Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings Read online

  ‘I been at it sixteen years now,’ Carmey says, leaning back against his picturebook wall, ‘and you might say I’m still learning. My first job was in Maine, during the war. They heard I was a tattoist and called me out to this station of Wacs….’

  ‘To tattoo them?’ I ask.

  ‘To tattoo their numbers on, nothing more or less.’

  ‘Weren’t some of them scared?’

  ‘Oh, sure, sure. But some of them came back. I got two Wacs in one day for a tattoo. Well they hemmed. And they hawed. “Look,” I tell them, “you came in the other day and you knew which one you wanted, what’s the trouble?”’

  ‘“Well it’s not what we want but where we want it,” one of them pipes up. “Well if that’s all it is you can trust me,” I say, “I’m like a doctor, see? I handle so many women it means nothing.” “Well I want three roses,” this one says: “one on my stomach and one on each cheek of my butt.” So the other one gets up courage, you know how it is, and asks for one rose….’

  ‘Littel ones or big ones?’ Mr Tomolillo won’t let a detail slip.

  ‘About like that up there,’ Carmey points to a card of roses on the wall, each bloom the size of a Brussels sprout. ‘The biggest going. So I did the roses and told them: “Ten dollars off the price if you come back and show them to me when the scab’s gone.”’

  ‘Did they come?’ Ned wants to know.

  ‘You bet they did.’ Carmey blows a smoke ring that hangs wavering in the air a foot from his nose, the blue, vaporous outline of a cabbage-rose.

  ‘You wanta know,’ he says, ‘a crazy law? I could tattoo you anywhere,’ he looks me over with great care, ‘anywhere at all. Your back. Your rear.’ His eyelids droop, you’d think he was praying. ‘Your breasts. Anywhere at all but your face, hands and feet.’

  Mr Tomolillo asks: ‘Is that a Federal law?’

  Carmey nods. ‘A Federal law. I got a blind,’ he juts a thumb at the dusty-slatted venetian blind drawn up in the display window. ‘I let that blind down, and I can do privately any part of the body. Except face, hands and feet.’

  ‘I bet it’s because they show,’ I say.

  ‘Sure. Take in the Army, at drill. The guys wouldn’t look right. Their faces and hands would stand out, they couldn’t cover up.’

  ‘However that may be,’ Mr Tomolillo says, ‘I think it is a shocking law, a totalitarian law. There should be a freedom about personal adornment in any democracy. I mean, if a lady wants a rose on the back of her hand, I should think….’

  ‘She should have it,’ Carmey finishes with heat. ‘People should have what they want, regardless. Why, I had a little lady in here the other day,’ Carmey levels the air with the flat of his hand not five feet from the floor. ‘So high. Wanted Calvary, the whole works, on her back, and I gave it to her. Eighteen hours it took.’

  I eye the thieves and angels on the poster of Mount Calvary with some doubt. ‘Didn’t you have to shrink it down a bit?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Or leave off an angel?’ Ned wonders. ‘Or a bit of the foreground?’

  ‘Not a bit of it. A thirty-five dollar job in full color, thieves, angels, Old English—the works. She went out of the shop proud as punch. It’s not every little lady’s got all Calvary in full color on her back. Oh, I copy photos people bring in, I copy movie stars. Anything they want, I do it. I’ve got some designs I wouldn’t put up on the wall on account of offending some of the clients. I’ll show you.’ Carmey opens the cardboard file-drawer on the table at the front of the shop. ‘The wife’s got to clean this up,’ he says. ‘It’s a terrible mess.’

  ‘Does your wife help you?’ I ask with interest.

  ‘Oh, Laura, she’s in the shop most of the day.’ For some reason Carmey sounds all at once solemn as a monk on Sunday. I wonder, does he use her for a come-on: Laura, the Tattooed Lady, a living masterpiece, sixteen years in the making. Not a white patch on her, ladies and gentlemen—look all you want to. ‘You should drop by and keep her company, she likes talk.’ He is rummaging around in the drawer, not coming up with anything, when he stops in his tracks and stiffens like a pointer.

  This big guy is standing in the doorway.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Carmey steps forward, the maestro he is.

  ‘I want that eagle you showed me.’

  Ned and Mr Tomolillo and I flatten ourselves against the side walls to let the guy into the middle of the room. He’ll be a sailor out of uniform in his peajacket and plaid wool shirt. His diamond-shaped head, width all between the ears, tapers up to a narrow plateau of cropped black hair.

  ‘The nine-dollar or the fifteen?’

  ‘The fifteen.’

  Mr Tomolillo sighs in gentle admiration.

  The sailor sits down in the chair facing Carmey’s swivel, shrugs out of his peajacket, unbuttons his left shirt cuff and begins slowly to roll up the sleeve.

  ‘You come right in here,’ Carmey says to me in a low, promising voice, ‘where you can get a good look. You’ve never seen a tattooing before.’ I squinch up and settle on the crate of papers in the corner at the left of Carmey’s chair, careful as a hen on eggs.

  Carmey flicks through the cardboard file again and this time digs out a square piece of plastic. ‘Is this the one?’

  The sailor looks at the eagle pricked out on the plastic. Then he says: ‘That’s right,’ and hands it back to Carmey.

  ‘Mmmm,’ Mr Tomolillo murmurs in honor of the sailor’s taste.

  Ned says: ‘That’s a fine eagle.’

  The sailor straightens with a certain pride. Carmey is dancing round him now, laying a dark-stained burlap cloth across his lap, arranging a sponge, a razor, various jars with smudged-out labels and a bowl of antiseptic on his worktable—finicky as a priest whetting his machete for the fatted calf. Everything has to be just so. Finally he sits down. The sailor holds out his right arm and Ned and Mr Tomolillo close in behind his chair, Ned leaning over the sailor’s right shoulder and Mr Tomolillo over his left. At Carmey’s elbow I have the best view of all.

  With a close, quick swipe of the razor, Carmey clears the sailor’s forearm of its black springing hair, wiping the hair off the blade’s edge and onto the floor with his thumb. Then he anoints the area of bared flesh with vaseline from a small jar on top of his table. ‘You ever been tattooed before?’

  ‘Yeah.’ The sailor is no gossip. ‘Once.’ Already his eyes are locked in a vision of something on the far side of Carmey’s head, through the walls and away in the thin air beyond the four of us in the room.

  Carmey is sprinkling a black powder on the face of the plastic square and rubbing the powder into the pricked holes. The outline of the eagle darkens. With one flip, Carmey presses the plastic square powder-side against the sailor’s greased arm. When he peels the plastic off, easy as skin off an onion, the outline of an eagle, wings spread, claws hooked for action, frowns up from the sailor’s arm.

  ‘Ah!’ Mr Tomolillo rocks back on his cork heels and casts a meaning look at Ned. Ned raises his eyebrows in approval. The sailor allows himself a little quirk of the lip. On him it is as good as a smile.

  ‘Now,’ Carmey takes down one of the electric needles, pitching it rabbit-out-of-the-hat, ‘I am going to show you how we make a nine-dollar eagle a fifteen-dollar eagle.’

  He presses a button on the needle. Nothing happens.

  ‘Well,’ he sighs, ‘it’s not working.’

  Mr Tomolillo groans. ‘Not again?’

  Then something strikes Carmey and he laughs and flips a switch on the wall behind him. This time when he presses the needle it buzzes and sparks blue. ‘No connection, that’s what it was.’

  ‘Thank heaven,’ says Mr Tomolillo.

  Carmey fills the needle from a pot of black dye on the Lazy Susan. ‘This same eagle,’ Carmey lowers the needle to the eagle’s right wingtip, ‘for nine dollars is only black and red. For fifteen dollars you’re going to see a blend of four colors.’ The needle steers along the li
nes laid by the powder, ‘Black, green, brown and red. We’re out of blue at the moment or it’d be five colors.’ The needle skips and backtalks like a pneumatic drill but Carmey’s hand is steady as a surgeon’s. ‘How I love eagles!’

  ‘I believe you live on Uncle Sam’s eagles,’ says Mr Tomolillo.

  Black ink seeps over the curve of the sailor’s arm and into the stiff, stained butcher’s-apron canvas covering his lap, but the needle travels on, scalloping the wing feathers from tip to root. Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, heart’s-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream.

  ‘The guys complain,’ Carmey singsongs. ‘Week after week I get the same complaining: What have you got new? We don’t want the same type eagle, red and black. So I figure out this blend. You wait. A solid color eagle.’

  The eagle is losing itself in a spreading thundercloud of black ink. Carmey stops, sloshes his needle in the bowl of antiseptic, and a geyser of white blooms up to the surface from the bowl’s bottom. Then Carmey dips a big, round cinnamon-colored sponge in the bowl and wipes away the ink from the sailor’s arm. The eagle emerges from its hood of bloodied ink, a raised outline on the raw skin.

  ‘Now you’re gonna see something.’ Carmey twirls the Lazy Susan till the pot of green is under his thumb and picks another needle from the rack.

  The sailor is gone from behind his eyes now, off somewhere in Tibet, Uganda or the Barbados, oceans and continents away from the blood drops jumping in the wake of the wide green swaths Carmey is drawing in the shadow of the eagle’s wings.

  About this time I notice an odd sensation. A powerful sweet perfume is rising from the sailor’s arm. My eyes swerve from the mingling red and green and I find myself staring intently into the waste bucket by my left side. As I watch the calm rubble of colored candy wrappers, cigarette butts and old wads of muddily-stained kleenex, Carmey tosses a tissue soaked with fresh red onto the heap. Behind the silhoutted heads of Ned and Mr Tomolillo the panthers, roses and red-nippled ladies wink and jitter. If I fall forward or to the right, I will jog Carmey’s elbow and make him stab the sailor and ruin a perfectly good fifteen-dollar eagle not to mention disgracing my sex. The only alternative is a dive into the bucket of bloody papers.

  ‘I’m doing the brown now,’ Carmey sings out a mile away, and my eyes rivet again on the sailor’s blood-sheened arm. ‘When the eagle heals, the colors will blend right into each other, like on a painting.’

  Ned’s face is a scribble of black India ink on a seven-color crazy-quilt.

  ‘I’m going …’ I make my lips move, but no sound comes out.

  Ned starts toward me but before he gets there the room switches off like a light.

  The next thing is, I am looking into Carmey’s shop from a cloud with the X-ray eyes of an angel and hearing the tiny sound of a bee spitting blue fire.

  ‘The blood get her?’ It is Carmey’s voice, small and far.

  ‘She looks all white,’ says Mr Tomolillo. ‘And her eyes are funny.’

  Carmey passes something to Mr Tomolillo. ‘Have her sniff that.’ Mr Tomolillo hands something to Ned. ‘But not too much.’

  Ned holds something to my nose.

  I sniff, and I am sitting in the chair at the front of the shop with Mount Calvary as a backrest. I sniff again. Nobody looks angry so I have not bumped Carmey’s needle. Ned is screwing the cap on a little flask of yellow liquid. Yardley’s smelling salts.

  ‘Ready to go back?’ Mr Tomolillo points kindly to the deserted orange crate.

  ‘Almost.’ I have a strong instinct to stall for time. I whisper in Mr Tomolillo’s ear which is very near to me, he is so short, ‘Do you have any tattoos?’

  Under the mushroom-brim of his fedora Mr Tomolillo’s eyes roll heavenward. ‘My gracious no! I’m only here to see about the springs. The springs in Mr Carmichael’s machine have a way of breaking in the middle of a customer.’

  ‘How annoying.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for. We’re testing out a new spring now, a much heavier spring. You know how distressing it is when you’re in the dentist’s chair and your mouth is full of what-not …’

  ‘Balls of cotton and little metal siphons …?’

  ‘Precisely. And in the middle of this the dentist turns away,’ Mr Tomolillo half-turns his back in illustration and makes an evil, secretive face, ‘and buzzes about in the corner for ten minutes with the machinery, you don’t know what.’ Mr Tomolillo’s face smooths out like linen under a steam iron. ‘That’s what I’m here to see about, a stronger spring. A spring that won’t let the customer down.’

  By this time I am ready to go back to my seat of honor on the orange crate. Carmey has just finished with the brown and in my absence the inks have indeed blended into one another. Against the shaven skin, the lacerated eagle is swollen in tri-colored fury, claws curved sharp as butcher’s hooks.

  ‘I think we could redden the eye a little?’

  The sailor nods, and Carmey opens the lid on a pot of dye the color of tomato ketchup. As soon as he stops working with the needle, the sailor’s skin sends up its blood beads, not just from the bird’s black outline now, but from the whole rasped, rainbowed body.

  ‘Red,’ Carmey says, ‘really picks things up.’

  ‘Do you save the blood?’ Mr Tomolillo asks suddenly.

  ‘I should think,’ says Ned, ‘you might well have some arrangement with the Red Cross.’

  ‘With a blood bank!’ The smelling salts have blown my head clear as a blue day on Monadnock. ‘Just put a little basin on the floor to catch the drippings.’

  Carmey is picking out a red eye on the eagle. ‘We vampires don’t share our blood.’ The eagle’s eye reddens but there is now no telling blood from ink. ‘You never heard of a vampire do that, did you?’

  ‘Nooo …’ Mr Tomolillo admits.

  Carmey floods the flesh behind the eagle with red and the finished eagle poises on a red sky, born and baptized in the blood of its owner.

  The sailor drifts back from parts unknown.

  ‘Nice?’ With his sponge Carmey clears the eagle of the blood filming its colors the way a sidewalk artist might blow the pastel dust from a drawing of the White House, Liz Taylor or Lassie-Come-Home.

  ‘I always say,’ the sailor remarks to nobody in particular, ‘when you get a tattoo, get a good one. Nothing but the best.’ He looks down at the eagle which has begun in spite of Carmey’s swabbing to bleed again. There is a little pause. Carmey is waiting for something and it isn’t money. ‘How much to write Japan under that?’

  Carmey breaks into a pleased smile. ‘One dollar.’

  ‘Write Japan, then.’

  Carmey marks out the letters on the sailor’s arm, an extra flourish to the J’s hook, the loop of the P, and the final N, a love-letter to the eagle-conquered Orient. He fills the needle and starts on the J.

  ‘I understand,’ Mr Tomolillo observes in his clear, lecturer’s voice, ‘Japan is a center of tattooing.’

  ‘Not when I was there,’ the sailor says. ‘It’s banned.’

  ‘Banned!’ says Ned. ‘What for?’

  ‘Oh, they think it’s barbarous nowadays.’ Carmey doesn’t lift his eyes from the second A, the needle responding like a broken-in bronc under his masterly thumb. ‘There are operators, of course. Sub rosa. There always are.’ He puts the final curl on the N and sponges off the wellings of blood which seem bent on obscuring his artful lines. ‘That what you wanted?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  Carmey folds a wad of Kleenex into a rough bandage and lays it over the eagle and Japan. Spry as a shopgirl wrapping a gift package he tapes the tissue into place.

  The sailor gets up and hitches into his peajacket. Several schoolboys, lanky, with pale, pimply faces, are crowding the doorway, watching. Without a word the sailor takes out his wallet and peels sixteeen dollar bills off a green roll. Carmey transfers the cash to his wallet. The schoolboys fall back to let the sailor pass into the street.


  ‘I hope you didn’t mind my getting dizzy.’

  Carmey grins. ‘Why do you think I’ve got those salts so close to hand? I have big guys passing out cold. They get egged in here by their buddies and don’t know how to get out of it. I got people getting sick to their ears in that bucket.’

  ‘She’s never got like that before,’ Ned says. ‘She’s seen all sorts of blood. Babies born. Bull fights. Things like that.’

  ‘You was all worked up.’ Carmey offers me a cigarette, which I accept, takes one himself, and Ned takes one, and Mr Tomolillo says no-thank-you. ‘You was all tensed, that’s what did it.’

  ‘How much is a heart?’

  The voice comes from a kid in a black leather jacket in the front of the shop. His buddies nudge each other and let out harsh, puppy-barks of laughter. The boy grins and flushes all at once under his purple stipple of acne. ‘A heart with a scroll under it and a name on the scroll.’

  Carmey leans back in his swivel chair and digs his thumbs into his belt. The cigarette wobbles on his bottom lip. ‘Four dollars,’ he says without batting an eye.

  ‘Four dollars?’ The boy’s voice swerves up and cracks in shrill disbelief. The three of them in the doorway mutter among themselves and shuffle back and forth.

  ‘Nothing here in the heart line under three dollars.’ Carmey doesn’t kow-tow to the tight-fisted. You want a rose, you want a heart in this life, you pay for it. Through the nose.

  The boy wavers in front of the placards of hearts on the wall, pink, lush hearts, hearts with arrows through them, hearts in the center of buttercup wreaths. ‘How much,’ he asks in a small, craven voice, ‘for just a name?’