Marked

Before he touched my skin, I already detected that I was lying in a puddle of sweat and sticking to the naugahyde massage table, with my jeans unzipped and filleted around my thighs, my underwear elastic pulled down over them. I hadn’t prepared for this fully, I realized. Good thing I wore my good underwear, I thought.

I heard the gloves pop onto his hands and heard his four-wheeled low stool, the seat matching the black naugahyde table, roll away with a swish and then roll back, as I stared at a high-vaulted tile ceiling. Something soft and wetly cool touched my lower left hip, wiped across it, then the other way, then lifted with no sound.

“I’m laying the stencil down,” he said, in a monotone voice, nonetheless one of the phrases in his arsenal he used every day, as natural as “Good morning” or “How’s it going?” I felt pressure and then a comfortable pull, like a Bandaid one wears for days finally peeling off with little fanfare or pain.

“Take a look and see if you like it.” From this prone and vulnerable position, I was now denigrated to standing up, at the age of eighteen — hardly a prude but not nearly far enough away from my previous virginhood — with my pants below my waist in order to waddle to a full-length mirror, in front of a man I’d met only moments before, all with the goal of making a marked change on the rest of my life.

I studied the view – the vantage of a scorpion from above, claws both raised above its head, tail turned in towards my abdomen and toward one of two stars separately posted on the outsides to indicate the constellation and the zodiac. If there was ever any symbol that defined me throughout my life, it was the scorpion, my birthright, literally. I was textbook – withdrawn yet watchful, forceful yet determined, obsessive yet intuitive, jealous yet passionate.

Shuffling back over to the table, I plopped myself like a fish on the cutting board of the massage table and shimmied my body — head, back, hips, ankles — as close to the position I had lain in before all in order to put myself back together.

“Okay,” I smiled, staring again at the ceiling. And so we began.

Believe me: they can try to make you feel at home with paintings on the walls, books on shelves in their cubicle-style offices, and music slowly drifting from their iPods. It almost works if you close your eyes. The tattoo artists and institutions can attempt to mask the smell of metal and blood and burning flesh with sterile goops and oils and wipes. And for this, we should be thankful. We aren’t, after all, a bunch of sailors settled in port for the night, yearning to blow of some steam with a bottle of whiskey and an outline of a pretty girl.

But the truth is, you are electing minor surgery when you walk into that tattoo studio. The initial buzzing from the tattoo gun is the scalpel ready to slice. It’s the machete ready to rat, tat, tat against the husk of your life, to farm a new crop on the soil of your skin.

The minute the tattoo outline begins, you register your terror and the idea takes root. What are you doing? Long lines of pain and then reprieve, slicing and then wiping, slicing and then wiping, feels like hours when it’s hardly close. The seeds are sown in perfect pattern. You feel dizzy and you shake, and your skin feels like it is being whisked by cold gusts without the wind. (Some say like tiny bees making a calculated stinging attack, all in the same area of your body.) Your system yearns to understand what defense mechanisms it should employ to detect and eradicate this virus. But this is self-inflicted, this is conscious, and your brain runs the course of logic while your body gets wounded. You march yourself into war and you take the beating, lying down, just like others before you and after you, who are and will be attracted to the experience and the outcome– the yearners, the searchers, the prophets of their own lives.

I remember attempting to have a conversation with the tattoo artist but my voice was shaky and unsure, especially over the bellows of British punk rock and Nuevo American metal slashing out of the iPod’s speakers. Soon enough, my soft supple hip gave up registering pain, sedated from the torture of the outline.

Then the magic began – the unsuspected second tattoo gun clicked into being where it hadn’t existed before and began filling the spaces in between, giving dimension through the shading of the claws and the arachnid shell and the stars. Gaps of flesh, imagined but not real, seared underneath the needle with five more tips than the first and rubbed raw against my skin like a Brillo pad on sunburn. I found myself feeling a sense of pride in marking my own body, in fighting my impulse to run away from pain and just being. Just feeling.

After we finished, there was more wiping down, some goo applied that felt like sonogram gunk, and more sterilization and then a covering. Those hands that felt so alien to me only an hour before, warmly taped a matte-finished yet slippery bandage pad over my hip and drew two long lines of medical tape across their lengths to cage in the mark. I stood, fully aware, hyperaware, of my surroundings – the warm wooden and scuffed floor of the tattoo studio, the old 19th century rowhome turned tattoo studio posts holding the building up, the fragile giggling of others in the waiting room.

It was a high, probably not unlike a runner’s high, but I am no authority on that. I do know that I left that tattoo studio feeling newly molded into myself, into someone I was fully in control of creating. That night, after the requisite two hours, I pulled the bandage off, and slowly, in circles, wet my hip with warm water and caressed it with antibacterial soap to remove the dried blood, then applying some burn cream to start the healing process. I threw the underwear away that night, already muddled by the blood I wouldn’t be able to wash out or explain to my parents if they investigated my laundry. The blood wouldn’t come out but it was no issue – the girl who wore those underwear hours before wasn’t walking the world anymore.

Reflex

It’s a weed that attracts more weeds. It’s a gangly arm shoved from the right of my body, with my hand straight out, all attached to a torso, attached to a neck, attached to a head with a face that scrunches up in discontent at the tone of your voice, the diversion of your eyes, the word, that word, on your tongue.

It’s overgrowth, stretching to cover hard emotions that aren’t so hard, but can be buried in soft ground and covered by more shoveled sand and silt and dirt until no one else would know. Or rather, I believe that they can be buried, like my head in the pillow, going to sleep under covers in the middle of the day to avert a crisis of worry, a non-existent possibility that consumes my brain.

It’s those defense mechanisms I’ve held on to for so long to keep from healing. Weeds still need rain and sunlight, they still need to be nurtured in order to stay alive, to thrive. I tend them with my ignorance; I tend them by still using them and not asking why. Walking away, when I feel defeated or attacked; drawing myself inward, limbs tight, face averted; becoming quiet, misinterpreting your words. Or rather, interpreting your words the way I would 15 years ago, when I felt trapped and lonely and unwelcome.

Without the anxiety, without the mechanisms, I’d have to breathe and listen. Without the weeds, I have to assess the situation, I have to analyze what overgrown tomb of emotional and psychological haunt these actions are coming from.

Those weeds are wizards, they’re warlocks, disguised as growth. But just because they’re alive, it doesn’t mean they’re immortal. Weeds can die a death that’s slow and painful. But the more they sink in, the more painful it gets, the more those roots wrap around and cling. It’s a Catch-22 that’s not magical or paranormal or unimaginable. It’s well within in my hands to turn those reflexes over, to shake that overgrowth and soil in the pan of my life, to discover the gold nuggets through introspection and acknowledgement.

It’s only in my hands to stop watering those weeds, to pull them out slowly and to thank them for a job well done.

Excerpt from Essay – January 8 2000

It was cold; but not too cold to wear my uniform those days: plaid skirt, fishnets, and Doc Marten boots. Tracy and I hopped into my baby blue Ford Mercury Topaz, lovingly tagged the Skankmobile – not so named after the slang term for sexually promiscuous girls but for the jumpy, walking-in-place dance that we employed to our favorite types of music, ska and punk. With fresh packs of smokes, we started the night exuberant – embarking on an hour-long trip to Washington, D.C. for a club show, intending on meeting up with friends once we arrived. My parents took pictures of Tracy and me close to each other in my living room, our bodies smiley and giddy, hugging each other.

Chain smoking and listening to CDs on a plug-in Walkman, some kind of ska or punk band most likely framed by brass horns and saxophones and grumbly vocals, I drove while Tracy read the directions printed from Mapquest, navigating our path up I295 and then I495 through the night, rambling on in spaces about how excited we were about meeting boys, about the late-night, dark-street glory and mystery of the nation’s capital, of possibly having a drink or two passed to us in secrecy.

Split second.

And then Tracy yelled loudly that we were about to miss our exit. I swerved into the right lane, not sure that I had already missed it. A screech. Numbness while watching the world from my window. An unconscious body tuck, like I was on fire. A pop.

Our detour, hidden from view on those directions we checked and double checked, and not meant to get us any closer to our destination or around some unwieldy obstacle like traffic or bad weather, was skidding across four lanes of traffic, hitting a roadside guardrail, and flipping back onto the wheels, doing a few twirls and ending up in the median. Memories of which are like amusement park rides that swing you out and then back into center. But I didn’t find center. Air and then the brackish pound of the hood hitting ground. Circling a full 360, then another, like the rock and roller at the town fair of which I was always so fearful. I never liked being fully out of control, off the ground, being thrashed around.

Back across the same four lanes of traffic to the left. Landing in the thin grass median, partly yellowed by drought, between the North and Southbound lanes, windows busted out, the cd Walkman still playing the same old song as if it were on repeat. Or as if nothing had happened.

I wish I could remember that song.

I couldn’t hear anything completely, see anything completely; I could have been in a circus of lights and blurs, animals and people for all I knew.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I just need to call my parents.”

Calmly collected, I turned off the engine of the car, released the key from the starter, and reached for my purse and my cellphone in the backseat. Noticed a clump of someone’s hair on the light gray fabric, hardly registering it as my own. I remember panicking, the only thought pursuing my consciousness that we needed to get out of the car before it blew up, like we had just survived a high-speed chase and crash in some as-yet-unnamed action movie. The things your brain registers when trauma surrounds you – I noted in my brain that you’re supposed to run in a zigzag pattern if you’re getting shot at too.

Some man helped us get out of Tracy’s side of the car, since mine was sealed shut, indented, pushed out of its natural space, as if by a giant’s large hands. A strongman.

I remember the night. The cool night. Sitting on grass, fumbling for some understanding of what it meant not to be in the car, singing to songs, moving to our destination. An amorphous ghost form of hip and leg with a hand coming from nowhere, offering me towels to press on my head and knee. Someone said the police are coming, the ambulance. I felt dizzy and a phone was held to my ear, but it felt gooey and wet and something tasted metallic. My phone.

“We’re coming to get you honey.”

“Okay.”

The paramedics, all blue coverall and flashlight, strapped me on a board with a neck brace and I heard Tracy saying that everything would be okay. “I’d rather be in an accident with you than anyone else.” I kept apologizing to her; my brain couldn’t move from the immediate. She kept saying, “Honey, it’s going to be okay.”

Finally able to assess myself in the short trip to the hospital, covered in blood in the ambulance, asking about Tracy and where she would be going, I caught a comment that, as the medic put it, “luckily” no other cars were hit and no one else was hurt, which in my state I hadn’t quite considered a possibility separate from myself.

So much movement, lights, screeches, and halts in the emergency room. The cops kept asking if I was drinking, what happened, questions about seatbelts. Was I the driver? They started asking me questions I didn’t know the answer to: What was my address? What was my last name? What time did I think it was?

Throwing up the meatloaf my mother fed us before we left, and apologizing for it nonstop, my body sat concussive and shivering while I endured stitches pinning and pinning and pinning me back together. Voodoo girl getting stitched up. I felt pulling on my scalp, like a tight mask was being peeled over my head from my face. I asked for more blankets even though I had a pile the size of a small mattress heaped upon me. The lights of the ceiling my only skyline, I was pushed into Cat Scans and sat dizzy, being yelled at to stay awake. The doctors were happy to report that I didn’t have a skull fracture or any brain damage. My head swelled. I woke up unable to hear out of my right ear at all, my hair still caked in blood, a hard time hearing.

I changed rooms. I remember having a young boy as a roommate who was moaning all night because he hadn’t had a bowel movement in weeks. That was the proper upgrade from my emergency room cot. My friends flitted in and out of my vision like specters. And my parents. Brian, Tracy, my brother. My mom went on and on about not worrying, about how everything would be okay. About calling the school regarding my scholarship. I might not be able to go back for the semester due to my injuries. About how I was very much lucky to be alive.

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I am the only one in my family to walk away from a car accident. The only one to have anything other than a fender bender. It’s not anything anyone has had to deal with – so it wasn’t dealt with. No therapy, no talking about it, just doctor’s visits and medicines and salves for the stitching up of what people are able to deal with realistically, what they are able to see.

Instead, my friends dealt with it with humor. Tracy wrote me cards and letters every day. My new nickname was Ann “Danger is my middle name” Sosnowski. She sent me letters with quotes like, “Hope life is soon ducky, ‘cause right now it’s sucky” with a rubber ducky on the front; or “Heard you’re laid up. I wasn’t listening very well, though, so at first I was really happy for you…” with a picture of a truck on a bed of grass. Everyone commented about how I could have a career as a stunt car driver.

I still keep the key from the car in a box with other memories. Sometimes I see it and I don’t recognize it. I don’t know where it came from, where it should go. But I can’t get rid of it. It represents emotional degradation, it represents a life gap, it’s a doorway to a moment I’ve lost forever.

I earned my driver’s license after only attending classroom lecture for 30 hours and watching videos and taking multiple choice tests: A B B A C. The highlight of the classes was our half-hour break at night, when were more concerned with getting food from Burger King than understanding the proper etiquette of the road. At that time, soon-to-be young drivers were required to only have three driving lessons with a certified driving instructor. On the third, I went straight to the DMV to take my driver’s test with the four-door sedan I had only driven for a few hours. I passed. The next day, my dad bought me the used Ford Mercury Topaz for a little more than $3,000 and I agreed to pay him back in weekly installments from the measly money I was making during the summer working at the craft store. We started a ledger.

In one of the 30 hours of classroom instruction from Nice and Easy Driving School, the instructor stated two facts simultaneously – one of you will have a near fatal car accident in the next year; one of you will have a fatal one. I often wonder who the unlucky one was.