, his tattoos were—and Edgar himself was certainly vulgar. To Jack, almost everything at Daughter Alice was uglier than ugly, and the ugliness was intentional—your skin not merely marked for life but maimed.

“You’re just a snob,” Claudia told him.

Well, yes and no. The tattoo world, which had not once frightened Jack when he was four, terrified him at twenty. Here was Jack Burns, affecting Toshiro Mifune’s scowl—the samurai’s condemning look at a dog trotting past with a human hand in its mouth—while the tattoo scene at Daughter Alice reflected far worse behavior than that dog’s.

Once upon a time, the maritime world had been the gateway to all that was foreign and new; but this was no longer true. Now tattoos were drug-induced—psychedelic gibberish and hallucinogenic horror. The new tattoos radiated sexual anarchy; they worshiped death.

“ May you stay forever young, ” Bob Dylan sang, and Alice had more than sung along with Bob; she’d embraced this philosophy without realizing that the young people around her were not the hippies and flower children of her day.

Of course there were the collectors, the sad ink addicts with their bodies-in-progress—the old crazies, like William Burns, on the road to discovering the full-body chill—but Jack chiefly detested his generation, now in their late teens or early twenties. He hated the pierced-lip guys—sometimes with pierced eyelids and tongues. He loathed the girls with their pierced nipples and navels—even their labia ! The people Jack’s age who hung out at Daughter Alice were certifiable freaks and losers.

But Alice made them tea and coffee, and she played her favorite music for them; some of them brought their own music, which was harsher than hers. Daughter Alice was a hangout. Not everyone was there to get a tattoo, but you had to have been tattooed to feel comfortable hanging around there.

Jack saw Krung once—he stopped in for a cup of tea. The Bathurst Street gym was gone; it had become a health-food store.

“Gym rats always gotta find a new ship, Jackie,” Krung said. He sized up Claudia with a lingering glance; he told Jack that he thought she had the hips to be a formidable kickboxer.

Another day, Chenko came by; he walked with a cane, but Jack was happy to see him and wished he’d stayed longer. Even with the cane, Chenko was more protection to Alice than she had most of the time.

Chenko was courteous to Claudia, but he made no mention to Jack of her potential as a wrestler. He would never get over Emma, Chenko said sadly—meaning more than the fact that his separated sternum had not entirely recovered from her lateral drop.

The lost kids with no money came to Daughter Alice and watched Alice work; they were trying to find the cash and making up their minds about which tattoo they would get next. The old ink addicts dropped in to show themselves off; some of them appeared to be rationing what remained of their bodies, because they had little skin left for another tattoo. (It drove Jack crazy that Claudia called them “romantics.”)

“The saddest cases,” Alice said, “are the almost full-bodies.”

But were they almost cold? Jack wondered. He couldn’t look at them without imagining his dad. Did William Burns have any skin left for that one last note?

Jack could have predicted that Claudia would get a tattoo, but he pretended to be surprised when she announced her decision. “Just don’t get one where it will show onstage,” he said.

There was a movable curtain Alice rolled around on casters; like those enclosures for hospital beds in recovery rooms, this curtain sealed off the customer who was being intimately tattooed. Claudia wanted her tattoo high up—on the inside of her right thigh, where she chose the Chinaman’s signature scepter. It was Jack’s personal favorite, Claudia knew, symbolizing “everything as you wish.”

“Forget about it,” his mom had told him, when he’d said it was the best of the tattoos she’d learned from the Chinaman. But Alice raised no objection to giving one to Claudia.

When Jack was at Redding, he’d briefly benefited from the exotic impression he gave his fellow schoolboys of his mother—the famous tattoo artist. (As if, if she weren’t famous, there could be little that was exotic about her profession.) Now his mom was famous—in her small, Queen Street way—and Jack was embarrassed by Daughter Alice and the general seediness, the depraved fringe, that tattooing represented to him.

But what else could his mother have done? She had tried to protect Jack from the tattoo world. She’d made it clear that he wasn’t welcome at the Chinaman’s, and it hadn’t been Alice’s fault that Jack became her virtual apprentice when she tattooed her way through those North Sea ports in search of William—excepting those nights when Ladies’ Man Lars tucked the boy into bed in Copenhagen.

Now, ironically, at the same time Alice seemed to be proud of her work—and of being her own boss in her own shop—Jack was growing ashamed of her. Claudia was right to criticize Jack for this, but Claudia hadn’t been there in those years when his mother was turning her back on him.