In the bestselling tradition of Drinking, Smoking, and Screwing: Great Writers on Great Times comes a hip collection of classic and contemporary stories, essays, and poems about tattoos. Previously considered the domain of bikers and a rite of passage in the army, tattoos have crawled out of society’s fringes and onto the ankles of starlets and the biceps of bankers. While still risque enough to raise a mother-in-law’s eyebrow, tattoos have come to be one of the most popular forms of personal expression. DOROTHY PARKER’S ELBOW brings together some of the most erotic, humorous, and vivid fiction, essays, and poetry that explore the mysterious fascination and the intensity of emotion attached to the act of being tattooed. Readers will join great writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Rick Moody, Elizabeth McCracken, Sylvia Plath, and more in celebrating the tattoo experience in all of its rebellious glory.
Release date:
October 31, 2009
Publisher:
Grand Central Publishing
Print pages:
288
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Once the terrain of drunken sailors and circus freaks, in the past twenty years the American tattoo parlor has attracted individuals
as diverse as our nation’s population. Whatever the motivation or background, no matter how large or small the design, baring
your flesh to the tattooist’s needle initiates you into the tribe—a tribe that has grown enormously in recent years. Celebrities
and star athletes flash tattoos for the paparazzi and fans. Across the country, yearly tattoo conventions draw thousands of
the curious, the initiated, and the deeply committed. The local newsstand carries a variety of tattoo trade magazines, with
images and articles that range from the obvious to the erudite. Grocery stores display temporary tattoos to boost point-of-purchase
sales, and henna tattooing has replaced face painting at community art festivals. Business magazines recommend temporary tattoos
as an alternative to traditional promotional gifts like pencils and paperweights. Even Butterfly Art Barbie—a recent incarnation
of that icon of regressive femininity—wears a tattoo on her belly. Though Mattel deleted the word tattoo from Butterfly Barbie’s box to appease conservative parents’ fears, they also include butterfly stickers for children to
wear, just like Barbie.
Clearly, tattooing has emerged from the underbelly to the surface of the American landscape. And as the popularity of tattoos
has expanded, so has the art itself. No longer restricted
to Bettie Page look-alikes, muddy blue anchors, and ribbon-wrapped hearts reading Mom, today’s tattoo images make bold statements of personality, as individualized and varied as any art form.
Unlike other fashions, hobbies, and interests, tattooing, by its very definition, does not lend itself to fads—it creates
permanent art. Perhaps that explains why, despite its move from the social fringe to a newly won place in the American mainstream,
tattooing retains an aura of glamour and edge. In a culture that fears commitment, loves individualism, and takes guilty pleasure
in the macabre, tattoos fascinate. Ask anyone who sports a tattoo—as soon as you reveal that you have one (or two, or three),
the questions begin: “What did you get? Where did you get it? Can I see it? Have you ever regretted it? Did it hurt?” Or,
as our mothers asked us, “Why would you want to do that?” Behind every tattoo stands a story that people want to hear. Our interest in those stories led to Dorothy Parker’s Elbow. In fact, the title came about when we discovered that this irreverent author, always ahead of her time, had a star permanently
inked on her elbow.
A few well-known authors from previous generations—including Herman Melville, Flannery O’Connor, and Sylvia Plath—wrote tattoo
stories in their time. And when we put out our call for contemporary writing, we found some of our most talented authors following
that lead, offering us varieties of experience and attitude that match the wide-ranging meanings of tattoos themselves. It’s
not surprising, of course, that tattooing, a language of symbols, should find some correspondence in literary language, in
stories and poems that use symbol and metaphor to probe the meaningful moments of human experience with sharply etched words.
Not surprising at all that top-notch writers would produce such a fascinating
array of work on an art form that, since its beginnings in ancient Egypt, has helped to define and challenge our sensibilities.
Dorothy Parker’s Elbow includes offerings from several well-known writers and a few newcomers. Herman Melville writes about a nerve-racking experience
on Typee, where he feared that natives would tattoo him against his will. In Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back,” we read
about a man who attempts to keep the love of his devout wife by having Jesus inked on his back. Mark Doty tells the stories
behind his tattoo, while J. D. McClatchy explores everything from primitive ritual practices to Modern Primitives. In her
lyrical reflection, tattoo artist Madame Chinchilla covers the history of the tattooed woman, while Karol Griffin teaches
us how one learns to tattoo, first on a grapefruit, then on a devoted friend’s skin. Joy Williams, Rick Moody, Darcey Steinke,
and others contribute short takes on the practice. In “A Toda Máquina,” Alejandro Murguía takes readers on a fast-paced road
trip with a vato who falls for a tattooed stranger and throws his own self-destruction into high gear. Poet Denise Duhamel gives us a pantoum
that begins with—who else?— Tattoo, the diminutive seventies star from TV’s Fantasy Island. Auschwitz survivor Paul Steinberg remembers the day a concentration camp official tattooed his wrist. Deena Metzger describes
the liberation she feels, symbolized by the tattoo that winds around her mastectomy scar. As this partial list of contents
shows, tattoo literature covers the range of human experience, from the absurd to the profound.
Ultimately, tattooing, like writing, taps into existential questions: Who are you? Where do you belong? These days, in relationship
to the tattoo world, everyone belongs somewhere: You are tattooed, you are thinking about it, you are
disgusted by it, you create tattoos on others, you almost did it, you wish you hadn’t, you’re afraid of needles, your cousin
has the names of five ex-girlfriends on his forearm, you are hiding an inch-wide butterfly on your shoulder blade, you have
orange and red flames crawling up your legs, you have always wanted the words Carpe Diem emblazoned on your rear end. No matter how you feel about tattoos, these writings will get under your skin.
RAY BRADBURY
It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the
final leg of a two weeks’ walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut,
and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated Man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the
sky.
I didn’t know he was Illustrated then. I only knew that he was tall, once well muscled, but now, for some reason, going to
fat. I recall that his arms were long, and the hands thick, but that his face was like a child’s, set upon a massive body.
He seemed only to sense my presence, for he didn’t look directly at me when he spoke his first words:
“Do you know where I can find a job?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said.
“I haven’t had a job that’s lasted in forty years,” he said.
Though it was a hot late afternoon, he wore his wool shirt buttoned tight about his neck. His sleeves were rolled and buttoned
down over his thick wrists. Perspiration was streaming from his face, yet he made no move to open his shirt.
“Well,” he said at last, “this is as good a place as any to spend the night. Do you mind company?”
“I have some extra food you’d be welcome to,” I said.
He sat down heavily, grunting. “You’ll be sorry you asked me to stay,” he said. “Everyone always is. That’s why I’m walking.
Here it is, early September, the cream of the Labor Day carnival season. I should be making money hand over fist at any small
town side show celebration, but here I am with no prospects.”
He took off an immense shoe and peered at it closely. “I usually keep a job about ten days. Then something happens and they
fire me. By now every carnival in America won’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.”
“What seems to be the trouble?” I asked.
For answer, he unbuttoned his tight collar, slowly. With his eyes shut, he put a slow hand to the task of unbuttoning his
shirt all the way down. He slipped his fingers in to feel his chest. “Funny,” he said, eyes still shut. “You can’t feel them
but they’re there. I always hope that someday I’ll look and they’ll be gone. I walk in the sun for hours on the hottest days,
baking, and hope that my sweat I’ll wash them off, the sun’ll cook them off, but at sundown they’re still there.” He turned
his head slightly toward me and exposed his chest. “Are they still there now?”
After a long while I exhaled. “Yes,” I said. “They’re still there.”
The Illustrations.
“Another reason I keep my collar buttoned up,” he said, opening his eyes, “is the children. They follow me along country roads.
Everyone wants to see the pictures, and yet nobody wants to see them”
He took his shirt off and wadded it in his hands. He was covered with Illustrations from the blue tattooed ring about his
neck to his belt line.
“It keeps right on going,” he said, guessing my thought.
“All of me is Illustrated. Look.” He opened his hand. On his palm was a rose, freshly cut, with drops of crystal water among
the soft pink petals. I put my hand out to touch it, but it was only an Illustration.
As for the rest of him, I cannot say how I sat and stared, for he was a riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such
intricate detail and color that you could hear the voices murmuring small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body.
When his flesh twitched, the tiny mouths flickered, the tiny green-and-gold eyes winked, the tiny pink hands gestured. There
were yellow meadows and blue rivers and mountains and stars and suns and planets spread in a Milky Way across his chest. The
people themselves were in twenty or more odd groups upon his arms, shoulders, back, sides, and wrists, as well as on the flat
of his stomach. You found them in forests of hair, lurking among a constellation of freckles, or peering from armpit caverns,
diamond eyes aglitter. Each seemed intent upon his own activity; each was a separate gallery portrait.
“Why, they’re beautiful!” I said.
How can I explain about his Illustrations? If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely
detailed, with all his sulphurous color, elongation, and anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man’s body for his art.
The colors burned in three dimensions. They were windows looking in upon fiery reality. Here, gathered on one wall, were all
the finest scenes in the universe; the man was a walking treasure gallery. This wasn’t the work of a cheap carnival tattoo
man with three colors and whisky on his breath. This was the accomplishment of a living genius, vibrant, clear, and beautiful.
“Oh yes,” said the Illustrated Man. “I’m so proud of my
Illustrations that I’d like to burn them off. I’ve tried sandpaper, acid, a knife…”
The sun was setting. The moon was already up in the East.
“For, you see,” said the Illustrated Man, “these Illustrations predict the future.”
I said nothing.
“It’s all right in sunlight,” he went on. “I could keep a carnival day job. But at night—the pictures move. The pictures change.”
I must have smiled. “How long have you been Illustrated?”
“In 1900, when I was twenty years old and working a carnival, I broke my leg. It laid me up; I had to do something to keep
my hand in, so I decided to get tattooed.”
“But who tattooed you? What happened to the artist?”
“She went back to the future,” he said. “I mean it. She was an old woman in a little house in the middle of Wisconsin here
somewhere not far from this place. A little old witch who looked a thousand years old one moment and twenty years old the
next, but she said she could travel in time. I laughed. Now, I know better.”
“How did you happen to meet her?”
He told me. He had seen her painted sign by the road: SKIN ILLUSTRATION! Illustration instead of tattoo! Artistic! So he had sat all night while her magic needles stung him wasp stings and delicate
bee stings. By morning he looked like a man who had fallen into a twenty-color print press and been squeezed out, all bright
and picturesque.
“I’ve hunted every summer for fifty years,” he said, putting his hands out on the air. “When I find that witch I’m going to
kill her.”
The sun was gone. Now the first stars were shining and the moon had brightened the fields of grass and wheat. Still the Illustrated
Man’s pictures glowed like charcoals in the half-light, like scattered rubies and emeralds, with Rouault colors and Picasso
colors and the long, pressed-out El Greco bodies.
“So people fire me when my pictures move. They don’t like it when violent things happen in my Illustrations. Each Illustration
is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale. In three hours of looking you could see eighteen
or twenty stories acted right on my body, you could hear voices and think thoughts. It’s all here, just waiting for you to
look. But most of all, there’s a special spot on my body.” He bared his back. “See? There’s no special design on my right
shoulder blade, just a jumble.”
“Yes.”
“When I’ve been around a person long enough, that spot clouds over and fills in. If I’m with a woman, her picture comes there
on my back, in an hour, and shows her whole life—how she’ll live, how she’ll die, what she’ll look like when she’s sixty.
And if it’s a man, an hour later his picture’s here on my back. It shows him falling off a cliff, or dying under a train.
So I’m fired again.”
All the time he had been talking his hands had wandered over the Illustrations, as if to adjust their frames, to brush away
dust—the motions of a connoisseur, an art patron. Now he lay back, long and full in the moonlight. It was a warm night. There
was no breeze and the air was stifling. We both had our shirts off.
“And you’ve never found the old woman?”
“Never.”
“And you think she came from the future?”
“How else could she know these stories she painted on me?”
He shut his eyes tiredly. His voice grew fainter. “Sometimes at night I can feel them, the pictures, like ants, crawling on
my skin. Then I know they’re doing what they have to do. I never look at them anymore. I just try to rest. I don’t sleep much.
Don’t you look at them either, I warn you. Turn the other way when you sleep.”
I lay back a few feet from him. He didn’t seem violent, and the pictures were beautiful. Otherwise I might have been tempted
to get out and away from such babbling. But the Illustrations… I let my eyes fill up on them. Any person would go a little
mad with such things upon his body.
The night was serene. I could hear the Illustrated Man’s breathing in the moonlight. Crickets were stirring gently in the
distant ravines. I lay with my body sidewise so I could watch the Illustrations. Perhaps half an hour passed. Whether the
Illustrated Man slept I could not tell, but suddenly I heard him whisper, “They’re moving, aren’t they?”
I waited a minute.
Then I said, “Yes.”
The pictures were moving, each in its turn, each for a brief minute or two. There in the moonlight, with the tiny tinkling
thoughts and the distant sea voices, it seemed, each little drama was enacted. Whether it took an hour or three hours for
the dramas to finish, it would be hard to say. I only know that I lay fascinated and did not move while the stars wheeled
in the sky.
Eighteen Illustrations, eighteen tales. I counted them one by one.
Primarily my eyes focused upon a scene, a large house with two people in it. I saw a flight of vultures on a blazing flesh
sky, I saw yellow lions, and I heard voices.
The first Illustration quivered and came to life….
ALEJANDRO MURGUÍA
She was hanging around the parking lot at an AM/PM in Sacramento, a little Chicanita with tight jeans tucked into lizard-skin
cowboy boots and a small suitcase held together with duct tape. Her sunglasses sparkled with rhinestones, giving her a glitzy
look that didn’t fit in around here among the trash and homeless pushing shopping carts. This was the rough part of Sacra,
where desperate women turned tricks in cars under the shadow of the State Building. She wasn’t exactly hitchhiking, me entiendes, but she didn’t need a sign that said here was a huizaready to split Dodge.
I’d nearly finished pumping the fifteen gallons of Supreme when she came up behind me and said, “Can I ride with you to the
freeway?” Her voice had something about it that made my stomach tighten up a notch.
I turned around real slow like and there she was in the shimmering heat of the parking lot, suitcase at her feet, hands on
her hips, and jeans that looked like she’d taken a brush and painted them on, being careful to detail the seams and pockets.
I didn’t know if she carried good luck or bad, but I should’ve known. Lizard-skin cowboy boots. Rhinestone sunglasses. A wild
bush of hair framing her oval face. I’ve always been a chump for women, so I said, “Órale, hop in.”
Without another word she threw her suitcase in the
backseat and slid in front, against the window, away from me, a coil of plastic bracelets bunched up on her left wrist. I’d
been a long time in the country without female company except for Sage Pumo, a Hoopa Indian, wide as a bear, so this little
smoke of a woman had most if not all my attention.
I floored the Camaro and shot out of the parking lot. “So what’s your name?” she asked. I told her mine and she told me hers—Adelita
Guerra. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “It’s always good to make new friends.” She offered her hand, and I shook it. It was
a worker’s hand, rough and stained from picking walnuts, maybe yesterday. She dug into her front pockets for a frayed pack
of Juicy Fruit and offered me one. “Naw. Go ahead,” I said. I didn’t tell her I hate gum. She chewed smacking her lips, happy
as a kid on a school trip. I had Los Lobos playing on the tape deck, “La Pistola y el Corazón,” music that makes you crave
a nice cold one. It’d been years since I’d drunk a beer, but you never forget.
When we came to the freeway on-ramp, she sat up. “This doesn’t look good. Can I ride to the next town?” I glanced at her from
the corner of my eye, and that tightness in my stomach just got tighter. I couldn’t exactly kick her out in the middle of
nowhere, so I hit the on-ramp with a thump and revved the Camaro out, angry at what I’d gotten myself into.
I kept my mouth shut and my eyes on the road, not wanting to look at her. Still, I could sense her gauging me, like a good
hustler on the prowl. On my way to Sacra I’d seen a head-on collision by Redding, two cars twisted into pretzels with no survivors,
and that’s what I was thinking about a few minutes later when she asked, “Pues, where we going?”
I checked the rearview mirror for Highway Patrol and ignored her question. Adelita shrugged as if she didn’t care, and tapped
her boots, grooving to the music. It took a few mi. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
