Sparkle: The Queerest Book You'll Ever Love (37 page)

“Oh, stop looking so sullen,” he commanded. “It’s still a great idea for a tattoo. Just, next time, leave the deceit to the master, okay?” He stood up and came over to hug me.

“Okay,” I agreed.

“Besides,” he said, whispering in my ear. “We both knew all along that you were gonna get a tattoo with me. Who did you think you were kidding?”

“Sparkle?” I whispered to him and hugged him back. “You’re such an asshole. You know that?”

“Yeah, Secret, so I’ve heard. And thank goodness for that.”

Thank goodness indeed.

***

Right about now, I suppose your asking yourself, “But, Secret, where are the death threats? Isn’t that the purpose of these endless stories you keep telling us? What gives?” Well, I guess you’re right; though, to tell you the truth, not everyone wanted to see Sparkle dead. Most people did, yes, but not everyone. And I can’t even begin to imagine all the times that people threatened Sparkle’s life when I wasn’t around. Remember, we weren’t attached at the hip; Sparkle does have a life outside of mine. Still, I don’t want to disappoint you. I mean, you have made it this far, and I give you credit for that. Well, fear not; there’s a big whopper of a threat coming up, and it’s got quite an unusual twist to it. But first, let me tell you about the day we went to get our tattoos.

Seeing as you’re either gay or gay-friendly, or else hating every minute of all this, there’s a good chance that you already have a tattoo. They seem as commonplace these days as earrings and nail polish: just another thing to slap on your body. But, just in case you haven’t lived through the ordeal, I’d like to set the record, if you’ll pardon the expression yet again,
straight
. They hurt. They hurt real bad. There’s no real difference between getting a tattoo and having a sewing machine run rampant over your body. Is that vivid enough for you? Of course, I had to find that out the hard way.

Yes, Sharon did indeed pose nude for Betty first. That was the deal, after all. And she loved it. She claimed it was the most freeing and exhilarating experience of her life. As a matter of fact, she did it three days in a row. At the time, I didn’t fully see how strange a request it was to have Sharon continue posing nude for Betty. Once, okay. Twice, maybe. But three times? I mean, really, how many different angles do you need of someone’s tits and ass? And Sharon loved the attention, too. To a point. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

In any case, once Sharon posed for the first time, I made Sparkle and I dual appointments at a local tattoo parlor. Tattoo parlors in San Francisco, by the way, are getting to be like grocery stores: there’s one in nearly every neighborhood. And so, a week later, we were on our way to permanent body scarification. If you’re catching the dread in my tone, it’s on purpose, because, with each passing day before our scheduled rendezvous, I grew more and more freaked out by what I was about to do to myself. It wasn’t just the thought of the pain that was scaring me, either; it was the thought that I would have the damn thing forever, whether I liked it or not. That’s what really scared me the most. (Okay, it was the pain, but you get my drift.)

That day, I can honestly say, I was truly glad to have a walking pharmacy for a best friend. They don’t let you get tattooed if you’re drunk, you see, it thins the blood and makes for a messier experience. Plus, it pays to be alert while you’re getting it done. One slide down the chair and you have a line that’s not supposed to be there. However, they don’t ask you if you’ve taken every pill in the book to calm you down and to stifle the pain. Needless to say, by the time we arrived for our appointments, I was giddy as a schoolgirl. (Though I would hope that not may schoolgirls chase Vicodin down with a shot of Xanax.)

I made sure that Sparkle and I got our tattoos simultaneously, too. I didn’t want him to trick me like he did with the whole nipple thing. Plus, I really didn’t want to watch him get his tattoo, either. There’s something about watching your friends sit there and bleed that I find disquieting, you see.

Now, the first scary thing about getting a tattoo, generally, are the people that actually give you the damn things. Our artists were no exception. Mine was tall and lanky, pasty white and completely covered with old and faded tattoos that I wouldn’t be caught dead with on my body. I thought it was just a cliché that people had words printed across their knuckles. Judas, as he was called, had
ANGEL
across one set of fingers and
DEVIL
across the other. Everything in between was certainly not quite human, and so I think he was leaning towards the latter. I felt fortunate that he worked with the hand of the former. Why, I have no idea. Superstition, I suppose.

Lucky, that was the other one’s name, worked on Sparkle. Lucky had only four fingers on the hand he drew with. When we asked him why they called him Lucky, he raised his other hand and showed us that he had only three fingers on that one. And that’s why they called him Lucky. I prayed that his tattooing skills were better than his logic.

And these two guys came highly recommended to us, too. I’d hate to see the bad tattoo artists. I casually asked Judas, before he started dragging the needles across my body, how someone gets training to do what he did. He answered that he’d practiced on potatoes and homeless people. I didn’t feel in good company, needless to say. That alone should’ve sent me running, but I knew that neither Sparkle nor Sharon would ever have let me live it down, so I removed my shirt and sat down on the rickety chair before me.

The first thing that Judas did was he wiped some rubbing alcohol across the area that he was going to be working on. Rather than make me feel safe and secure, I felt like I was being prepped for surgery by a disbarred doctor. My heart, though highly medicated, was beating fast. Then he took the design that I had given him, ran it through a machine that made a wet, purple, carbon copy, and pressed it to the area of my back just below the neck and between my shoulder blades. He then had me inspect the results in the mirror to my left. Seeing as it’s near to impossible to look at ones back in a mirror with any degree of precision, Sparkle and I proofed each other. That calmed us down a bit. We both agreed that at least our temporary tattoos looked fabulous. Now all Lucky and Judas had to do was fill in the lines. (Which any fifth grader could reasonably do. Then again, I had to wonder if these two guys made it that far.)

When Judas turned on the tattooing device for the first time, my stomach lurched and my heart skipped a beat. True, it may have stopped due to the large amount of prescription medications I had taken, but I was more inclined to believe that it was the jarring noise the tool made while it was running. It drowned out the sound of the awful music playing in the background, though. Honestly, I didn’t know which was more unnerving. Should I have asked how long the session would take? Probably. Should I have brought one of my own CDs to listen to? Definitely. It had been years since I listened to AC/DC, and I had thought my life rid of them. As it turned out, I was sadly mistaken.

But nothing, I repeat,
nothing
could’ve prepared me for the touch of the needles to my skin those first few seconds. There’s simply nothing to compare the sensation to, so I won’t even try. I can say, however, that every muscle in my body tensed at once. And for the next hour and a half, that’s how they remained.

Judas outlined the letters first. Slowly and methodically, he worked his way across my back. The only saving grace to the experience was that he frequently had to stop his work to fill the needles up with ink. I relished those brief moments in between the shocking bouts of pain. The rest of the time, I tried to concentrate on other things: the stains in the carpet, the stains on the ceiling, the stains on Judas’ pants. But the pain was so intense that it became the only thing I could think about. Thankfully, when he was done with the outline, he gave me a five-minute break while he smoked a cigarette. (Inside!)

As
SPARKLE
has one more letter than
SECRET
, my break came before my friend’s. I slowly made my way over to the area were Lucky worked and watched the progress from behind. It was intriguing to witness the results unfold. See, he had amazing dexterity with just the four fingers, and his pen flowed through Sparkle’s once-unblemished skin like a skater’s blades through the cold, hard ice. Mere trickles of blood emerged from under his skin, but that was enough to turn my stomach queasy, and, after a few minutes, I stopped watching and walked around the chair to face the victim.

Sparkle’s face was a crimson red and his jaw was locked tightly in a grimace. He blinked his eyes open when he realized that I was standing before him, and I gave him a look that said that I knew what he was going through. I was sure glad that we had short nicknames at that moment. Just think what it would’ve been like if we’d been calling each other
Moonbeam
and
Sassafras
all those years. I mean, I couldn’t even begin to image sitting in that chair for an additional half-hour. And people have tattoos that take multiple sittings. The fools!

“How’s it going?” I asked, knowing full well what he was experiencing.

“Why are we doing this again?” he pondered, out loud.

“Beats me.” By then, I had forgotten my motivation. But I did remember that all Sharon had to do was lie around naked for a few hours. Guess I should’ve set my sites a little lower. Next time, I thought, I’d just paint my toenails.

“Okay, take a fiver,” Lucky said, putting down his instrument of torture.

“No problem, Boss.” Sparkle breathed easily for the first time since we got there.

“Pretty bad, huh?” I whispered. I didn’t want our new friends to think we were sissies. Why? I have no earthly idea, as we were, after all, two of the biggest sissies on the face of the planet. But eighteen year old girls all over the country were getting butterflies tattooed on their butts, so, I figured, I could tough it out for the brief period of time it would take.

“I had no idea,” Sparkle confessed, while I nodded in full agreement.

And then, all too soon, we were back in our chairs and the needles were once again pressed deep into our flesh. Now it was time for the fill in work. If it was at all possible, this hurt even worse than the outline. Where Judas practically glided across my back during the first part of the ordeal, he then began to slowly, and with a much heavier hand, start to etch in the filler. Multiply
ouch
by a thousand and you’d be coming close to the searing pain I was feeling at that very moment. I had visions of what it must’ve been like at the dentist’s before someone had graciously invented Novocain.

In what seamed like hours, but in reality could only have been forty-five minutes or so, Judas finished up his work. I had never in my whole life been more anxious for something to be over and done with. But Judas had one more surprise for me. When he was through, and I thought the pain to be finished, he whipped out a spray bottle and told me that he had to clean the wound. Strange wording, I thought, and couldn’t begin to imagine what he was preparing me for. I was glad, however, that he didn’t tell me, as the bottle was full of rubbing alcohol, and, with each spray, it felt like a thousand little daggers were stabbing into my back.

Thankfully (?), that part only took a few moments. When he was satisfied that it was clean, he put some kind of ointment on my new piece of body art and then wrapped my wound in a dressing. Done! Thank God! I couldn’t believe people came back and did that over and over again. Once was, by far, enough (or at least I thought, at the time). Then I got to watch Lucky finish up on Sparkle.

I wasn’t about to tell my friend how it all would end. Why add insult to injury? What I did do, however, was hold Sparkle’s hand just before Lucky sprayed the bottle on him. I was rewarded with a death-grip as Sparkle shook all the life out of my hand as the spray ravaged his sore back.

“Finished?” he asked, a bead of sweat dripped from his brow.

“All done, Champ,” I answered, gladly.

“Thank God.”

“Amen, Brother.  Let’s never do that again.”

“Agreed.”

***

Well, as any of you in the same position can attest, those damn tattoos become habit-forming. And, just like when a woman gives birth and swears that she’ll never go through the pain and agony again, and then goes through it at least once if not twice or thrice more, Sparkle and I weren’t quite done adorning our bodies, either. Up to the time of this unfortunate coma thing, we were both up to three and were planning our fourths. The best explanation I can give is that you simply forget how painful it really is. It’s not until you sit down to get another one that you remember, and by then it’s entirely too late. Oh well, no one ever accused us of being the brightest bulbs on the tree, right?

In any case, two weeks after our joint adventure, our tattoos were healing nicely. We were done bathing them in Bacitracin and were rubbing Lubriderm over them daily. There was still some itching and flaking, but, for the most part, they were looking fairly spectacular. At least that’s what I told Sparkle and he told me. After all, we couldn’t see our own tattoos very well at all. Truth be told, I for one was feeling butcher by the moment. Tattooed and pierced. I couldn’t begin to imagine what we would do to our bodies next. (No, getting shot through the chest doesn’t count.)

Also, over those two weeks, Sharon continued seeing Betty. As a matter of fact, when Betty wasn’t at The Snatch, she was at Classics II. At first, we all found it kind of endearing, but after a few days of her presence, it became, well, sort of creepy. And then, as they frequently do, the bomb dropped.

“Oh my God, Sharon, where’s Betty today?” I asked her one morning, when Betty was noticeably missing from the shop and our lives.

“She had a photo shoot at the beach and needed to catch the early rays,” she said, and I caught just a glimmer of relief in her voice.

“Really? I didn’t know she was photographing anybody but you these days. Is the intrigue finally waning? Has she moved on to the next pretty face?” I may have been joking, but deep down I’d hoped that it was true. Our trio simply wasn’t meant to be a quartet. Besides, when Betty was around, she barely paid any attention to anybody but Sharon. Plus, Sparkle couldn’t really stand her and took to avoiding the shop during the day in order to maintain his distance. Still, I tried to support Sharon, as it’d been forever since she had dated anyone seriously, and my horizons, needless to say, looked fairly bleak.