For the past two months I have been an apprentice at a tattoo shop. I have loved every minute of this experience and have felt like I have finally found my calling. The opportunity was granted to me by three artists: Charles, Bob and Paul. This is the story of Paul. When I first started going into the shop with my portfolio I had seen a small, feeble looking man who managed to pull off a gigantic swagger. He kicked back in a lean at all times and moved as if he were immune to the passing of time. He looked at my portfolio one day. I was visibly intimidated. He didn’t say a word and handed my sketch book back to me, his large, droopy hazel eyes telling me I had already failed, but he still said nothing. I was crushed. Later, when I started reporting to the shop I found a different person. His first words to me were “what’s up, bro?”. I was later to find that this was more or less a mantra for Paul. Of all of the artists he was the most heavy handed in telling me I was doomed. He told me strictly that I wouldn’t be working any time soon, that he had apprenticed for a year and a half, and that we were going to do this the traditional way. I felt welcomed by the austerity. It seemed like a privilege. His work is old school. Heavy black, traditional design with a fifties palette. He let his needles hang out of his machine like fangs out of a viper, and his hazel eyes watched what he did like truckers watch the lines on roads: intuitively and serenely. His malice evaporated when he realized I was for real after he had tattooed my neck with a design of an origami bird in the center of three origami flowers and a banner that says “Lifer”. This was to be Paul’s last good tattoo. He left for Florida to visit family. We were all excited for him to come back, not only because work flow had been noticeably slowed, but because we missed him. I didn’t know at the time that he had a problem. Charles told me that Paul had just recently cleaned himself off of booze but had extremely violent withdrawal symptoms which necessitated hospitalization and that he was personally worried about Paul relapsing. I also worried as if I had been instructed to. When his plane was scheduled to arrive I was waiting in the van. I had volunteered to go, excited to talk with Paul about the screen printing business that had manifested while he had been away, secretly eager for his approval and to feel like I had moved on to a new step in my education where I had proven myself valuable. I was disappointed to find him wandering aimlessly and sickly through the terminal, clearly drunk, the other passengers obviously distressed by his presence and likely what he had done on the plane. After several false attempts and much embarrassment I finally brought Paul a bag which he recognized but did not match the description I had been given. The cops were looking at us so I hurried us out of the terminal. He stared at me for the duration of the ride as if he wanted to punch my face off, like I had slept with his wife or something. He said a number of things that made me think that he would try to kill both of us, or just him, or that he might have even creepier plans. He was slurring and swearing at me, telling me that nothing was going to work and that I would never make it in this industry because… you know. I didn’t know. I drove forward and stared at the road like it was a line in someone’s skin and I was turning it black forever. He drank the whole ride. I contemplated the falling of my idol. At the shop his condition worsened over the days. He fell down the stairs. He seemed drunk in the morning but he didn’t smell like booze and didn’t move like a drunk. He was too slow. Charles wouldn’t let him work, took all his money and told him that he wasn’t going to work until he was clean. Later that day Paul started a tattoo, though nobody still remembers who ok’d it. It was a scripture verse on a chest, something that I would consider standard in our shop, our daily bread kind of tattoo. Script. But what I saw at the end of that tattoo session was not anything like the work I had seen before. The customer was bleeding profusely and complaining that Paul had bogged the machine down, or stopped the needle, in his flesh several times. The letters were not uniformly aligned either vertically or horizontally. There were extra lines, missing lines, bad filling. In short there was no letter of this entire verse that was of professional quality. Paul defended his work. Charles sent me to drive him home. In the car Paul told me that he wanted to die. That life had become too much for him. That he could see that in me, too, and that like him I would turn from Charles and his Holy scripture towards a life of self-destruction and I told him that I was only there to learn how to tattoo from him. The next morning was cold and I was excited and high when I approached the shop. I saw Paul on the porch. It was church day so I knew nobody would be in for a while. I became anxious. Charles had told me I was to remove Paul if he were to return. I sat down in front of him and he began, in the true form of a teacher, to tell me stories. He told me about sitting on a stoop on A street in New York with a friend and how they would tell somebody they could buy them weed and then they would lock themselves in their apartment and shoot heroin while the person knocked angrily on the door for their money. He told me that I’ll see things like people getting killed for their machines, people selling their whole lives for dope, or throwing ending up in prison because of a hooker or a stripper. His large, dopey hazel eyes pleaded like a detainees for death. He was mumbling then. I became annoyed. I told him to get his shit together and I walked back to my house and then the store. He was gone when I came back so I sat on the porch and smoked cigarettes and drank Mountain Dew and thought about how great it will be to have my own tattoo machines. Three hours later I was cleaning my offset press in the garage when a cop car pulled into the driveway. I watched Charles and the cop talk at a distance. I knew. I had already said to Charles that I thought Paul would die soon. Charles looked out at me and went in the shop. I found him at Paul’s station, stalled in the process of looking through his designs. He didn’t look up. I said “Is Paul dead, Charles?” and with his head bowed Charles said: “Yeah, he’s dead. It is what you thought it was.” He was looking for information on Paul’s next of kin. We are the closest thing to family he has here. They found his body in a river. Nobody knows what happened to him. On my first day in the shop he said: “When a tattoo artist dies he gets a pauper’s funeral. His friends put him in a sack and throw him in a hole in the ground. Welcome to the industry.”
The Paper Trail 