Harmony: Somebody remembered to pick me up the sweetest unicorn. Guess someone was feeling guilty for standing me up in tenth grade. Brad: What? Had to get her something. She sired me. Peaches: Sire-whipped.

'Beneath You'


The Great Write Way  

A place for Buffistas to discuss, beta and otherwise deal and dish on their non-fan fiction projects.


erikaj - Feb 26, 2004 8:45:59 am PST #3405 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

Some of you may remember this...I think I've finished, but something still doesn't seem right yet.
Where do I go from here? Making my Mark: Why A Crip Got Ink When I was a little girl, the current mainstream tattooing trend hadn’t started yet. But every once and a while I’d see a guy wearing a greenish and probably home or jail-inked one. But I wasn’t allowed to ask about it, ever. Kind of like how people told other kids not to ask about me and my chair. So I wouldn’t, because although I was very curious, I was a very good girl who tried not to hurt people’s feelings. I wondered why anyone would get something on purpose that people had to be stopped from staring at. I would give mine up in a minute.

In the 1990s, the first tattoos start showing up at my high school. Only the wilder kids from the class I refer to as Idiot Math, and the people who sit in the back and get mad in the journalism lab when they are not allowed to review local bands or write about hemp have them now. Or at least, I never saw anybody’s ankles in AP History or Accelerated English. We are all learning How To Make Good Impressions. I wear pink sweaters and end sentences with questions a lot. I am convinced that my disability will be but a minor roadblock in my path to success, but I never even ask, because that would break my unwritten rule about talking about it, which I do maybe four times in three years. The fourth year, I leave it in the offices of the VR counselor and the occupational therapist, two pleasant but extremely vague individuals who forget who I am every week.As does my guidance counselor, except to nag me about taking higher-level math. I decide a tattoo is not very responsible and start looking down my nose at them.

I finally move out of my parent’s house at age nineteen. Yay, freedom, right? Not exactly. I’m now living in a “licensed setting” the better to learn “Independent living skills” with. I try to learn them from people who make out with each other on the late-night shift and eat tacos they leave in their cars. But when they are with me, they are being paid to painstakingly recreate “America 1954.” Where everyone eats meat with their breakfast, June Cleaver keeps clutter to a minimum, and women like being “ladies”.

I try to resist but the acculturation is too strong for me then.Maybe the fact that they do pay my electric bill does mean they can tell me to get a haircut. I keep my hair long and shaggy for two years. I hate it but they hate it more. My body is not my body...just something on somebody’s scheduling checklist. I barely care enough to pick my clothes. What’s the difference? It’s just the same old me in there. The few funky or low-cut things stay buried in the closet...they aren’t appropriate. And when we go in the “community” we should always look appropriate so people think the staff do a good job. The fact that the staff smell like “bar” sometimes is not up for discussion...that’s personal, and they don’t want to get personal. Getting personal with me is “furthering an independent living goal.” So I always know (from somebody else) if my bra fits correctly, my deodorant still works, or if I should shave more often. I already think I live in the community, I mean, go out in the street and there it is. Full of fat women in tube tops and college students in Charlie Manson t-shirts. Maybe they need programs,too.

I get a boyfriend. Finally. He’s mostly my ally and my support, but he wants to dress me, too. I let my “O’Connell cut” grow out, cause that’s what gals with boyfriends do, right? Please with their appearance? He tells me he wants to run his fingers through it. I figure shorter’s better for that, uncoordinated fingers might need a shorter trip.But, what the hell, it grows like weeds.I suggest he do the same for me, just a little, despite the conviction I now have that my opinions count for squat, and I’d best endeavor to have as few as possible, like gas. He works at a school, he tells me, people wouldn’t understand.

He starts not to like the person I’ve become, with the “I don’t care. What do you think?” to every question in the world. Which I thought was some kind of male fantasy, so in addition to being incredibly insecure, I’m confused. I’m still afraid to mix and match in my closet.
We kiss and have long discussions about “my self-esteem problem” One memorable occasion, we do both at once. He doesn’t understand. He tells me I’m pretty all the time. Why don’t I believe him? I tell him he is humoring me, which is sometimes true,because sometimes the body image demons do drive me to the kind of insanity where I ask if my butt looks big after we spend the night together, but sometimes he is overcome with emotion and says it anyway. He ruins the moment one night by asking “Why do you feel so bad about yourself? You have me,” I think I call him a moron, but I think a lot of things I don’t say in this period. He moves away before we can tear the relationship completely to bits.

What does this have to do with my getting ready to have an artist treat my body like I treat typing paper? Plenty...I eye people’s body art on the sly for a few more years, not feeling enough ownership in my body to claim it and mark it up. Someone could withold disinfection and blame it on me, punishing me but not. Oops. Then, I turn thirty.

Ex- anthropology student that I am, my mind is full of scarification and tooth removal rituals. I missed the 16th birthday driver’s license ritual and passed up the 21st birthday “get really hammered’ ritual for lack of congenial company...I’m going to have the ritual observance now, I think.
The first thing I notice is that nobody stares at me in the tattoo place. I’m the one looking at what’s different as my eyes follow the jungle scene on one of the artists’ forearms. Later on Homicide, when Meldrick talks about how white people mess ourselves up in


deborah grabien - Feb 26, 2004 9:26:52 am PST #3406 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

Ex- anthropology student that I am, my mind is full of scarification and tooth removal rituals.

Oh, lordy, erika. For some reason, this really talks to me.


erikaj - Feb 26, 2004 9:31:19 am PST #3407 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

Really. Cool. I was just being honest. I wrote a whole paper once on Navajo menarche rituals, which I wish I still had.And it got cut off, so I need to fix that somehow...


erikaj - Feb 26, 2004 9:53:45 am PST #3408 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

Making my Mark: Why A Crip Got Ink
The first thing I notice is that nobody stares at me in the tattoo place. I’m the one looking at what’s different as my eyes follow the jungle scene on one of the artists’ forearms. Later on Homicide, when Meldrick talks about how white people mess ourselves up in the weirdest ways, he was the one I thought of. My unmarked body makes me weird here, nothing else. I could get used to that, being the normal one, the straight, Jo Ann Average.

I almost back out when I smell the alcohol...nothing good in my life ever came with that attached...I feel primal doctor fear. I almost back out again when I see the artist, with studs in his ears and “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on his fingers. But they have my credit card and my John Hancock...I am as a hostage. I take comfort in two icons placed in the cube...Tony Montana in full “Say hello to my little friend!” mode, and a picture of the artist with his newborn baby and a beatific expression on his face. My kind of people.(I think the fingers are tattoo-artist humor but I can’t be sure.) He is gentle as he puts his hand on my back, and for thirty seconds I’m in love.

A man has not put his hand there for a long time. It passes and we talk about why he doesn’t do tats on “drunk idiots”. They talk too much, bleed too much, and move around too much.. The needle machine starts to work and I think I’ve learned what “feel the burn” means. I breathe into the pain like at support group, and it eases.
My chair rocks because I forgot to put the brakes on. He asks me about it because I’m the first person in a wheelchair he’s ever worked on,which makes me proud in a silly way, like when I was ten and read about the first women doctor, lawyer, tribal chief, pit boss. Partly what makes a ritual a ritual is the endurance, I think.

It takes an hour and feels both faster and slower...I selected the black bird to make a dramatic statement against my vampire-pale skin...I’m sweating in the leather pants I wore not to look like Suzie Suburb, but I think I have a rookie face...I could have spared myself the schvitz. -more- He tells me the tattoo parlor’s other branch in Utah does a very brisk business. “Those young Mormon girls,” he says, swabbing at my shoulder, “They’re just looking to rebel any way they can, while they can.” After it’s over, practically the whole place comes out to congratulate me and praise my guts for picking such a big design. It feels good, the approval of strangers, which makes me wonder how big of a statement this really is, but hey, it’s my shoulder, right? Finally something I’ve inflicted on my body with meaning, shape, boundaries, even some aesthetic.(My internal scars are still ugly)Maybe people think the pain should have brought me to my knees, even dressed as they are in my faux-Bohemian, faux-leather pants.I feel like a woman for the first time, which is big, even after having been turned into a goofy pop song. I was such a late bloomer that the physical and interpersonal changes that should have brought that feeling about were greeted with “Well, finally...” more than anything else. But this is mine. And it didn’t hurt a bit.


Deena - Feb 26, 2004 9:56:47 am PST #3409 of 10001
How are you me? You need to stop that. Only I can be me. ~Kara

Oh Erika, that's lovely.


erikaj - Feb 26, 2004 10:01:36 am PST #3410 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

Thank you. Writing about that made me think about a lot of stuff, like that first bf wasn't really perfect, like I'd been thinking when we broke up...that I was crazy for not choosing him. Among other things.


Lyra Jane - Feb 26, 2004 10:05:11 am PST #3411 of 10001
Up with the sun

Erika, that's really good. You should submit it to BUST.


deborah grabien - Feb 26, 2004 10:13:02 am PST #3412 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

Me too, with the submission-encouraging. I think BUST would like it.


Lyra Jane - Feb 26, 2004 10:18:20 am PST #3413 of 10001
Up with the sun

Bust would like it, Jane might. (The magazine) Bitch, maybe?

I'm trying to think of other alt.girly pubs.


erikaj - Feb 26, 2004 10:18:50 am PST #3414 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

Yeah? Not too freaky? Maybe not for BUST...