All the Rage

Only psychos and felons got tattoos back then, which covered everyone I worked with on the truck- Fitch, who lost a rose-twined dagger with half the skin on both legs when his bike jumped a median, struck a street lamp, and combusted. Or Pete, with the mermaid he still showed off like a new bride, trying in vain to make it shimmy on his arm, blind to the grayed green tail and blur of what years back had been a smile. Even Blatz, with his army-navy drabs, wound a thread around a needle tip, dipped it in a vial of India ink, and pecked out across the fat mound of his thumb a skewed gunmetal-green-black swastika. That should've been enough. And yet I found myself strangely tempted, watching Donny with his slack side-eyed saunter climb the loading dock, indifferent to the diesel and seven o-clock cold, setting his coffee on the punch clock, a hard pack rolled in his shirt's short sleeves, baring the rocks of his biceps, lit up like a beach-side casino in blues and vermilions, bright forms that stole from his knuckles to elbows, elbows to collarbone. And while the rest of us, blessed with nothing to hold out for anyway, cashed our paychecks at the pool hall Friday nights, he stashed what he could of his away, saving up, obsessed, evidently, with gemming over the arms he'd once used to beat a decent man to near death in a life-staining minute that bought him nine months in Riverfront. And we few of no design, who knew less beauty than truth, who would always equate violence with strength, could not help appreciate how the foreman gave him space. How suddenly foolish I felt, when I asked him, one such morning he showed up, skin swollen beneath a jewelish sheen of baby oil, some new tensed beast adorning his already busy forearms, when I asked, because I could picture him with his fist flopped like a blood donor's on a vinyl table top, the walls papered with available designs, the buzz like a streetlamp on the fritz, when I asked in all innocence if it hurt, having that needle pop again and again and again the drum of his skin.