All Night Long

Koko Taylor

1928 - 2009

What Would Angelina Do?

There's mold growing in my medicine cabinet. I've named it Al.

Al has matured rapidly over the past few months. He now sports a goatee and a tattoo. The tattoo resembles a cactus, but actually it's a toothbrush. Al considers my toothbrush his mother. He's a good son, a real Momma's boy. Actually this is my old toothbrush, which I ignored for half a year. Thus, Al.

When my husband first saw my tattoo, he thought it was a seal balancing a ball on its nose. I immediately started drinking. All that pain and new age music for this?

The artist who created my tattoo -- a vegan lesbian from San Francisco with Buddhist leanings -- worked out of a third-floor walkup above an appliance store down on East Lake. Her walls were covered with tattoos, as was she. I made my appointment on a blustery day in spring, just after my 40th birthday.

"This is gonna hurt," she predicted as she lit a stick of incense, "but it's a karmic pain."

That broad would never make it as a dentist.

She had an accomplice, er, assistant who hovered like a dragonfly in the background, replacing incense and adjusting lights and changing tapes. These were the good ol' days, people still played tapes. After an hour or so the vegie lesbo with Buddhist leanings leaned back and surveyed her work.

"I'm gonna make a prediction," she predicted. "You're gonna come back for more."

More what?, I was thinking, Enya? patchouli oil? reefer breath?, but I bit my tongue. If I hadn't, I might've screamed.

It's not that getting a tattoo hurts, per se. It hurts per spicuously, per naciously, per suasively. Afterward, one drifts in a hazy ache for a few months, dulled somewhat by the right combination of reefer and madness, as in,

"I must've been fucking mad to get this fucking thing!"

But, like your parents or global warming, a tattoo is forever. You learn to live with it. There are the inevitable regrets, sure. Like the day you wake up and realize you should've gotten a dragonfly instead of a seal balancing a ball on its nose. But there's nothing you can do about it, jack, so chill.

A tattoo is a time warp. The ultimate Be Here Now. A moment you can't take back, no matter what, a moment that will continue to exist until you don't. And then some. A tattoo is Dorian Gary, er, Gray. FYI: I keep typing it like that: Dorian Gary. Some weird little muscle memory.

Dorian Gary. Sounds like somebody Al might know. Maybe the guy who did his tattoo.

Everybody knows a guy named Al. Some of my best friends are...well, not Als, per se, but they're married to Als. Come to think of it, I used to be married to an Al. No wait, it was a Dick. Everybody knows a Dick. Al is the new Dick. Or maybe it's the new Bob. Or maybe it's the other way around. I forget.

Anyhoo...every time I typed Dorian Gary I LOLed. Then I backspaced and corrected. As if life were that easy.