Behaving Responsibly

Hitchhiked to San Diego one winter night with a boot knife in my pocket and a cardboard sign that said San Diego: Please.  There were palm trees waving in the humid air and rolling mountain hills.  I called up Rachel and Stephen on a pay phone then sat down on the curb and smoked my Harley Davidson cigarettes one after the other.

When they drove up, I said, "I'll sleep in your car.  Is that all right?"

"You won't sleep in no damn car," said Stephen.

"Yeah, man, I'll sleep in the car."

"You look scary," Rachel said.

The next day we went down to Tijuana and we walked around and bought stuff.  I bought a poncho and a cow’s hoof.  We decided to get tattoos.  A knife salesman gave us the address.  It was up above a pharmacy and down an empty corridor, blank doors on either side and at the end of the hallway, on the left a wooden door had scrawled upon it the word, “Tattoo.”  Stephen knocked.

Someone inside shouted something.  Stephen opened up the door.  We went inside.

Señor Paco had long red hair, a long goatee, and a bullring in his nose.  He grinned at us, his gold tooth glinting in the dim light from the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.  

Stephen showed him the design—Africa with the colors of the Cameroonian flag, red, yellow, green. 

“Are the needles clean?” I asked.  I was behaving responsibly. 

He took a needle from his desk drawer and showed it to me.  “Is it clean?” I asked again.  He handed me a magnifying glass.  Stephen, Rachel, and I took turns peering at the needle through the glass, satisfying ourselves that there were no germs or dirt.  He pulled out inks and a small mechanical device.  He plugged the needle into the device and applied pressure to a foot pedal and the thing made a loud clacking noise.  He shaved my leg, twisted to the side, my foot resting in his lap.  He dipped the device into ink and then stepped on the pedal and applied the needle to my leg.  He held my foot tightly and began to paint, pausing time to time to wipe away the blood.  My mind wandered as I watched him work. 

Stephen was next.  He asked for the design to be put on his left shoulder.

"Is that you?" I asked, pointing to a photo in a tattoo magazine.

Señor Paco smiled.  It was a black and white photo of him in a crowd of cheering, yelling people.  He was in the center of the crowd, his mouth wide open in a snarl, his head thrown back, a beer held in the air.  "That was a tattoo convention in Nevada," Señor Paco said.  He continued tattooing Stephen’s arm.   

"What's that?" Rachel asked, pointing to a jar of dirt and yellow liquid on his desk.

"A fetish," Señor Paco said, "to protect me from my enemies."

Stephen looked up from his trance.  

"A fetish?" he asked.

"Yes, but I don't really believe that shit," said Señor Paco.  "I don't practice black magic, only white."

Stephen grinned, happy as a clam.

Señor Paco finished with Stephen and bandaged his arm.  Then Rachel took her turn and Señor Paco tattooed her lower back.  She bent over the chair and he tattooed her for a half an hour as the sun went down and Stephen and I flipped through magazines, looking for more pictures of Señor Paco.  We never found any more, though we looked through dozens, scrutinizing every page.

When she was finished she gingerly reclasped her belt and stood up to her feet.

"Oh, yeah," Señor Paco said and dug some papers from his desk.  "Sign these please."  We signed the release forms, promising that we were sober, of age, and not afflicted with AIDS or hepatitis.  

As we walked down the street towards the bridge, a man yelled at us from across the street.  It was the knife salesman from before.  "Here," he said, thrusting a butterfly knife into Stephen’s hands.  "Five dollars, okay?"

"Yeah, okay," Stephen said.  "Want to see our tattoos?"  He peeled the gauze away from his arm.

"Very good," said the man.  We walked back across the border.

A few days later, Stephen and Rachel drove me north to Los Angeles.  Then we just drove around until dark, taking random roads into the mountains to the east.  When it was dark, we stopped beside a field.  Music played on the radio and we sat in the car.  We talked for a while.  Stephen rhythmically nodded his head up and down to the music on the radio, looking out at the fields, now a gray color shimmering across the rolling landscape fading.