That's Us

knock-knock

Of all the god-awful things I’ve confessed so far, these tats make me feel the dirtiest, and they weren’t even on my body. I guess technically they were on my body sometimes. (Get it?) In my defense, I didn’t even know that Ken had tattoos until the first time he parked his wienermobile in my garage. (I say wienermobile because

that thing was almost as big as the famous Oscar Mayer hot-dog car. Almost.) After my first run-in with that ten-pound trouser snake, I began calling Ken “Ding-Dong.” He was flattered because he thought it was in reference to his p***s size. Bless his heart. I had ripped his clothes off in the darkness of his basement abode, so it wasn’t until we were done fooling around and I’d turned on the harsh fluorescent lights that I noticed an odd little word etched on Ken’s chest. It was on his left pectoral muscle but a little too high to be over his heart, like somewhere between his heart and his collarbone. The tat was so faint that it could have been written with pencil or administered in jail. Jailhouse tats always seem to have that telltale sketchy appearance. (Sketchy in both senses

of the word.) I squinted and slinked closer, trying to covertly make out what it said, while Ding-Dong concentrated on shimmying back into his leather pants,

oblivious to my scrutiny. Once I was about five feet away, I was able to make out a three-letter word scrawled in a bizarre block outline ARM. That’s it. Just ARM. On his chest. It said f*****g arm on his chest.

Arm…arm…

Surely, there was a pun or a play on words there somewhere. People don’t just ask other people to permanently label one of their body parts with the

name of another body part, right? Searching for some explanation, my brain instantly began tearing through

every image, phrase, pun, anagram, song, and associated word in my entire catalog of experiences. I had nothin’.

Once Ding-Dong managed to wrestle his anaconda back into his skintight pants, I asked him about it, then immediately wished I hadn’t. A little too happily, Ken explained, “Oh, that? Well, it was gonna say 168 FARM STREET BOYS, but the guy who was doing it skipped town before he could finish.” He shrugged and began searching around for his shirt, surprisingly devoid of embarrassment. I had so many follow-up questions after that statement that I didn’t know where to begin. So, does this mean that you’re gang-affiliated? Did the guy skip town fifteen minutes into your tattoo, like, out of the bathroom window, because that piece should have taken forty-five or fifty minutes, tops? Oh, wait, is skipped town a euphemism for got shivved? And why did he start with the middle of the middle word in the phrase? Was he dysgraphic? Sensing my confusion, Ding-Dong continued as he shoved his bare toes into his unlaced boots. “When I was living in Atlanta, I was in a crew called

the One Sixty-Eight Farm Street Boys. We all lived in this shitty f*****g house, and that was the address one sixty-eight Farm Street.” Smiling to himself, as if reminiscing about the good old days, he wistfully added, “They called me Scabie Ken.” Okay, I only had one follow-up question to that little gem. I tried to sound as non-judgy as possible when I sputtered, “Why did they call you Scabie Ken?”

“Oh, because I had scabies. That place was really f*****g nasty."

#$%@&@$#%!

No words. My brain had no words. Just electromagnetic pulses of prickly creeped-out no-feelings and alarm bells and flashing arrows pointing me in the direction of the exit. I’d just had s*x with a guy who not only used to at

least I hoped it was past tense have scabies, but was proud of the motherfucking nickname! Before I could snatch up the rest of my clothes and do the sprint of shame across his mother’s front yard, Ken turned to pick up his studded belt. And I saw his right arm. At first glance, it looked like any other generic tribal tattoo a solid black design that forked and ending in sharp points. I almost dismissed it and continued to make my escape until I noticed how simple it was. Usually, tribal designs were somewhat intricate and took up a decent amount of space. This thing just had three points and no twists or turns at all. It really just looked like a thick, pointy poorly drawn letter Y as in, why did my mom have to huff all that paint thinner while she was pregnant? I had to ask, again trying to mask my horror, as I pointed to his right

shoulder, “Tell me about this one.” He smiled his sweet, innocent there-is-absolutely-nothing-to-be- humiliated-about smile again and said, “Oh, that’s my tribal piece.” I snorted. I couldn’t help it. Choking down the percolating hysterics was agony. Agony! As I bit my lip and tried in vain to suppress my giggles, Ken absentmindedly went about collecting the rest of his clothes, continuing, “Yeah, it’s not totally done, but I ran out of money before it was finished, and you know whatever.” It’s not totally done?? It’s not halfway done! It’s a f*****g Y, you knuckle- dragging mouth-breather!

That was it. The mood had sufficiently been demolished, and I was in need of a turpentine douche, stat. I politely made my exit and enjoyed the view as Ken walked me

out to my car. From the back, he was all leather pants, studded belt, no shirt, just-f****d messy blond hair… Mmm…what was I so upset about again? Oh, yes, scabies and mental retardation. But…but he was so cute and sweet and hung. I decided that maybe, as long as he continued to wear shirts with some regularity, these tats could just join the long list of s**t About Ken I’m Overlooking for the Sake of Making Lucas Both Jealous and Afraid to Murder Me.

Nobody has to know about the tats, I thought. I can pretend like they don’t exist, I thought. That was before I saw the one on his head. Although I knew Ken also had a tattoo of some asinine sci-fi I-wasn’t-listening-when-he-told-me-but-I-think-it-involved-a-spaceship thing on the top of his head, I thought it was a nonissue since the entire piece was buried under that oh-so adorable shock of rockabilly blond hair. The operant word in that sentence being was. It was buried up until the day he was scheduled to meet my parents.

Before my parents ever met Ken, they hated him. I had already been busted a couple of times for lying to them about where I was spending the night. (Obviously, I had been curled up with Ken in his twin-size bed in his mother’s garage) So, I’d lost my driving privileges for a month. During one particular bout of punishment I decided having Ken over for dinner would make my parents more sympathetic to my cause? That question mark was intentional. I have no idea what I was thinking. It must have been the contact high I’d gotten from swapping body fluids with Ken so often. Since Ken didn’t have a car at the time and my car had been confiscated, I volunteered my parents to take me to pick him up in my mom’s Band-Aid–colored Ford Taurus station wagon. I was unflappable, cavalier even, from the backseat of that rolling eyesore of festering tension. When we pulled up in front of Ken's mom’s place, I was actually giddy. I’d beengrounded for a week, and I was dying to see my sexy Lucas Idol look-alike (while his mouth was closed and shirt was on, at least) come barreling down the stairs of his mom’s rickety termite-infested front porch and into my waiting arms. My mom honked the horn. Real classy, Mom. When Ken emerged, my giddiness was replaced by something else. Confusion? Disappointment? He looked different. Something was very wrong. It wasn’t until he’d confidently stridden all the way across the driveway and pulled open the car door that my brain finally acknowledged what was going on. Ken had shaved his head…completely bald…right before meeting my parents.

And…there it went. My consciousness bolted like a caged animal the moment Ken stepped into the car. It clung to the roof and watched upside down through the back windshield as he slid over to me, beaming from ear to ear, and gave my rigid, abandoned body a nuzzle. From my vantage point above the car, I could see everything. Where Ken's adorably soft blond pompadour used to be, there was instead a crudely drawn image the size of a f*****g dinner plate. It depicted a bird’s- eye view of Ken’s brain, as if his skull had been removed, like the lid of a cookie jar. The center of his brain appeared to be hollowed out into a spaceship-style cockpit, and there, in the center, manning the craft, was a tiny f*****g p***s.

A tiny f*****g circumcised p***s with little d**k arms and a look of determination on his little d**k face was jostling joysticks around inside Ken’s pickled brain. My parents were minutes away from finding out that their eightheen-year-old only child was dating a grown man with no job and no car and no brain cells and bad teeth and oh, by the way, he also has a f*****g p***s tattooed on his head. Luckily, the empty shell of a body that I’d deserted in the backseat was incapable of forming coherent speech patterns, let alone demanding an

explanation, because unlike the ARM tat, I figured out the euphemism Ken had been going for with this piece immediately, and quite frankly, the backseat of your mother’s station wagon is the last place you want to hear

your adult boyfriend explain, I think with my c**k! Get it?The shock and dissociation I experienced after seeing that little phallus were so profound that I barely remember anything from the moment we picked Ken up to the moment we dropped him back off. The only images I’ve been able to mine from that evening are of my mother lurking behind Ken like a shadow while he and I ate our Domino’s pizza at the kitchen table. As he snarfed down his fifth slice of pepperoni, completely unaware of her presence, my mom made direct, searing eye contact with me over the top of his tattooed head. Raising one scarily pissed off eyebrow, she slowly and blatantly shifted her gaze down to Ken’s exposed scalp, drawing her mouth into a tight line of disgust. It was terrifying.

My mom doesn’t do pissed off. She’s usually too stoned to remember how feelings work most of the time, so this little demonstration was frighteningly out of character.

Once he was out of the car and we were on our way back home, I braced myself for my mother’s wrath. Sure, she was a hippie pacifist to the core and barely even raised her voice in anger, but I’d never exactly brought home a

grown man with a p***s tattooed on his head and zero high school diplomas before either. All bets were off.

After riding in suffocating silence for a few miles, my natural tendency toward optimism took over, and I began to think, Maybe she’s just going to give me the silent treatment! Maybe she’s not actually going to kill me!Then, her hand shot out in my direction.

Mommy, no! Only, instead of smacking me in the mouth she simply reached past my tense, waifish body and opened the glove box. I watched through splayed fingers as her hand disappeared under a pile of miscellaneous bullshit for just a moment and emerged holding not a Glock, but a mundane-looking Altoids tin. Driving with one eye on me, one knee on the steering wheel, and both

hands firmly wrapped around the Altoids tin as if it held the antidote to her daughter’s idiocy, my long-suffering mother pried open the lid and pulled out one pristinely rolled joint and a tiny pink lighter. God bless her. She puffed in silence the rest of the way home, which took for-f*****g ever, what with her driving ten miles under the speed limit and stopping at every yellow light, yield sign, and shiny object along the way. When we finally pulled into the driveway, her nerves appeared to have been restored to their typical Woodstock levels of tranquility, whereas mine had been utterly annihilated.

Just as I was about to open my door and sprint to safety, my mom took a deep, self-composing breath, pinned me with a glassy-eyed stare, and slurred, “Pumpkin, I hope you’re using protection with that man. He looks like he’s

been to prison, and with that wiener on his head he was probably somebody’s b***h. I don’t want you getting the big C.” I’m pretty sure the big C is cancer, but I didn’t have the heart to correct her. As my mother erupted into a giggle fit I smiled and realized that that woman would probably help me bury a body. Especially one with a certain tattoo on his head.