Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (41 page)

Steward returned his signed contract for the
$TUD
collection to Womack along with an amiable letter, which noted among other things that “various of the Kris boys had a field day suggesting [titles for the book], such as ‘Lavender Evenings,’ ‘Ding-Dong Daddy,’ ‘Purple Passions,’ ‘For Sale, Cheap,’ and ‘Meat Market,’ all of which gave them an hilarious moment, but naturally left me cold.” Assuming that Womack would produce the book within the year, Steward now turned to a much more urgent project: his relocation to San Francisco.

Steward’s February 1964 visit to San Francisco resulted in a chance encounter with an old Chicago acquaintance who invited him to dinner in Berkeley at a “small house built in someone’s backyard, a house-behind-a-house, a ‘cottage’ in northern California terminology.” The acquaintance, a former sex contact, was about to relocate to Europe and wanted someone to take over his lease.

The bungalow in the backyard of the house at 2016 Ninth Street was charming in an Old California way. Located in the Berkeley flatlands, the six-hundred-square-foot structure had a tiny sun porch, a tiny kitchen, a sitting room, and a bedroom. Steward liked its low rent and discreet anonymity, but his impulsive decision to assume the lease was paradoxical, for he had always dreamed of living in San Francisco, not the Berkeley flats—a neighborhood that was essentially suburban. Since Steward did not know how to drive and had no intention of ever buying a car, any visits he made to San Francisco from the bungalow would require him to take a long, slow bus ride across the Oakland Bay Bridge.
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In choosing it as his future home, Steward seems to have made a conscious decision to remain perpetually at a distance from all those districts—the Tenderloin, the South of Market, and the Castro—that had attracted him to San Francisco in the first place, districts where homosexual men from across the United States were creating exciting new experimental communities for themselves. “I’d purposefully chosen to live in Berkeley, afraid that if I actually lived in the city I would dull the excitement, or tarnish the glamour of my first visits to it a dozen years before,” he would have Phil Andros later observe; “my trick had worked—each trip across the Bay still had for me the same spine-tingles of years ago.” But Steward had had a lifelong ambivalence to the close company of his fellow homosexuals, and he was now fifty-five. More than a decade earlier, his advanced age had made him unattractive to most of the men he desired at the Embarcadero YMCA; living amid the rampant youth culture of mid-1960s San Francisco, he would have been even more visibly an outcast, and he knew it.

Packing up the Chicago apartment had been difficult, not only because of the huge amount of erotica, memorabilia, books, papers, photo graphs, and objets d’art Steward had filled it with over the years, but also because he had the vast contents of his tattoo shop to contend with as well. Overwhelmed with erotic material, he organized a large donation to the Institute for Sex Research, and burned many other things for which neither he nor the institute had further use. When after all these wrenching preparations he finally left Chicago and arrived several days later at his new home on Ninth Street in Berkeley (a place he had seen only briefly, and at night), he discovered that it stood in the middle of a crime-ridden, rubbish-strewn black ghetto. And yet, despite his misgivings, he decided simply to stay. A month later he wrote Gebhard,

The question of where to open a tattoo parlor vexed Steward for some time. He initially found a location in San Francisco, across from the East Bay Bus Terminal on Mission Street, but then he apparently received some intentionally misleading advice from his fellow tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle. As Steward later explained,

In September, Steward instead took a lease on a shopfront at 1727 San Pablo Avenue in Oakland. The place he had chosen to set up business was utterly desolate, but it was also cheap, close to the Oakland naval bases, and located on a major bus route running directly to and from Steward’s bungalow—an important consideration since he had no intentions of ever purchasing a car.

Oakland, the city about which Gertrude Stein has observed, “there is no there there,”
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certainly lived up to that epithet in Steward’s new business neighborhood, a commercial strip down which few pedestrians could venture, since it was essentially isolated by the convergence of two four-lane commercial highways. But the new shop was serendipitously just a five-minute ride from 4019 Foothill Boulevard, the world headquarters of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, a sprawling, loose-knit social club and criminal organization that was just then in the process of cornering the California drug trade, and whose members all regularly sought out new tattoos to define their status and accomplishments to other members of the gang.

The relationship of Oakland’s residents to both the Hells Angels and the Oakland police force was at that moment a complicated one, for even as Steward opened his business, the city was under something close to martial law, and the situation would only worsen in the coming decade. Steward’s soon-to-be-friend Ralph “Sonny” Barger, head of the Hells Angels, noted in his memoirs that “Oakland in the fifties and sixties was still a tough town, a blue-collar area overshadowed by glittery Frisco-by-the-Bay…The Oakland PD boys didn’t lose a lot of fights either; they were pretty tough…The OPD once came by a biker bar called Frank’s Place and jumped a bunch of our [gang] members, beat the shit out of them, and then took them to jail.” Steward purchased a police shortwave radio soon after opening his shop so that he could follow the many violent crimes taking place daily in the area. He also purchased weekly transcriptions of these police conversations in an attempt to track and predict crime patterns.

Poverty, crime, and police brutality were not all Steward had to deal with at his new business location. With its large, disaffected population of African Americans, Oakland was fast becoming a national focal point of racial tension and conflict. Within months of Steward’s arrival, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party in Oakland, calling both for armed resistance to black oppression and for the open expression of black rage. While much of that black rage would be immediately focused on the Oakland police force (which in 1966 had only 16 black officers on a force of 661), the local racial hatred was also directed at any other white “oppressor”—that is, any white businessman perceived to be exploiting black residents. White shopkeepers like Steward were therefore possible targets for race-inspired crime.

There was also student unrest. As Steward observed in his memoirs,

Steward worked hard on creating a stylish new tattoo parlor in this awful new neighborhood, for he had few friends in the Bay Area and little else to do with his days. He named the place the Anchor Tattoo Shop instead of Phil Sparrow’s Tattoo Joynt so that the name would come first in the phone book. The interior, however, looked much like the old shop in Chicago—black plywood panels eight feet high, topped with six feet of wall painted dark Chinese red. Outside there was a lighted sign with black “circus”-style letters spelling “Tattoo” against a yellow background. Steward placed in the window a series of placards drawn by Dom Orejudos—illustrating various tattooing styles and techniques in grand homoerotic style—that he had salvaged from the Milwaukee tattoo parlor.

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Steward kept regular business hours five days a week, but with few customers in early daytime, he began most of his workdays by going through his tattoo journals, hoping at last to write his long-delayed general-interest book on tattooing. After years of collecting data about tattoos and tattooing from his customers, he had amassed an extraordinary amount of information, including statistics on the sorts of tattoos his customers had bought, the bodily locations on which they were placed, and the feelings and actions (many of them sexual) that customers had experienced or undertaken in the wake of their application. With these facts and statistics in hand, he felt he had more than enough material to write a unique “inside” account of contemporary American tattooing, and moreover to do so with both authority and style.

$TUD
was meanwhile moving toward publication. In mid-September 1965, Steward wrote Paul Gebhard a letter detailing his hopes for the manuscript, which was then going through a final proofreading. After describing the striking dust jacket illustration he had commissioned from Dom Orejudos, he went on to describe his new life in Oakland and Berkeley as well as his various other literary projects. Gebhard, ever the anthropologist, immediately responded with a suggestion about the proposed tattoo book, namely that Steward widen its scope to include “the anthropology of tattooing,” for in Gebhard’s words, “to write a book on the art without tipping one’s hat to the Japanese and the Maori would be impolite.”

In the months that followed, Steward found the tattoo book unexpectedly difficult to write, perhaps in part because of his use of barbiturates, which had increased since his move from Chicago,
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but mostly because of the overabundance of materials from which he drew. Steward’s tattoo journal had consisted of more than a thousand single-spaced typewritten pages of his own information, and on top of that he now had a vast archive of additional information, made up of literature he had amassed over more than a decade. His own sexuality posed yet another problem for the project, for the tattoo journals had been primarily works of sexual confession. Steward felt his tattoo book needed to be something entirely different: a general-interest nonfiction book on tattooing. As a result, he left out much of the most interesting material.

Nonetheless, within the year Steward managed to produce a lengthy manuscript on the art, history, and practice of contemporary tattooing he entitled
The Tattoo Jungle
. He sent it to Grove Press directly, without the assistance of a literary agent, for at that moment he had none. At the same time he continued to seek outlets for his erotic short fiction, republishing “Little Lamb, Who Made Thee?” with the Society of Janus magazine,
Drum
, that December. It was his first erotic story to be commercially published in the United States.

At his sister’s invitation, Steward then traveled down to Los Angeles for the Christmas holidays. Despite his misgivings about his hard-drinking, archconservative, deeply Catholic brother-in-law, Steward was happy enough to pass the holidays with his sister in their beautiful Santa Monica home. On Christmas Day, however, Steward decided to fight off his usual holiday melancholy by doing something wild and thrilling: inviting a leather-clad parking-lot pickup named Bruce Bradbury over to the house for sex. His arrangement with Bradbury had been made with the understanding that his sister and brother-in-law would be out making Christmas Day visits to friends. Bradbury unfortunately arrived too early, “on [a] motorsickle, in leathers [and Jinny was] outraged. [After Jinny and Joe left I] started to do him; [but then unexpectedly they] came back. Incompleted.” Walking in on the two men, his sister had been shocked and distressed; as a result, Steward’s last two days with her were distinctly uncomfortable.
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In early 1966, a young man entered the Anchor who would one day become one of the most commercially successful tattoo artists in the United States. Don (later Ed) Hardy was at that moment a young printmaker working toward an MFA degree. Obsessed with William S. Burroughs, Hardy immediately recognized Steward as a similar sort of renegade intellectual—in Hardy’s words, “a mysterious, inscrutable hipster cruising through dark waters with terrific élan.”

Hardy had known of Phil Sparrow since taking the Milton Zeis tattooing correspondence course as a kid, since Steward, writing as Phil Sparrow, had contributed to the coursework. Upon making his way to the Oakland tattoo parlor, Hardy had been immediately dazzled by what he saw there, for the Anchor had a completely different look from Oakland’s many other tattoo parlors. In Hardy’s recollection, “the window display featured artists’ renderings of different styles of tattooing: classic Navy work, Japanese, etc. [and] instead of walls blanketed with flash, [Sparrow] hung his sample designs like a gallery, with space in between…Classical music played, and the biggest change was that he did not tattoo in an enclosed area…but [rather] had his work desk set up in a corner of the room, open for all to observe.” Hardy also thought Steward an extraordinary sight, for during that period Steward “dressed entirely in black, a black long-sleeved shirt and trousers accentuating his pencil-thin ‘Errol Flynn’ mustache…his sophistication was apparent in the first few minutes of conversation.”