The Electric Michelangelo (29 page)

Henry’s mild curiosity about the tattoo artist in the back room soon got the better of him and one day he slipped through the door, which was off-limits to anyone not undergoing work, and he went unnoticed for fully five minutes while Cy concentrated on the handle of a sword. The customer noticed him first.

– Your apprentice, I presume? He’s a shabby fella, huh? Needs a trip to the steam room.

The hum of the machinery stopped.

– Excuse me? What apprentice?

Cy turned to look behind him. At the back of the room was a stretched bow of a man, leaning too far to one side as if he had run hard and had a keen pain in his ribs. He had a vaunting smile and hooded eyes.

– Why, there’s nothing to it. A chile could paint as very well.

– Excuse me?

Cy had been squatting across a chair and now he stood, gained some height, not in a truly threatening manner, but the intruder flexed upwards himself like a startled cat or as if in mock response. Usually nobody slipped in past Jonesy but he must have been using the restroom or had gone out on a quick errand. Cy put down the equipment he was holding, carefully. The stranger stepped untidily towards him, waving a hand in front of him like a cop directing traffic.

– Whoa there. I don’t wanna hafta kill you. Jus’ came in to see, to see. Tha’s all.

The smile doubled in size. There were scars on the man’s face, like those of a boxer, fat paunches of tissue and thin-cut lunulated marks along the bone. Cy realized the man was drunk and jumpy – a strange combination, usually there was a slurred, diffuse aggression to
the anger of drunks, not focus, so perhaps another narcotic was acting as an energetic bedfellow with the booze – and he was quite possibly very dangerous. There was something about American confrontation Cy did not yet know how to navigate, not in the way that he could comprehend the butch inebriated combat, the smut, and the easily classified sober quarrels of his compatriots. It often had qualities of recklessness, wildness and inexplicability that made him nervous and uncertain of his ability to handle the protagonist. This man had an imagined capacity to fight that went well beyond the borders of his physical form, a vainglory, that much was obvious. Something in the foreground of his eyes revealed that a message had been sent down from his brain informing him that he was completely invincible, and therefore fearlessness was the natural order of things. He kept touching his breast pocket as if tapping a weapon stashed within. Cy suddenly got the urge to finish the sword, he wanted to finish it if he was going to fight or perish, he didn’t want to leave an unfinished piece of work. He sat slowly and took up his needle.

– Do you want work done?

– Naw. Not me, sir. Not on mamma bird’s baby. Haha, you’re an Englishman.

– Yes.

– Well I’m a Frenchman by history so that about makes us equally and thoroughly bad, now don’t it?

Cy pulled his braces down over his shoulders so they hung at his sides, he unbuttoned another fastening on his shirt and bent back in towards the sword. The drunk crab-stepped closer in. There was a smell of alcohol on him that had been passed through the skin and mixed with sweat. It was a distinctive odour, like the smell of a man not far back in Cy’s memory. Alcohol fumes in the air and the sense that he was being scrutinized sent a shiver through him. But Cyril Parks continued as he had always continued under pressure. With a steady hand. Red on the sword’s hilt. A broad border of black to keep it from spilling. He switched needles. Yellow blade, yellow blade. The hairs in the pores on the customer’s arms were blonde and dark at their tips, as if he had very recently travelled into old age. Around the delivered ink and under the wiping cloth the skin was beginning to inflame. It took ten minutes to finish, ten minutes of full concentration, slow internal time, with Cy half-believing he would, at any moment, receive a bullet or a blade in his kidney. When he looked around the strange man was sitting cross-legged on the floor sleeping with his chin touching his chest – eastern-god style. Cy leaned over and gently reached into the man’s pocket for the weapon and instead pulled out a hipflask of bourbon.

Den Jones stuck his head round the door.

– O Lord! That no-good kid bothering you? He don’t sleep when he gets off work so he falls asleep wherever he is through the day like a damn stray cat. Starts drinkin’ the minute he leaves the hospital, like he’d rather do that than get some proper rest! Henry! Henry Beausang, wake up and brush off your pants seat and drink some coffee. Black coffee.

After the first winter at the barbershop they might have been considered friends. Cy took to Henry in a quiet, reserved manner, and Henry’s enthusiasm saw little restriction in the face of a tepid foreign temperament. Henry began to re-sell stolen hospital gauze and needles to Cy, at a cut-rate price that was all profit to himself. He even ‘borrowed’ an old hospital steam sterilizer, which Cy used to keep his equipment sanitary, saying it had been sitting idle in the store room for all the years he had patrolled the dull, grey umbilical corridors of the asylum, and it may as well be put to use. For his part Cy inherited Den’s role of benefactor, giving to Henry what money he could spare if his wages had been taken from him in a brawl or he had spent too much that month on liquor, lottery slop, or whatever else lit him up, leaving not enough for rent. When word got back that Henry was in trouble or badly beaten, Cy would arrive on the scene. He was well versed in the skills of salvaging drunks. He did it because, after a decade with Eliot Riley, it was second nature to him, the way a person trained in medicine will be the first one to administer aid if a passer-by falls in the street or burns their hand, the way Reeda tended her consumptives, year after year, from habit. Or maybe there was something else that made Cy do it, the idea that Henry was somehow a redeeming version of Riley, younger, hopeful, benign to others if not to himself.

The first night of many that Cy carried Henry back to his own apartment, not yet knowing where the other lived, and put him on the floor to sleep off his stupor, he realized that his new friend was barely out of his teens. Henry was well banged-up, his cuts had begun to congeal and needed cleaning before an infection was sealed in. Cy took off the torn shirt that had grime on the collar and cuffs, removed his bloody vest and found underneath a small boyish chest, with only a few adolescent hairs on the breastbone. He had taken many more blows to the face than to his body in his life it seemed. So there was prolific damage and false years of ageing above the lines of his clothing. He put a blanket over him and a glass of water within reach. In the morning the blanket was folded neatly on a chair, the water glass was defiantly full, and Henry himself was gone.

A routine developed on Henry’s weekends off. There was one Saturday repetition like a nightmare that kept on recurring in which Henry flirted balefully with death and danger. Somebody would come to get Cy at the barbershop or at Coney, depending on the season, to tell him Henry Beausang was sick-drunk behind the train station again, or by a bench in the park. Tipped over into the dust and haemorrhaging from a beating he had just taken by men he had tried to swindle or resemble or call the bluff of or God knew what other transgression. Cy would leave his work, a bird half flying across a bicep, and he’d go down and get his friend, hauling him back to somewhere safe. He’d put his hands on the ribs that weren’t broken and place Henry into a part balance, part lean, then he’d throw the weaker, dislocated shoulder back into joint. At this Henry would wake up enough to laugh at the sensation, making his face beautiful, desperate, and foolish. And then he’d realize what the sudden jolt against his torso actually was, and pain would arrive. He would jump back livid so Cy would have to mind his feet quickly out of the way or Henry would be tripped down in the road again. But by then the drunk was awake and upright and could stay there to be helped home, singing and rejoicing like Riley never did.

Every Saturday that Henry did not have to work a graveyard shift it was like clockwork exploding. He was lighter than Eliot Riley, made of skin and bones only, and polite in his position of helplessness but that was all that could be said in favour of the situation. Cy would chide him, scold him, tend to him, and would end up finishing the second tattooed wing of the bird later for no cost to the annoyed, abandoned customer.

– But why does he do it, Den?

– Why does any drinker do it? He’s got devils in him that are too slippery to catch. Carrying around a lot of family disgrace in him too. He comes from a wealthy family, Baptists every last one. Now I know that ain’t in your understanding Cyril, but take it from me it ain’t good. Let them down bad. He was married once to the daughter of some rich cotton tycoon and did that lady a disservice so bad his mamma about threw him out of the state of Georgia. Him and his best school friend were found together embracing like husband and wife behind the bandstand at the reception. See, Henry married is like a chicken taking up with a hog. Half the time it ain’t a fight he’s looking for. No sir. Those men don’t beat him because they know what he can’t do to them, they beat him for what he’s willing to do. But I ain’t no-one to judge. We’ve all come to this city carrying suitcases full of history, and that’s the God-honest truth. That boy might have been born on third base but he sure as shit ain’t scored a triple.

Then it was back to Coney Island after the cold damp Brooklyn winters of working on men with wet flecks of fresh cut hair on their skin. In the summer he’d unboard the dusty booth, re-dress it and work along with the sounds of hurtling coasters and carnival barkers. Henry would come by and laugh at the shows and say the hospital had nothing on this place and he’d drink in the bars on the alleys with Cy, faithful and persistent and less likely to jar, or as if he just felt happier alongside the Coney crowd.

The artists tattooing around the parks and the avenues of Coney Island were mostly very talented, the good mechanics of their trade, inheritors of Chuck Wagner’s legacy, of bold-coloured, heavy-bordered symbols. Wagner himself came down for vacations to Coney and would stick his big plum-nose into the booths from time to time. The shyster copyists and dross merchants lasted only a season or less before fading out of the façade, before being kicked out, not being able to compete in such a skilled industry. The talented prospered; Arturas had not exaggerated the volume of work. There was something genuine about the artists amid the artificial stimulation, something older, timeless, a lasting appeal, like scrimshaw placed alongside the plastic novelties. They were at odds with the tricksters now lining the freak tents, who passed by Cy’s booth in costume at midday before the matinee shows, with glued-on ears or dyed skin, self-made freaks instead of those with genuine birth debility – the ichthyosis sufferers, the bearded women or armless children with teeth as strong as pliers who had in the past reigned supreme. The truly old-school terrible, like the Human Fountain, a man with water pipes forced under the skin of his arms, which led down to his finger-tips from where the spray would be ejected like plasmic geysers into the air, had become lost among the mass of counterfeit sensationalists. Freakery was now the means to a quick buck, where once it had had something bizarrely disciplined and formal if brutal about it – like the mad-dog children yanked from the woods of Idaho and pitied by civilization, or the Human Fountain himself, meticulously cleaning the pipes under his raw skin each evening to prevent infection – that was professionalism at its highest. Cy had once had a strange conversation with the Human Fountain about cleaning solution outside his booth, they were curious of each other’s equipment, and he had been left full of admiration for the man, who seemed at once so normal and yet so extraordinary.

– I used to just use salty water but if it’s not the right temperature the salt will clog up. I like less chemicals. Have you tried a tiny amount of ammonia or white spirits when you clean your gun? Vinegar may do as well, though. Obviously I don’t have the pleasure of steam or I’d cook like a wonton!