Included in A Perfect Scar and Other Stories

It was Denny who had made me curious about tattoos. Denny who had marked his demise defiantly in word and image upon his own body. Denny who had tattooed HIV+ in big green letters on his back when he was diagnosed. Later, in an ill black humor, he’d tattooed a skull and crossbones on his forehead. Danny went more or less mad with it, but I admired his demand to be heard. His body continued to speak in those final months, even when he no longer could.

It was Denny who made me realize tattoos were news.

His certainly were, and part of that news was that “we” were over. Denny adopted that sense of urgency that many of the newly infected felt in the late 1980s. Denny knew he had very little time. Probably a few years. So Denny threw himself into ACT UP, marching, and political performance art. He changed his diet, did yoga and qi gong. He found himself a positive boyfriend who wouldn’t be afraid, as he suspected I was.

For awhile I’d tried to keep up with him. I marched and got arrested, though I regretted it. I remember, just as it was happening, Karl had said to me—he had a tattoo of Munch’s Scream on his Adam’s apple—“Don’t get arrested unless you’ve decided to beforehand.” I’d just looked at him and thanked him as I realized I hadn’t made that decision. And then the police were on us and it was too late.

In time, I succumbed to the guilt and low self-esteem of the negative, forever junior varsity to the HIV-positive varsity team. A weird hierarchy and a macabre one. But just somehow too. After all, what the hell did I really know about it? Easy enough to march for others when you knew you’d been spared. I felt like a fraud. But I couldn’t mope about such things or, worse yet, walk away as if it had nothing to do with me.

In the end, I decided activism just wasn’t my forte. I volunteered at the hospice instead, sitting with middle-aged men as they wasted away and died. That was how I served in those years—running down to the corner market to buy candy bars and ice cream; watching TV programs; cheering folks up. A sorry little do-gooder who wasn’t doing much good.

But at night, I searched for news. Because I missed Denny, though I wouldn’t quite admit it. I concurred with others that Denny had gone off the deep end. But I admired him for his madness. Every time I saw him, a new tattoo. After the skull and crossbones came a series of bull’s-eye targets all down one arm. On the other arm, he tattooed KS lesions that got all mixed up with the real ones not six months later. An in-your-face motherfucker, Denny was. He’d always been pissy, but never political. His body politicized him, and he in turn politicized his body.

And being that I missed him, and how we hardly talked, I listened to his body and how it spoke. Each word; each picture. I searched for his voice, in a sense, on the bodies of others as well. Tattoos became like books by Denny that I wanted and sometimes found in used book shops: There one is!—that thrill of capture.

And so I found Frank at Uranus. Frank had tattooed the same numbers on his forearm that his grandmother had been forced to wear at Auschwitz. This impressed me—for its unhipness, for its respect, and for its expression of the dark side of tattooing that Denny had matriculated me in. It made sex with Frank more secretive, more taboo, and somehow more connected to the world outside the fishbowl of gay culture. Frank’s tattoo made fucking a defiance against the hordes of Nazi Christian bastards who gloated as we died. I licked it as his arms, flexed, held tightly to my biceps while I fucked him.

But ultimately, it was because it was something Denny would have done. That was the clincher. If Denny were Jewish, he would have beat Frank to it. By then, I realized that I was more interested in Frank’s tattoos than Frank, and we drifted apart.

I’d run into Denny in the street all the time because he was everywhere then. Denny was a public person with a public body. He was shirtless, and Denny had a new tattoo.

“Eli, how you doin’?” he said.

“Hi, Denny.” I didn’t have to say anything more, since he was already lifting the bandage, as “it” was clearly what my eyes were drawn to upon seeing him. Underneath, just below his left nipple, was the biohazard symbol. What could I say? Nice? I love it? I just nodded to show I understood his meaning.

“I gotta go,” he quipped, and he was off. Busy Denny. We talked of nothing now. I felt like I’d been replaced by a disease and his tattoos. He was an artist of his illness and his anger. And I felt awful for feeling that. I felt awful all afternoon. So awful that I knew there was only one cure for it.

I headed straight for Buena Vista Park. And while I hiked up the dizzying cutesy San Francisco Victorian streets to reach it, I remembered a boy I’d known in high school, who’d had radiation treatments for cancer when he was fifteen. The doctors tattooed a dot on his cheek, and another on the back of his neck, which together were used to line up the beam of radiation that burned away the remnants of his cancer.

Paul’s tattoos found me as much as I found them. I met him that day in the park. He was shirtless too, and I noticed his chest was splattered with ink. We circled each other like wolves for a bit, and when he vanished into the bushes, I followed. He was ravishing me shortly after, tugging at my belt, slobbering on my chin, but I wanted to talk about his tattoos. He explained that he liked men to cum on him, and he said that the men he loved had marked him, marked him permanently, with their seed. He had three cum splashes on his chest: one in red, one in green, and one in black. On the inside of his right thigh was another, and up his spine was a beautiful more or less straight green line—to each side images of green rolling droplets where the semen had run away off his skin.

“Maybe you’ll be worth remembering too,” he grinned, re-routing my attention to the task at hand. I doubted it. I wanted to cum on his back too, so I tore off his jeans and got him on all fours, jacked my dick in his butt crack and splashed my cum across the long green line.

Afterward, we walked down the hill together, and he told me more about the one on his back. He explained that this particular tattoo had a special meaning, not only as the rising of his kundalini life force through his chakras, but that it was the cum shot of the man who had broken his heart, betrayed him and infected him, and thus taught him everything.

Maybe I should tattoo Denny’s face on my heart, I thought, after that. Maybe I should go and get all of Denny’s tattoos so that the next time I see him, he will not be able to dismiss me or ignore me. Would this be submitting to his narcissism, or would it be a romantic gesture of devotion? Or would it be both?

Because Denny was fast becoming his body in place of himself—for me, for him, for everybody. Denny’s body grew increasingly profound—in illness, in word, and in symbol. Denny’s body spoke to you and reminded you of things. Denny’s body was not something to escape into as it had been for me before he got ill. And like so many others, I escaped into sex in my fear of the epidemic. Ironic perhaps, but, more truly, it was simply the paradox that is sex: the more harrowing sex became, the more necessary it was as a refuge.

Denny’s body could never be a refuge now. Denny’s body was dangerous and dead serious.

I wondered if I would be able to have sex with Denny now. With the new Denny. I loved him I believed, that was enough. But where was he? He was vacating his body, and it was as if it had become one of those abandoned buildings covered in movie posters and flyers for lost cats.

Condemned.

In my unrelenting confusion, I kept hunting tattooed boys. Sadly, most of the tattoos I came across were as common and dismissible as a tagger’s graffiti. An annoyance more often than not. Not news at all, but commercials. There were the endless variations on the belly button sunburst, the band of barbed wire or Celtic weave on the bicep, zodiac signs, animals, and the commandeered images of indigenous cultures. These were so common as to have become like name brands—advertisements of “cool.” Alive with Pleasure.

I couldn’t suffer these for long. I wanted to hear something, to read something that would explicate. It had to disturb me or awaken me; it had to be a herald of something. It had to be news. It had to help me work things out with Denny.

It had to be a voice in the wilderness.

A boy I met and slept with who had attempted suicide as a teen, and who had worked his way through so much of what had driven him there, had gone out one day and had his scarred wrists tattooed with vines of jasmine flowers interwoven with barbed wire. He explained he had sealed shut the door on suicide, and opened his heart. He held me down with those wrists as he pushed his cock against my hole, whispering to me, “Open . . . open to me.”

But suicide was not my story. Denny was. And Denny could not close the book of his body. It was open for good.

Sometimes they were simply suggestive. Peter, who smoked pot five times a day, had a tattoo on the small of his back of a listless reclining Pooh bear with heavy-lidded, glazed eyes sitting next to a honey jar, his free hand—the one not holding the bong—digging greedily into that pot of honey. I did the same to Peter’s ass, all the while watching Pooh as my cock slammed into him doggie-style.

Sometimes, despite my cynicism and jadedness, I found a tattoo so beautiful it didn’t need to imply anything. At the gym, a Vietnamese boy named Duc had a Chinese sentence running from his Adam’s apple to below his navel. This was beautiful—and on his hairless body, profoundly masculine, as from a distance it looked like a line of hair between his pecs that ran down to his belly and beyond. I didn’t want to know what it said or meant. I wouldn’t let him tell me, but I came all over it and he did too.

Keith reeled me in on sheer volume of ink. He’d focused his tattoos on his ancestors. He’d “nailed down” his genealogy he told me, and so his arms were a mess of heraldic shields and Celtic knots. On his back was a map of Ireland. After twenty minutes wrestling around in his bed, I was struck with the absurdity of what he’d done. I thought the whole thing profoundly stupid. I think it was the edelweiss and shamrocks on his ass that finally did it. His body was like a cheesy scrapbook from which I wanted to tear the tattoos like pages and scrunch them up to toss across the room. Since I couldn’t, I pulled my tongue out of his sphincter and buried my teeth in clover—an act which he misinterpreted in the same fashion as he had his “glorious line.”

A week later, I pounced on a young boy at the Detour. Raver Jason had Hebrew letters running down his forearm. They were beautiful in the way that languages you can’t read are beautiful. You know they mean something and have meant something for a very long time. People had died for such words, you were quite sure. It inspired deference.

I dragged him out of the bar for a walk around the neighborhood. When I asked him about his tattoo and what it meant, he wasn’t sure.

“It’s ancient,” he said, “Egyptian, I think.” I offered that the letters looked Hebrew. “Yeah,” he responded, “like Jerusalem, Egyptians—that’s what I said.” He was getting annoyed. Perhaps because I was completely appalled by his ignorance, I asked him obliquely if he knew any Egyptians. He claimed they’d all been dead for centuries. “Are you stupid, dude?” he asked, dumbfounded.

I couldn’t have sex with him, but as the horse was out of the barn in a sense, I needed to find someone.

I found Vinny at the End Up. Vinny’s tattoo was a blob because he kept changing it until there was nothing else to do but scribble it out completely. It remained a giant blue dot, three inches by three inches, above his left nipple, which is what first attracted me to him on the dance floor. He was a lost soul and not afraid to admit it. And so the circle his tattoos had become ultimately said more than any of the images that had preceded it.

And he wouldn’t tell me about them anyway. “I erased them for a reason,” he insisted.

Sucking hickeys around his blue abyss and then cumming on it felt like painting abstract art.

He was the perfect antidote to Raver Jason, who symbolized so perfectly the degradation of the whole tattooing art and tradition as it entered shopping malls and children’s birthday parties. Something ancient, eh? Is that all? Sometimes I thought it all just a sociohistorical indicator, pointing to the lostness of the white race. Not that only white people had tattoos. Certainly the original Asian and Polynesian traditions were a whole other story. But for white people it seemed a function of popular culture, a culture which I always perceived had a kind of panic to it about making some kind of connection, a connection it usually—and ultimately—failed to make. Thus, a tattoo to me, more often than not, looked like a swing and a miss.

Vinny, at least, had struck out with grace.

In time, Denny became too ill for activism and yoga—and even tattooing. I joined the circle of friends who took care of him when he could no longer take care of himself. Some of his activist friends were assholes, politically correct, furious at everything, moralistic and arrogant. But they were not afraid to do what needed to be done, and this mattered more than anything I didn’t like about them. At the hospice I’d meet men out on the sidewalk who were afraid to visit dying lovers. They couldn’t even cross the threshold. They were mostly nice men, respectable men, friendly men—and untattooed. I liked them even, but they had failed. They were not heroes like Denny’s friends were. And Denny’s friends all had tattoos.

Denny didn’t want to give up tattooing, so he took to writing all over himself in black felt-tip marker. He had a graph across his chest that charted his T-cell count, and when he was so far gone that he could no longer muster the energy for such scribblings, he asked me for one last thing.

“Do this for me, Eli,” he strained, hoarsely. “Get a tattoo. Do it for me.”

I would have preferred he ask for something else. Forgiveness maybe? A second chance while there was still a smidgen of time? But how could I be selfish at such a time? I didn’t want a tattoo of course, but how could I say no?

I nodded, but didn’t say yes—to buy time I suppose.

I thought long and hard about it. I hated the idea of being stuck with some image, or some word. Well, what won’t change then? What will I always believe? I asked myself. I thought of social commentary to counter the endless bourgeois armbands and bicep bombast that threatened to deplete the world’s ink supply. I considered sarcasm: I could tattoo highrises, sewage plants, and nuclear reactor cooling towers across my skin. Or perhaps actual name brands: Nike, Tide, Coke. Or maybe the two sides of my body could represent the duality of the world: what we had, and then what we did with it. On my left side would be trees and flowers, animals, rivers, and rock. I’d cover my right side with a city of strip malls and factories, its skies crowded with fighter jets and its streets with tanks and SUVs, while around it would be fetid, toxic pools and clear-cuts.

But that would be a desecration of my body, and it would do nothing for Denny. He’d made his body holy with ink, in my estimation. And I had to do the same out of respect for his request. What then?

It took me weeks to figure it out, and I saw the doubt grow on Denny’s face, a doubt that tended toward betrayed. Then one day at the gym a boy walked into the showers—scrawny, a wisp of a boy. He turned on the showerhead, and when he turned his back to me to receive the water, I saw the green ink across the small of his back, and it read, “I am loved.”

I filled up and nearly wept. Of course, I wanted him immediately. I looked his way, but he never turned or noticed me. He had relayed a message and that was all that was needed. I didn’t need to kill the messenger. Sex with him would have been redundant, superfluous.

It would be too corny, of course, to tattoo “You are loved” for Denny. The tattoo needed to be news, and it needed to be news for Denny. It was simple. He already knew I loved him. Perhaps it could be a reminder of that? But it just wasn’t Denny.

The idea sputtered along for awhile until it completely paled the day I noticed Denny’s Buddha on the night table next to his bed. Denny had turned to Tibetan Buddhism in the last months of his life, and he studied with a teacher who had him meditating on what is called a “seed syllable,” a Tibetan character that one envisions to enter into the meditative state, and which later morphs into a Buddha. Denny was very into this and the bardo teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which instructed one to focus very clearly on one’s intentions and mental state at the time of death. It was important for Denny to keep this syllable in the forefront of his mind.

And so it was easy. I went and had the seed syllable Hung tattooed on the inside of my right palm, so all I had to do was hold it over his face and he would see it—be reminded:

Denny liked it; he held my hand hard and for a long time that day.

I am loved; you are loved.

His family came around at the end. His sister was one of those strident Christians who thought he was hellbound for his lifestyle. We all had to fight it out at the end as Denny had insisted on being kept in his bed for three days after his death in keeping with the Tibetan Buddhist view that it takes the consciousness up to three days to leave the body, and that it is important not to disturb it in any way. His family thought this was New Age crap, and they tried through legal means to wrest the body from us. But Denny had nailed the whole thing down, with a power of attorney and lawyers, and his activist friends knew how to fight such a battle.

He got his three days, though in the end he was not cremated. It had been the lawyer’s idea.

“You guys have to make a goodwill gesture,” he’d sighed to us. “You won this thing, but it’s a death, and it’s supposed to be about rest. You need to give them something, some kind of goodwill gesture. Giving them his body would be that.” He looked at us with his brows raised to see if we’d accept the idea.

We did. For Denny and his rest.

Denny had told me once how the American Indian tribes of the plains had kept what were called winter counts, picture stories on buffalo hides of important things that happened in each particular year. Denny’s body was his winter count; his final winter count. And it made it difficult to watch him be buried. I actually said to his mother—what politic way was there to put it?—that I thought his body was a record of something important, and as such should be preserved like a text or work of art. It was rhetorical—I think—but she was offended, and I realized too late my mistake. She was, after all, appalled by his body and what she saw as the brazenness with which he had shamed both her and himself.

She snapped at me, with disgust: “I’m sure you have pictures, lots of pictures.” I let it pass, reluctant to tell her that Denny destroyed all his pictures toward the end and allowed no one to photograph him, explaining that he was the volatile center, a Tibetan sand mandala, impermanent, and thus all the more sacred. He talked about Black Elk and the tree at the center of the world. Obsessed by then with all manner of tragic figures and paraphrasing Crazy Horse, he had explained, “Why would I let you take from me my shadow?”

 

And so in death, Denny does not speak.

 

Of course I think of him often, and my tattoo makes him hard to forget even when I want to. It’s on the hand that I masturbate with. Perhaps it’s my guilt, but it’s been disturbing me, masturbating with this symbol of enlightenment on my palm. How incongruous. Or not. In the Tantrayana, Denny had once explained, all action can lead to enlightenment if the intention is noble.

And so I too have been marked by a man I loved. San Francisco, my own private Auschwitz—which must be German or Polish for Idaho. Marked in the end with a language I cannot read. It might as well be Vinny’s Zen blob. My koan. Denny. Love is a koan then too. And Denny’s tattoos like a poem I remember; like a prayer. A song, and I’m not sure of the words. But I sing it, hum Denny as I reach out with this hand, as I wave with it, eat with it, jack off with it. My intention. I’m no different from the rest. A symbol for something; a connection. No doubt I’ll end up in someone else’s story: a dude with a Tibetan syllable on his hand. To slap their faces with Denny’s dharma, to transform their cocks into Buddha-cock as I pull upon them, to lay gently upon their hearts my hand like a blessing; to remind them they are loved, we are loved. To bring them Denny’s news: the jewel is in the lotus, or the tattoo, or the body, or the cock, or this story even.

“Open . . . open to me.”

 

© 2007 Trebor Healey

Trebor Healey is the author of the 2004 Ferro-Grumley and Violet Quill award-winning novel, Through It Came Bright Colors (Harrington Park Press), and a poetry collection, Sweet Son of Pan, (Suspect Thoughts, 2006). His short story collection, A Perfect Scar & Other Stories, was recently released. Trebor lives in Los Angeles. www.treborhealey.com.