The Paper Trail

Don’t tell the debt collectors but I’ve been hiding in the country. Taking some time with my family to figure out who the fuck I am. I think I’ve got that question pretty licked. I’m the inevitable, given the givens. I am what I said I wanted to be, and I am who went and did and said all those things I did and said. I’m the one who has seen at least three dozen good plans turn rotten and wither and I presume it is from the radiation caused by my mental illness. My personality, if you will. I just can’t tone it down.

I am a narcissist and I have always been one and I am only mildly repentant of this this social faux pas on the grounds that everyone else around me is so flamboyantly fucked up as well that I am forced to admit that even my transgressions are normal, it is only that I see them so loudly and intensely that for me they are everything. Everything I have ever done has been about me, for me. Judge away. This trait renders me impervious to shame from ridicule unless it comes from within. I chose a lifestyle that suited this after finding that time and time again it was a worthless effort to ally myself with others. I find managing all of the feelings involved extremely boring.

But what kind of future am I going to have like this? With my stupid blog, some pictures of my work. The years go by and I feel more and more like a tired and sad old clown. Everywhere the writing is on the wall: Get a Job. I don’t think anyone really believes I can make it as a tattoo artist. Everyone is a critic. And no matter how good I feel I’ve done I always see this whisp of disappointment, this hope that it could have been that much cooler. I panic.

And I panic at night.

I can’t afford for this to not work. I can’t endure another failure. Another change of course. Another hasty retreat from Chicago. I already riddle myself with shame for all the other botched careers.

Fuck it. Whatever right? Worst case scenario I’ll be the VA’s worst nightmare. A public record of the life that could have been saved any number of times by them had I ever been treated like a real veteran but instead ends as a statistic because he ran out of options and he was scared of the world.

A lot of young Americans are fortifying their souls for a crucible of activism starting pretty soon here which has stirred in me some thoughts that seem relevant from my Grandma’s porch in a trailer park in Mid-Michigan. I will admit that I am living in an extremely self-centered delusion right from the beginning. This is a kind of rationale for why self-centered delusion is, in my esteem, not only a valid political and cultural reaction to an unreasonable America, but maybe better than it’s pretentious alternative: activism.

Firstly I feel it is important to address the way people’s hearts throb when anyone begins to criticize this holiest of time sinks. Many will question why one would even want an alternative to the current trend in activism, this pathetic occupy movement. I will use it as an example of why something new or different is called for and in the meantime try to persuade any offended activist types to consider being a little more critical of their work, and not just doing things so as to not alienate friends in established social hierarchies. I know that everyone involved in these activities dedicate an enormous amount of energy to making them “work”. But when they aren’t working we shouldn’t be scared to question ourselves and our motives. That is still an individual right.

So, the root of my concern, aside from all the We-think, is that when we protest, sit in front of buildings, talk amongst ourselves etc. we are allowing ourselves to become consumed by our subject, which is the same thing that we were trying to divorce, right? The modern world and all of it’s evil shenanigans, wars, profiteering, yada yada. We train ourselves to talk about them, to think about them, to devote free work into abstractly declaring war on complicated issues. In the end activism leaves people looking confused, starved and severely unqualified for socializing with the rest of the world that doesn’t live in a Metropolitan area.

Now, activist, socialist, whatever, do you really think that middle America gives a fuck about your protest? They are trying to raise families in the dried up scrap heap of the rust belt while you extoll the virtues of their rights. They don’t need you to speak for them. They aren’t dumb. They’re just specialized in other forms of labor than having opinions.

I learned the whole shpeal because I was eager for new friends who had open minds. I learned to say all the right things to not offend the many kinds of people in the world who were all very sensitive. These fucking classifications kept coming out of the woodwork and I’d have to become more vague to not end up in some shitty conversation with a bible beating hippy about why somebodies feelings are hurt. Get the fuck over it. We’re protesting things like the War. People get shot, get called sand-niggers and faggots, bombs explode. This shit happens. So put your stupid feelings away. Nobody gives a fuck. Nobody. A tougher skin is usually the answer, rather than trying to change the speach of the entire world. In the end words aren’t worth a damn thing anyway, so don’t stress your overly educated head about it. Worry about actions.

And purchases are actions. I’d wager you probably make a few of those every day. Who profits from that? I bet it’s not very radical. When I see a march now all I can think of is all of these people buying Mocha Frappachino’s from Starbucks, getting the Subway veggie delight, grabbing a quick Monster from the 7/11. Or a pack of cigarettes? Meanwhile you got papers flying everywhere, littering whole paths of destruction with socialist propagandha that some poor city worker will have to pick up with calloused hands, reading up on his Marxist philosophy during his smoke break, mayhaps? Not.

And again, middle America missed it because Dancing with the Stars was on, then they had a few more shows on Tevo.

Through all the protest and actions and political correctness what has really changed? The cell phones, the price of gas, the fabric of the soldiers uniforms and the vehicles adopted to counter street protests. Other than that we’re still warring, driving, eating and spending as much as we ever have.

I watch my grandma quietly decorate eggs and I can’t help but to think that our generation has something entirely wrong. We tried to turn away from something and we ignored old values that would serve us much better than the snotty behavior we endorse as political change. Maybe if we were more thrifty, resourceful, tough. Less whiny, indulgent and spaced out on technology. Maybe if instead of freaking out about what the rich assholes that run the world are going to do anyway we focused on doing something that made our time here more special, bettered ourselves so that we could offer more to our friends, challenged ourselves more to not just fit into something because we’re lonely and need friends. In short, if we all focused on ourselves more and less on giant, abstract concepts, we could find a different door into the future so that we can finally just leave this husk of a culture behind.

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.”

I started drawing dinosaurs when I was five. Mom bought me a whole set of books. I learned every line and every name of each of them. I walked squares around the yard rebuilding their world without the books. Putting the lines back together. In the country these internal worlds can become tangible places. In the silence of Bradley Road I could hear them eating big leaves… and each other.

What fantastic and beautiful things. This one eats leaves and this one eats the one that eats the leaves so it grows a tail with a club or spikes or travels in packs or all of the above. It wants sex without conversation so it adorns itself with frills and thick boned skulls to fight all the other boys. Metaphorically speaking I don’t think anything has changed about animals except we are more boring now and eat each other less frequently. Mastication, even, is still done with either teeth or a beak, though the arrangement has changed the plan has stayed the same. Why not think about dinosaurs for days. I want to be four again.

Well all of this was only to introduce you to how I started drawing. I drew and I daydreamed and that was just about it.

Later, when I admitted to myself that I could never be a dinosaur or have a dinosaur or see a dinosaur and especially not ride one, I decided that I liked to draw mutants instead because I saw an increased likelihood of becoming one of those.

I did become one of those. Socially deranged, completely unwilling to adapt to normative society, ready for something new.

I tried and I tried to be good at so many other things. I was a winemaker’s apprentice, a canon crew-member, a busboy, a screen printer/cleaner… the list goes on. Nothing stuck. Nothing felt forever. Nothing felt like it was what I was made to do.

And then comes tattooing. All of a sudden 25 years of drawing experience drawing dinosaurs and freaks and naked women becomes a Curriculum Vitae.

Draw every day. My hands are my future and it is time to draw that future out.

I feel like a rapper who writes inflamatory lyrics about the purity of their process. I took a gift and I hustled it and I worked harder than anybody I know to be the realest artist I could be and all of that work is finding a home now in my life. My dreams can grow to the next stage: to combine printing, tattooing, house fixing and coffee into a reasonable life.

And find someone to share that with.

Who is not insane.

This last weekend was my birthday. I turned 28. I’ve waited a long time for this year to come, all talk about how that was going to be my year. The truth was that I had no real idea of what the shape of that year could look like. You’ve seen my life. There is no sense in trying to plan anything. The night before this day I walked up the hill to East Hall to look out over this drizzly, drunken college town and to reflect on where I’ve been and where I was going. If only I knew then.

The next day, my birthday, I treated myself with a Greyhound ticket to Detroit and a phone call to the Veterans Administration to check in on a recent education package I had submitted to be an apprentice at a tattoo shop. Low and behold I was “VA’d” which is to be told that I was ineligible for benefits because the guidelines of the apprenticeship program state that the recipient must be paid hourly wages. No tattoo shop in the history of the trade has ever paid an apprentice. As far as I have heard we are expected to pay them. So that was a no go.

I got to chew on this despair while priming the walls of a house that my highschool friendhad purchased for $1300. We taped off the entire apartment and primed the second floor with two coats. We were elated to find that when we pulled the old carpeting up the hardwood floors underneath were beautiful and varnished. All told the house was really charming.

I had had this fear that I believe I share with a lot of people that these open, cheap hood homes in a crumbling city are probably beyond repair and in places where nobody would want to live. I was preconditioned to a state of pity for a place that I had never been for more than a few days.

But in this house I felt this real possibility to take these things that have been left like garbage by a fleeing population and to make them ours, to turn them into things that we can be proud of, and things that can house our new kind of life. Our generation has a unique challenge set ahead of it. We have been handed a miserable condition and Detroit is the very picture of this deal. But to me every one of these houses is an opportunity for our generation to excersize a discipline that nobody expects of us.

It is true of us that we are lazy when it comes to manual labor. We have all preferred to go to school for liberal academic careers and for the dream that we can make a lot of money without ever doing any physical work ever again. That is what the older generations think, and they are right. And sure we can say that they are fucked up too, and they are the ones that abandoned this whole city in the first place because they were scared of black people, but I’m not going to sit here and condone living out the story of the previous generation. Forget them. They fucked it all up and bought into debt. Look what happened. We should fight our laziness for ourselves because there is a good deal on the table.

Seeing all of this with the house and stewing on my recent disappointment I decided to do something a little drastic after seeing a commercial for a Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning Trade School which loudly advertised its openness to veterans. I thought about it for all of five minutes and made the call, signed the paperwork, the whole deal.

We finished priming in two days and by the end of it I’d changed my entire life plan and decided to move into a house with no heat, water, electricity or internet. I’m sure that living without each will light a fire under my ass to resolve each issue quickly.

It is difficult for me to convert my dream of how I wanted my life to be now that I am at the point where I wanted to be really announcing my career and in reality I am only announcing that I will be one of the slavish millions lost to American labor. I am not sure I am ready to give up the hipster dream of the luxurious life without taxation and labor, dressed to the nines and always glamorously high. The ambition to have every dreamy eyed dynamo burning a little brighter to outdo me, like I worked so hard to outdo the dynamos that burned before me. It was all very selfish but I wanted it very much and worked very honestly for it.

But nay, it never worked anyway. My career ends with me as a no named hack, a self indulgent whore who got too far ahead of himself, but catching himself in time made the stately decision to go out with some pride and get himself a real job doing things that men do. I will sooth myself with the deluded fantasy that I am moving out to the wastelands where my freak flag can fly as wildly as it pleases, where I will devote myself to bringing heat to the fragile artists trying to live like rats in nearly condemned houses. There is some romance in that. The first Dadaist Heating and Cooling Specialist.

I think it is an internal struggle that I might share this fear of trades, probably from condescension. To actually be a laborer instead of an intellectual speaking about the labor movement. Well, there is work to be done. That city will rot if we don’t pick up this treasure.

Dear Veterans Administration,

I recently called to talk about a matter that is, to me, that is of the utmost importance and my survival depends on the information that I need from you. Instead of the usual droning hold music spattered with apologies from your robot I was met with an unusual option: to make an appointment for a call back. Initially I thought: Hey great, I don’t have to ruin my neck holding onto a phone for an hour. BUT! Your robot proceeded to tell me that the soonest that this could happen was Friday afternoon. It is Wednesday. This is completely unacceptable service.

I am a fucking veteran. My life has been irreversibly altered by the things that I have done for this country. I have been homeless and begging for your help for four years and I did all of it for a few measly dollars to pay for my education that you, the VA, promised me that I would receive. Well the ways that you have made getting this money difficult have been Legion. I feel as if my fight with you has been way grander in scale than any alleged fight I’ve had with Terrorism. But this of all things was too low.

You and the Government took a bunch of little boys and girls and you gave us guns and big scary vehicles and bombs and you let us do what-ever-the-fuck-we-felt-like in another people’s land and you filled our heads with garbage about loyalty, discipline, responsibility, selfless-service, honor, integrity and personal courage yet you, the sole governing force of our survival back here on our own land, can’t even operate a phone line so that we can speak to someone on the same day? Really?

I had to wake up at 4 in the morning for a year straight to work in a prison camp. That is what I did for you. But when I call, when I do get ahold of you, I’m met with aggressively incompetent people who bounce me from phone to phone until usually the call is lost. This is my user review. Fuck you. And fuck this whole country and all the bullshit you gave our generation.

You made so many of us you can’t even handle us and every day another one of us hears that message and says FUCK IT! 18 suicides a day and you bet your fucking ass that that hangs on your head. You have failed us, you have lied to us, you have mismanaged our money, you have complicated our lives, you have given us unnecessary work and you refuse to offer us any real assistance outside of education benefits.

Whenever I do finally get these final 12 months of pay out of you and we’re finally done and you can wash your hands of your petty responsibility you won’t even give a fuck what happens to me. And these are just my grievances with your education system. The disability function that you supposedly fill has strung my life out through a long sickness and anxiety and stupid, misplaced hope for four years now. I shouldn’t have to work so hard for your attention. I have been chronically homeless for all four of those years. I have some pretty serious issues. I deserved attention. Yet it felt as if you, somehow, sadistically enjoyed stringing me along.

I hope that you know that you feel like a monster to this veteran. You have fucked my life up in such magnificent ways and you don’t even know it.

Hatefully,

Christopher Brandon Arendt