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PART I
From Academia to Skidrow
For about twenty years of my life I had been a professor of English, teaching at various universities in the West and Midwest, finally ending in Chicago at a small, peculiar church school, a kind of co-ed religious kindergarten staffed with mediocrities and trumpeting a reputation which was founded more on its basketball team than on scholarly aims and accomplishments. At best it was a sort of protective nursing school where parents sent teenagers until they were old enough to go to work. The North Central Association of universities was continually hounding it because it had no endowment — and when it did manage to raise some money, it built an alumni auditorium for its basketball team rather than a new library.
The student body of the early 1950s was cowed, clannish, and conformist. It was drawn from lower and middle-class backgrounds which were narrowly parochial. Every member of the university’s English department occasionally had to take charge of an entering freshman class. In my opening session with such a group one year I asked a series of rapid questions trying to find out how much the students knew. Not one of the forty-odd boys and girls had ever heard of Homer, but in the same group thirty-four of them knew how to change a spark-plug. Out of approximately two hundred and fifty students who sat in my classes each year, possibly three or four grew to be “illuminated” or liberalized. The curtain went up for them on a world of art, music, or literature. The others were content with TV, beer, and sex — and an eventual progress into the world of work, of getting up at six every morning and going to work to make enough money to buy enough food to get enough energy to get up and go to work to earn enough money … and so on.
Those few students in whose eyes the light began to shine were not much reward for the teacher. The pay was small. Whatever “prestige” came from being a university professor could not be banked. You had to decide whether to take a taxi in the rain or to save the money for a haircut. Some strange immorality made the university raise the salary for each new child a married teacher produced. Bachelors — like myself, even with our advanced degrees — went on at the same old level.
During the last years of this harrowing life things got worse. I grew to loathe the matrix which imprisoned me. On some mornings I had to take a benzedrine tablet to face the doltish students. But what else to do? All my life I had made a living with my brain, and it had brought me little. At some point in the last three years of teaching, the seed of my rebellion broke and the spores went spinning along the blood. It was a mid-life crisis, undoubtedly. Ben Hecht spoke of Sherwood Anderson’s break with his past and the writing it produced as “the wistful idealization of the masculine menopause.” My menopause turned me down a decidedly materialistic channel.
Tattooing had really never entered my awareness very much. When it did, the associations were always with sailors first, ex-convicts second, and various toughs and gangsters last. In the 1920s I had read in some obscure novel about the three signs of “badness” — socks rolled down to the ankle, long sideburns, and a tattoo showing on the wrist. Robert Mitchum’s demented killer had Love and Hate tattooed on the fingers of each hand. There was a radio program which ended with descriptions of wanted criminals; invariably their tattoos were described. A Marlboro cigarette campaign popularized a man with a crudely drawn eagle or anchor on the back of his hand.
Perhaps, then, the first tangible sign of my “anti-intellectual” revolt was that I got a small tattoo very high on my left deltoid. This was an odd experience for me.
I had been “supering” with all kinds of companies that came to Chicago — ballet, opera, operetta like The Student Prince, and dramatic like Diamond Lil, carrying a spear or otherwise being in one of the crowd scenes demanded by the production. The fat and white-haired homosexual who was the entrepreneur for the “supers” called on me often, and gradually my status grew until certain definite roles were assigned to me for the troupes that needed extras. In Scheherazade with the old Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo I was a guardian eunuch in the first scene; in Gaîté Parisienne a member of the small on-stage orchestra; in Carmen one of the townspeople, and later a smuggler.
In the Ballet Russe version of The Nutcracker I was always the gondolier who in the last scene rowed across the stage the gondola from which the little girl heroine descended after her journey to the land of make-believe. For this the Ballet Russe furnished me with a gondolier’s costume, a part of which was a knit sleeveless dark-green nylon shirt.
It occurred to me that a gondolier might very well have a small anchor on his shoulder, the one facing the audience, to go with the large gold ear-ring in his left ear. The idea of getting the anchor tattooed on me was both fascinating and terrifying. Accordingly, one rainy night before that year’s arrival of the Ballets Russes, I fortified myself with a couple of drinks and went down to south State Street in Chicago to get one.
I got it, all right — from “Tatts” Thomas, a skinny baldheaded man with a mustache, the ends of which were waxed to long fine points. The sensation hurt like hell — at times burning, at other times like a knife of ice. When it was done he slapped a piece of brown wrapping paper on it, secured the paper with scotch tape, and told me to keep it dry.
This is a very superficial account of my getting a first tattoo, for in those early days the motivations were not very clear. There were undoubtedly deeper currents at work, but at the moment I could not see them. Many of my friends were horrified and shocked. “Why in the world would you want to do a thing like that?” was the question most often asked.
Why, indeed?
No one of my academic colleagues was tattooed, as far as I knew, so it was hardly possible for them to understand. I soon discovered that whenever I mentioned my anchor to other friends, I was at once furnished with many reasons why they would not ever consider getting tattooed. Most of these friends at this time were homosexual, and in the 1950s there seemed to be a particular horror of tattoos among them.
Take Paul’s reaction, for instance. Paul, a slight balding male, was a ribbon-clerk at Marshall Field’s department store. “Really,” he said, “to be quite honest about it, I just couldn’t stand the pain.”
Fear of pain is a universal reaction. An injection in a doctor’s office makes many persons weak; the prospect of hundreds of thousands of pricks over a period of minutes is enough to turn anyone white. The mere sight of needles can make a truckdriver faint in anticipation. Everyone who has been in the armed forces has seen draftees keel over in line as they approach the needle. The subconscious says in effect: “Let’s get out of here!” and sends a large supply of blood to the leg muscles to prepare for flight. And when the blood leaves the head, the person faints. Paul resisted all my reassurances that the speed of the machines made the individual pricks merge together, so that the sensation was that of heat or cold. “Not for me,” he said, shaking his head.
Or take Bruce. “Me get tattooed?” he said scornfully. “Never! That’s too low-class for me.”
That was the feeling of many young arrogant males, largely of the middle class. Possibly they were right about their status being lowered by a tattoo. TV, movies, and newspapers had imprinted on the public mind the connection between tattoos and criminal or derelict behavior.
Two reactions seem to be possible in persons who see a tattoo on someone. One is complete fascination, a feeling that here is the ultimate stud, the great macho, the sexual satyr, the Marlboro man, the far-traveling sailor, the incomparable sadistic master, the Genet criminal just released from prison. The other is a complete revulsion: the tattoo represents the epitome of sleaze, of low-class background, of cheap vulgarity and bad taste, everything that intelligence and sophistication have conditioned you to despise. To persons of this second view, it is useless to mention the tattoos of the late King of Denmark or the Duke of Windsor, Burt Lancaster, Sean Connery, Admiral Halsey, Senator Goldwater, George Schultz, and many others.
Allan’s reaction was different. “I wouldn’t want anything permanently on me,” he said petulantly. “I’m sure I’d get tired of any design that I had to wear forever. Besides, there’s the fact that you can be so easily identified by them.”
“Thinking of taking up a life of crime?” I asked. “Are you planning ahead for the day when you’ll do chop off someone’s head?” Later on I was to discover that many pseudo-bad boys refused to get tattooed for this same fear of easy identification, whereas the real criminal types seemed almost eager to flaunt their tattoos in defiance of authority.
Then there was Clifton, a Long Island snob of the first water. “In my family,” he said, “well—the men in my family have always admired Brooks Brothers’ suits, for example, because of their absolute purity of line. No decoration, no frills. Such plainness is the mark of good taste. So quite naturally I’m against tattooing. It’s decoration, and that’s in bad taste.”
I nodded, watching him twirl a large amethyst ring on his finger which seemed to me to be in the worst possible taste. In those days we used to call such baubles “bitch badges.”
And there was Ralph, a weightlifter and hustler. “Chee, no,” he said. “I ain’t never gonna get tattooed. Dat’d spoil me and I’d lose points when dey judge duh contests.” But Axel, another weightlifter, was covered down to the waist. “I think when you’re decorated you look purtier,” he said.
Here were two different narcissists speaking: one so admired his unmarked skin that he shied from tattoos; the other, a pseudo-narcissist, made the mistake of feeling that tattoos would make him even more attractive — an error which he discovered for himself after losing many contests because of his markings.
Clifton, the snob, made another point which was curiously interesting. “I am afraid of tattoos,” he said, “because of the sexual expression involved.” In those early days my own knowledge had not taken me far enough into the subterranean world of tattooing to understand what he meant: whether a tattoo revealed his own nature along narcissistic or sado-masochistic lines, or whether he might be sexually aroused while being tattooed. Albert Parry, one of the early Freudians to write about tattooing, definitely compared it to a sexual act, with both an active and a passive partner, the insertion of fluid (inks) under the skin, and so on.
* * * * *
Having told some of my friends and university colleagues — more for shock value than anything else — that I was thinking of becoming a tattoo artist, I felt that the time had come to do something about it. I bought a correspondence course in tattooing from the “only school of its kind in existence,” a poorly mimeographed set of lessons each bound in orange paper. The material seemed fascinating at the moment, but hindsight reveals that it was not at all informative, and that the “Professor” who wrote it — a Milton Zeis of Rockford, Illinois — knew very little about tattooing. The lessons were extremely dull, or at least it seemed so from my frosty pinnacle of a Ph.D. in English literature and an oft-repeated course in life-drawing at the Art Institute in Chicago.
But the tattoo lessons were all finished faithfully, even down to practicing alphabets and lettering. Zeis later told me that I was the only one who had ever finished the course. He was only a merchant, not a tattooist, and his course was made up of everything that the con-men tattooists told him.
Learning to tattoo from a book is just about as successfully accomplished as learning to swim from a book in your living-room. I did learn some things about machines and inks, and mastered various mechanical aspects. But it was not until I began to go to Dietzel, the old master in Milwaukee, that I really learned how to tattoo. Tattooing seems to be one of the few remaining skills that must be passed from a master to an apprentice.
My life suddenly seemed to draw together. Why had I been studying drawing for the past four years? Why had I been using an electric vibro-tool to make designs on metal? Was not tattooing the farthest distance I could get from the academic world? It was as if the broad, fan-like spread of my existence had come to a focus, indeed, taken on a funnel shape, and I was sliding down into a world of which I knew absolutely nothing.
The life ahead of me was as different from the one I had known as benedictine is from cheap red wine. Up until now there had been a good lot of the intellectual snob in me. I had had two books published, neither of which in any way interrupted my comfortable obscurity. I had been an encyclopedia editor. I had traveled widely in Europe, and visited Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas several times, both at their chateau at Bilignin in the south of France and at their Paris apartment on the rue Christine. I had corresponded with Thomas Mann and lunched with his family in Küsnacht. I had met and become friendly with André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and Julien Green in Paris, and been intimate with Thornton Wilder, and was later to detail such things (and write more novels under the name of Phil Andros) in an autobiography. My talents and ambitions were so negligible that they never took me into inner circles, but had enabled me to enjoy myself on the periphery of the literary world.
More might have been accomplished had I not been trapped like a djinni in the bottle — the liquor bottle. It took many years and many painful experiences to climb out of it. But it was accomplished with the help of a group of happy ex-drunks in the old Watertower group in Chicago, which included several radio and TV personalities, and both the mother and father of a then-rising young male movie star. None of us had a sturdy enough belief in religion to help us break the shell of narcissism that surrounds all alcoholics, but we could agree that booze itself was a “power greater than ourselves.”
In André Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestres there was a striking idea which many years before had lodged itself firmly in my memory. He said that at least once in one’s life a total break should be made, no matter from what — home town, family, room, or thought — but the separation should be absolute. He carried this thought farther than I could, however, convinced as he was that his desire should become his law, and that he should turn himself into the most “irreplaceable of human beings.”
I could not be as positive as he was, since I was uncertain of my own powers. My ego said no. Even after I made my break with Academia, it was not total. For quite a while I went on teaching during the days, and tattooing on weekends. It was a strange and disturbing overlapping.
It astonished me that in this renunciation — or quest — I began to seek the opposites of things I had long admired. In the tattoo shop I commenced to wear the oldest and “toughest” clothes possible, levis or Navy dungarees and a leather jacket, changing to them after I left the university and as soon as I arrived downtown. In those days there were no leather-shops; I had to get my jacket from Sears. My anchor tattoo — and two small ones experimentally self-applied — began to ally me with the toughs, the herd, the skidrow bums — all those who revolted against the “establishment.” But if my hatred of my matrix was genuine, and I really wanted to expel myself from it, what better way to start than with tattoos, and tattooing — certainly as anti-social as anything I could find? Was I bent on self-destruction — or just bored? I’d settle the question myself. I felt I needed no help.
The “street” — that skidrow where I was later to work — had the kind of atmosphere that bred disaster. You could almost breathe it in the air, and I was lucky that I was not more sensitive, or my preliminary wanderings down there would have crushed and stifled me. As it was, my empathic reaction had to be kept under rigid control by maintaining what the aestheticians call “psychic distance.” But I still had the sensation of sinking down into it. It became increasingly difficult to hoist myself back to the university level again. The street’s miasma and excitement began to play hob with my sense of reality, giving me an almost schizoid separation in my mind and emotions.
Formerly I had considered myself less sheltered and more sophisticated than my colleagues at the university. Yeah, I had known the “great world,” or so I believed. The shock that came when I actually descended into the world of the honky-tonk of south State Street in Chicago was extremely violent. I found I had known very little of life until then … the seamy, sodden world of whores and pimps and pushers and winos and con-men — yes, and of tattoo artists.
* * * * *
Zeis sold me not only the correspondence course but a few machines and some colors, and the experimental period began. I even had some business cards printed: extraordinary ones, announcing that “Professor Philip Sparrow” would tattoo “Anything You Want — Anywhere” but “By Appointment Only,” and gave my telephone number. ...
