44 Chapters About 4 Men (12 page)

Deep breath…okay, here goes.

Dear Journal,

Of all the god-awful things I’ve confessed so far, these tats make me feel the dirtiest, the most ashamed, and they weren’t even on my body. I mean, I guess technically they were
on
my body. Ew!

In my defense, I didn’t even know that Harley had tattoos until the first time he parked his wienermobile in my garage. And by wienermobile, I mean, this thing was pretty much exactly the same size and shape as the famous Oscar Mayer hot-dog car.

(After my first run-in with that ten-pound trouser snake, I began calling Harley “Ding-Dong.” He was flattered because he thought it was in reference to his penis size. Bless his heart.)

I had ripped his clothes off in the darkness of his basement abode, so it wasn’t until we were done fooling around and I’d turned on the harsh fluorescent lights that I noticed an odd little word etched on Harley’s chest. It was on his left pectoral muscle but a little too high to be over his heart, like somewhere between his heart and his collarbone. The tat was so faint that it could have been written with pencil or performed in jail. Jailhouse tats always seemed to have that telltale sketchy appearance. (Sketchy in both senses of the word.)

I squinted and slinked closer, trying to covertly make out what it said, while Ding-Dong concentrated on shimmying back into his leather pants, oblivious to my scrutiny. Once I was about five feet away, I was able to make out a three-letter word scrawled in a bizarre block outline—
ARM
.

That’s it. Just
ARM
. On his chest. It said fucking
arm
on his chest, Journal!

Arm…arm…

Surely, there was a pun or a play on words there somewhere. People don’t just ask other people to permanently label one of their body parts with the name of another body part, right?

Searching for some explanation, my brain instantly began tearing through every image, phrase, pun, anagram, song, and associated word in my entire catalog of experiences. I had nothin’.

Once Ding-Dong managed to wrestle his anaconda back into his skintight pants, I asked him about it. And I immediately wished I hadn’t.

A little too happily, Harley explained, “Oh, that? Well, it was gonna say
168 FARM STREET BOYS
, but the guy who was doing it skipped town before he could finish.” He shrugged and began searching around for his shirt, surprisingly devoid of embarrassment.

I had so many follow-up questions after that statement that I didn’t know where to begin.

So, does this mean that you’re gang-affiliated? Did the guy skip town fifteen minutes into your tattoo, like, out of the bathroom window, because that piece should have taken forty-five or fifty minutes, tops? Oh, wait, is
skipped town
a euphemism for
got shivved
? And why did he start with the middle of the middle word in the phrase? Was he dysgraphic?

Sensing my confusion, Ding-Dong continued as he shoved his bare toes into his unlaced boots, probably landing them on the wrong feet, “When I was living in Atlanta, I was a part of a crew called the One Sixty-Eight Farm Street Boys. We all lived in this shitty fucking house, and that was the address—one sixty-eight Farm Street.” Smiling to himself, as if reminiscing about the good old days, he wistfully added, “They called me Scabie James.”

Okay, I only had one follow-up question to that little gem. I tried to sound as non-judgy as possible when I sputtered, “Why did they call you Scabie James?”

“Oh, because I had scabies. That place was really fucking nasty.”

#$%@&@$#%!

No words. My brain had no words. Just electromagnetic pulses of prickly creeped-out no-feelings and alarm bells and flashing arrows pointing me in the direction of the exit. I’d just had sex with a guy who used to—at least I hoped it was past tense—have scabies.

Before I could snatch up the rest of my clothes and do the sprint of shame across his mother’s front yard, Ding-Dong turned to pick up his studded belt. And I saw his right arm.

At first glance, it looked like any other generic tribal tattoo—a solid black design that forked and ending in sharp points. I almost dismissed it and continued to make my escape until I noticed how simple it was. Usually, tribal designs were somewhat intricate and took up a decent amount of space. This thing just had three points and no twists or turns at all. It really just looked like a thick, pointy poorly drawn letter Y—as in,
Why did my mom have to huff all that paint thinner while she was pregnant?

I had to ask, again trying to mask my horror, as I pointed to his right shoulder, “Tell me about this one.”

He smiled his sweet, innocent there-is-absolutely-nothing-to-be-humiliated-about smile again and said, “Oh, that’s my tribal piece.”

I snorted. I couldn’t help it. Choking down the percolating hysterics was agony.
Agony!

As I bit my lip and tried in vain to suppress my giggles, Ding-Dong absentmindedly went about collecting the rest of his clothes, continuing, “Yeah, it’s not totally done, but I ran out of money before it was finished, and you know…whatever.”

It’s not totally done?? It’s not halfway done! It’s a fucking Y, you knuckle-dragging mouth-breather!

That was it. The mood had sufficiently been demolished, and I was in need of a turpentine douche, stat.

I politely made my exit and enjoyed the view as Ding-Dong walked me out to my car. From the back, he was all leather pants, studded belt, no shirt, just-fucked messy blond hair…

Mmm…what was I so upset about again?

Oh, yes, scabies and mental retardation.

But…but he was so cute and sweet and dumb and
hung
.

I decided that maybe, as long as he continued to wear shirts with some regularity, these tats could just join the long list of Shit About Harley I’m Overlooking for the Sake of Making Knight Both Jealous and Afraid to Murder Me.

Nobody has to know about the tats
, I thought.
I can pretend like they don’t exist
, I thought.

That was before I saw the one on his head.

Although I knew Harley also had a tattoo of some asinine sci-fi I-wasn’t-listening-when-he-told-me-but-I-think-it-involved-a-spaceship thing on the top of his head, I thought it was a nonissue since the entire piece was buried under that oh-so adorable shock of rockabilly blond hair. The operant word in that sentence being
was.
It
was
buried—up until the day he was scheduled to meet my parents.

Before my parents ever met Harley, they hated him. I had already been busted after lying to them about where I was spending the night a couple of times. Obviously, I had been curled up with Harley in his twin-size bed, next to his also adult-aged brother in his own twin-size bed in their mom’s mildewed basement. So, I’d lost my driving privileges for a month.

For some reason, it was during this particular bout of punishment that I decided having Harley over for dinner would make my parents more sympathetic to my cause? That question mark was intentional. I have no idea what I was thinking. It must have been the contact high I’d gotten from swapping body fluids with Harley so often.

Since Ding-Dong didn’t have a car at the time and my car had been confiscated, I volunteered my parents to take me to pick him up in my mom’s Band-Aid–colored Ford Taurus station wagon. I was unflappable, cavalier even, from the backseat of that rolling eyesore of festering tension. When we pulled up in front of Harley’s mom’s place, I was actually giddy. I’d been grounded for a week, and I was dying to see my sexy Billy Idol look-alike (while his mouth was closed and shirt was on, at least) come barreling down the stairs of his mom’s rickety termite-infested front porch and into my waiting arms.

My mom honked the horn.

Real classy, Mom
.

When Harley emerged, my giddiness was replaced by something else. Confusion? Disappointment? He looked different. Something was very wrong. It wasn’t until he’d confidently stridden all the way across the driveway and pulled open the car door that my brain finally acknowledged what was going on.

Harley had shaved his head…completely bald…right before meeting my parents.

And…there it went. My consciousness bolted like a caged animal the moment Harley stepped into the car. It clung to the roof and watched upside down through the back windshield as he slid over to me, beaming from ear to ear, and gave my rigid, abandoned body a nuzzle.

From my vantage point above the car, I could see everything. Where Harley’s adorably soft blond pompadour used to be, there was instead a crudely drawn image the size of a fucking dinner plate. It depicted a bird’s-eye view of Harley’s brain, as if his skull had been removed, like the lid of a cookie jar. The center of his brain appeared to be hollowed out into a spaceship-style cockpit, and there, in the center, manning the craft, was a tiny fucking penis.

A tiny fucking circumcised penis with little dick arms and a look of determination on his little dick face was jostling joysticks around inside Ding-Dong’s pickled brain. My parents were minutes away from finding out that their sixteen-year-old
only
child was dating a grown man with no job and no car and no brain cells and bad teeth and oh, by the way, he also has a fucking penis tattooed on his head.

Luckily, the empty shell of a body that I’d deserted in the backseat was incapable of forming coherent speech patterns, let alone demanding an explanation, because unlike the
ARM
tat, my consciousness pulled up the
exact
euphemism Harley had been going for with this piece, and quite frankly, the backseat of your mother’s station wagon is the last place you want to hear your adult boyfriend explain,
I think with my cock! Get it?

The shock and dissociation I experienced after seeing that little phallus were so profound that my consciousness must have blacked out and tumbled to the side of the road. I barely remember anything from the moment we’d picked Harley up to the moment we dropped him back off.

The only images I’ve been able to mine from that evening are of my mother lurking behind Ding-Dong like a shadow while he and I ate our Domino’s pizza at the kitchen table. As he snarfed down his fifth slice of pepperoni, completely unaware of her presence, my mom made direct, searing eye contact with me over the top of his tattooed head. Raising one scarily pissed off eyebrow, she slowly and blatantly shifted her gaze down to Ding-Dong’s exposed scalp, drawing her mouth into a tight line of disgust. It was terrifying.

My mom doesn’t do pissed off, Journal. She’s usually too stoned to remember how feelings work most of the time, so this little demonstration was frighteningly out of character.

The only other memory that I didn’t completely repress from that evening was when my mom and I dropped Ding-Dong back off that night. Once he was out of the car and we were on our way back home, the panic set in, and I braced myself for my mother’s wrath. I literally curled up into the fetal position in the passenger seat and covered my head with my hands just in case she went full-on
Mommie Dearest
.

Although my mother was a hippie pacifist to the core and had only called me a bitch once in my life, I hadn’t exactly brought home a grown man with a penis tattooed on his head and zero high school diplomas before either.

All bets were off. And I was in survival mode.

Luckily, the months I’d spent trying not to become a crime-of-passion victim while dating Knight had made me a bona fide pro at scanning my surroundings for potential weapons. So, while my mom was busy looking both ways before pulling out of the neighborhood, I stealthily removed the cigarette lighter from the car’s ashtray and slipped it into the sleeve of my stud-covered hoodie. You never can be too careful. Now, all I had to worry about were her hands, that stabby-looking Celtic cross hanging from the rearview mirror, and that choky-looking strand of love beads hanging around her neck.

Shit.

After riding in suffocating silence with my knees up around my ears for a few miles, my natural tendency toward optimism took over, and I began to think,
Maybe she’s just going to give me the silent treatment! Maybe she’s not actually going to disfigure me!