Excited to wear the mark of a real man.
With a few deep breaths, I gather the nerve to get out of my car and enter Kal’s shop. The lobby is painted a stormy ocean green, and it’s decorated with worn black leather furniture that still gives off an intoxicating animal smell. On the walls are photos of tattoos, I suppose ones with their origins here. There’s no wall of suggested designs. It makes me feel like I’ve found the right place, like I’m not going to be modified in some cookie-cutter way that makes my attempt to stand apart backfire, making me even more identifiable as a part of the proletariat. A receptionist who looks like a younger, less angry Janeane Garofalo directs me to another room behind a velvet curtain. I have an appointment with the wizard. I hope he doesn’t think me greedy when I ask for brains and heart and courage. I hope he is more than a fortune-teller scamming me and this tiny emerald city.
Kal is perhaps more tattooed than not and I find it immediately disarming, the amount of ink his body is able to absorb and, instead of looking marked, radiate empowerment back. He’s handsome and slightly older and gray at the temples. Native American, maybe? But more like Native Canadian. Inuit or Eskimo. He cuts through my awkward attempt at a handshake with an encompassing hug.
“There is no real word for hello in Inuktitut,” he says, “So we shake hands or hug.”
“Hugging is good.” At least it is when it’s explained to me what the hug means.
Kal motions for me to sit on a stool. It’s a slow day, and we talk for a while about life, about nature, about relationships—the ones that are fleeting and the ones that are not. I ask him about the tattoos of his that I find most interesting and he tells me the stories behind them. He can tell that I’m stalling, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
“What’s your favorite thing about tattoos?” It’s such an amateur question, something a third-grader might ask while interviewing him for some school project, although I don’t know what school would assign a project on tattoo artists. Maybe a charter school, or a Montessori.
“Their permanence,” Kal says.
“But now there’s laser removal.”
Kal shrugs. “It still leaves a scar. Like a ghost.” He looks deeper into me than anyone has in a long time.
“But eventually we die, and the flesh rots away.”
Kal smiles at me with unwavering eye contact. It’s unnerving, or at least I am unnerved.
“Let me guess, people leave ghosts, too.”
“You’re scared. That’s normal for first-timers.”
I don’t recall mentioning that this is my first time, and I’m fully clothed, and so he can’t possibly see that I am unmarked, but he knows. “I’m scared. But not about the needles or the pain or regret.”
“About what, then?”
“About memorializing someone who isn’t gone. That I’m giving up the battle. That I’m surrendering in war.” I can hear Jenny tell me to say what I really mean. I carry my thesis further. “Afraid of death, I guess. And, maybe for the first time, of my own mortality.”
“Death is a unique opponent, in that death always wins.”Kal offers a small hiccup of a shrug, as if this is of little significance. “There’s no shame in surrender when it’s time to stop fighting.”
“Comforting.” I say it sarcastically, but I’m not sure sarcasm is a language Kal speaks.
“Isn’t it?” Kal asks. I don’t think he’s without a sense of humor, but he’s completely serious here. I laugh, but in that nervous way you do when you can’t think of something to say. Kal opens a drawer and pulls out a Polaroid and hands it to me.
“What’s this?”
“The last tattoo I did. I don’t like to do quotes. Not much challenge in them for me as an artist. But I like this one, and we were able to do it in an interesting way.”
I look at the photograph. Across a guy’s rib cage are scrawled the words “To die would be an awfully big adventure.”
I recognize it immediately. “Peter Pan.”
“J. M. Barrie,” Kal corrects. “Peter Pan isn’t real.”
“Isn’t he? I always thought Peter Pan was death. An angel of death who came to collect children.”
Kal raises an eyebrow. “You’re darker than I thought.”
“I didn’t used to be.” I am transforming.
“What is death? Is it the end of photosynthesis, chemosynthesis, homeostasis?” Kal has the rhythm of a poet. “The last heartbeat? The last cell generation? The last breath of air?”
“Maybe all those things.”
He has a real philosophical approach.
“We don’t know, do we? It could be the tipping point, the point in life when extinction is assured.”
“If that’s the
