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