II
'II' is an excerpt from Michael Salu's work in progress novel of the same name.
A puff of smoke curled out wispy lines of turmoil along the passage of time as it caught the yellow light of a standing lamp, filling Jack’s makeshift tattoo studio with a fog of neon-like colour. The studio was really just a windowless backroom to Mr and Mrs Tran’s grocery store, but it was his spot, where he felt, well, safe; a necessary retreat from bullshit, and where he’d typically be most of the time, even now. Four narrow walls just discernible through the yellow weed smoke, were thickly pasted with his drawings and polaroids of his drawings re-imagined to exist beneath the surface of different skins. Close-ups of bruised skins, shades of rich browns blushed with tiny specks of deep blood red, were caught, mid-act by the flash photography, as skins hastily self-repaired, their vulnerable states forever preserved. Other photos were mostly of happy customers posing with Jack and his stiff smile, a pose and expression differing little across the constellation of memories. Wallpapering his studio with these images gave an overall chimerical effect—Jack’s own little Sistine Chapel, but rather than thick, ancient applications of oil paints, the technique here was a no-less idiosyncratic cut-and-paste collage of a similar interrogation of salvation and damnation. Like Michelangelo’s meticulous masterwork, the body also seemed here to be the vessel of choice to eventually reach either of these destinations. Like Michelangelo, Jack too was obsessed with the depravity and limitations of the human condition and the fault line of this eternal duality, ran somewhat unwittingly through his entire oeuvre of circumstantial compositions. Jack was young, yet to articulate his creative pursuit, nay, obsessions, in quite such a way, which was ok. He was twenty-two years old and still trudging through thick mud of loss. His interpretation of everything coursed through the loose line of his drawings. There was an obliqueness to his execution, which told a story in itself—a kind of narrative device within how he thought about things. Like how salvation as an idea, a myth, or an actuality might ever occur. Or, the quest to pursue something of any worth in a finite and often difficult existence. Thoughts like these already nested deep within his markings and his telling of these age-old concerns which wrapped every way we could think about living, and weren’t how the church pastor talked about this stuff. Those folk meted out the inevitability of eternal punishment if submission was ignored or resisted. Damning words he’d heard ever since he could remember, but always wondered why punishment was so inevitable. One day, age thirteen, he told his dear foster mother, he would no longer attend Sunday Service with her, but to Jack’s surprise, her response was muted. Offering nothing more than a quiet sigh, she turned back to making dinner, humming to the Gospel music on the radio. The anticlimax of this moment stayed with him. How strange it was that his rejection of absolute inevitable damnation of one’s eternal soul, could be met with a shrug. What did that mean? Where were the wails, the anguish, the thrashing of skin, and the flaying of souls demanding he resist this ill-considered dive into the unrelenting fires of eternal punishment. No mourning for his waywardness? No pity, no lamentations for hours, days, weeks? Jack had expected more of a fight for his soul than that. If the stakes were so high, then, shit, didn’t that mean he would need the church and its community—those he’d listened to for years as they wailed and sang and cried and shouted every week to rally around him and change his mind? Wasn’t some kind of intervention required—led by his dear, well-meaning foster mother? Nothing, except a shrug and a sigh that long perturbed him.
With his needle, Jack swiftly lifted the thin epidermal layer of Caleb’s skin and inserted a little black ink beneath, mottling the skin lightly coated with a shimmering film of perspiration—the needle offering steady, controlled repetition where little pockets of blood would form. Each insertion of the needle was consistent with the depth and duration of the previous, by now a method programmed into his mind. Quick entry, until subtle resistance, where the skin gave, indicating the correct force and depth had been reached. Then, a fragment of time to allow the ink to enter and bleed out a little into the fractal patterning of grooves and lines in the skin’s architecture, lifting the needle slightly to enable ink to enter and rest, spreading and billowing as if skin was fabric, or canvas. With two gloved fingers of his left hand, he pulled Caleb's skin taught and with his right he followed the outline of a letterform using this custom prick and lift technique, depositing a continuous line of dark ink to snake up slowly around Caleb’s demarcated collarbone, held steady, by Jack, completing a calligraphic outline of two words: Dear Mama.
Caleb lay face down on the bench with his limbs hanging loosely towards the floor. His athletic body, dulled a little by misuse and self-medication, surrendered to the ritual of ink and the humidity of late summer. A thick rope-like gold chain hung on him heavily, supporting a gold crucifix, which he had spun to the back of his neck, out of the way. Golden christ laying prone against his skin, body supporting his weight, breastbone and diaphragm pressed against the bench, rising and gently falling like disturbed earth, a periodic cavity beneath. Video game sounds twitched the room. The cold halo of a phone screen momentarily illuminated a face in the corner, a spirit captured. Jack caught it too, the haloed face, and made a mental note, then returned to embedding ink just beneath the surface of Caleb’s undulating topography. ‘You wan hit?’ his friend Isaiah offered in a low rasp. The formerly haloed one thrust a half-toked joint into Jack’s line of sight, which he clutched with two latex-ed fingers, resting the joint in the corner of his mouth, where it stayed and released a thin line of smoke to wave around the room as he worked. ‘Aah! winced Caleb. ‘Shit!’ Jack’s brow furrowed mockingly. ‘Sit yo ass back down and keep still. How old is you?’ he asked sarcastically and gripped Caleb’s arm more firmly, muting his attempt at protest, as a father might when administering medicine, or cutting the hair of his young son. ‘How many times you done this now? Still crying,’ he said, to a cacophony of mocking laughter. ‘Shit hurts,’ Caleb whined, but his lament was met only with more derision, ridicule cutting deeper than the needle, especially in his prone position, face down, vulnerable to his taunters. ‘Everything hurts,’ offered James, to a collective chuckle. Friends lay about like geckos sunning on rocks, their attention flitting between devices, pockets of conversation and the game on the screen. The joint hovered silently around the room. The number of regulars in Jack’s studio was pretty consistent, give or take one or two. Often they’d just hang out. A few fringe friends dropped in every now and then, to stir up some shit and disrupt the equilibrium of this core contingent, but it was usually amiable for the most part. Video games, neighbourhood gossip, girls, that kind of thing. The loyal regulars, Caleb, Isaiah and James were usually around, which Jack appreciated, as tattoos took a lot of time. An entire day could easily pass inking out something relatively simple. These regulars occasionally got ink themselves, but their presence in the parlour were more as fixtures—sculptures, complimentary to Jack’s fresco of drawings and photographs. Jack’s regulars collected his work like armour and were always there ready, with weed and several new strategies to implement in their favourite game, as well as many new tales from the street. Each of Jack’s friends, the regulars, were all living works of his art that would one day have to die.
Jack grinned at Caleb trying to look up and see if he could inspect the handiwork through the mirror. He peered more closely at the outline of the calligraphic lettering stencilled onto Caleb’s skin, working carefully at perfecting the delicate tip of a ligature’s flourish. Deep he was in his well of concentration, choosing a script kind of lettering to render the two words. When googling Tupac’s original single, the cover had used a lame serif typeface and Jack was keen to see if he could inject more poignancy and melodrama into those two words, by replacing the serif with a script. This is the kind of detail that gave his work distinction, having developed an interest in letterforms or what some called typography, without knowing official terms or such niche study, which he’d never audibly geek to anyone about, but this kind of thing, these details, were his secret sauce. Nowadays, most called them fonts, but the structural integrity of a letterform is actually a typeface and the digital file is a font, and though everything was digital, Jack liked thinking with the materiality of these original terms, which were suited to the undeniable physicality of his work. This was the kind of thing he dug for deeply online as an active, rather than passive user of the internet, and where he discovered open treasure troves of research and white papers offering opinion on what seemed small fragments of history, or notions of thoughts someone like him might have had, but lacked the vocabulary for, nor, truthfully, the foundational education. When he discovered the existence of Google Scholar, then, well, he was set, and built an intricate web of his own; references and inspirations which helped him draw associative lines between basics of antiquity and from there, tracing his own path through mostly western art history, and then, more broadly, history. For a long time, he felt much of what he had found was somehow elicit, as if he shouldn’t be privy to this information, as if it wasn’t for him, and he wondered why this wasn’t readily available to the minds of those around him every day, though these unassailable mountains of information were just a few clicks away. Like these guys here, dotted around him, tucked up in weed smoke, like they were heavenly cherubs, waiting, for something. Though young, Jack was acutely consciousness there was more out there than he had, as a result of his circumstances, been designed to see, which bothered him. He’d often stop himself drifting too far on the thought of what life would have been like if his mother was still alive; where they might have lived; the places they might have travelled; maybe his brother Isaac might even have been ok, more settled, at peace. Thinking about what more there was out there somehow both paralysed and inspired him. The script he chose for the new letters on Caleb’s skin came with a few extra touches, something a bit fancy which could be added to certain letterforms for a further decorative flourish. In this case, it was the second ‘A’ of “Mama”. The right foot of this particular letterform floated away a little as if caught by a zephyr and keen to ascend. Maybe others also noticed these little details he found important, maybe they didn’t. Still, they noticed something about the overall picture he was gradually painting, even if they didn’t fully understand that his body of work was an ongoing, kinetic, living, breathing work of art, living a long time on all those canvases that then walked the streets, developing their autonomy, something with an aura, strutting through their town, and, sometimes, even beyond that; transported on two legs, or more likely in cars charging down freeways on towards another town in the state. His artworks roved the streets, or rested, or hid away in a bedroom. They got into fights and fucked and fell in love. They got wet in the river nearby and dried themselves out in the sun, necking coloured sugar waters to quench their thirst. Or they got dried out by poorly processed hard water, dribbling weakly from their bathroom taps, leaving them ashy as foreign limescale ate away at their skin. They’d lotion-up and moisturise with shea butters or their derivatives, manually mixing with baby oils and natural heat from their palms, rubbing them together to soften the mixture enough to be spreadable across Jack's fine drawings, their canvases, rubbing and massaging the mixture in, trying to push this balm deep beneath the surface, trying hard to really nourish themselves, as if the balm might heal more of them than they could see, as if it might reach more than needle bruises, or the caustic legacies of poisoned waters. They got their hair done—braided or twisted. They let their ‘hair grow out over time like nurtured plant-life. They played ball like that – fros out – freshly released from cornrows wrapped tightly against their scalps and into the atmosphere, escaping tightly cultivated farmlands, discovering greater length and bounce after three month of attentive confinement, now, loose and free, flapping against the breeze, the physics of driving to the basket now less aerodynamic, now resultantly claiming an egregious foul call. The tattoos would wrinkle their faces if, say, they were drawn on a back, and the owner of that back pulled up for a graceful jump-shot. Along with the rest of that body, the artwork would lean at a steep angle towards the ground, waiting—waiting a little longer for gravity to make itself known, before they located the perfect release point of the basketball, in this fade-away jump-shot, the tattoos offering a trembling expression, when, somehow, just as gracefully, the body returns to the ground, with feet beneath them, somehow avoiding a fall, while the chain net on the outdoor hoop makes that satisfying raspy clang when the shot was clean. They’d argue over foul calls longer than ever necessary, breaking the flow of the game. Words flung about, but rarely spilling over into something darker than the spirit of competition. They’d be out there for hours, leaping off the hard concrete with young limbs springy and absorbent enough to not notice the unforgiving hardness of the ground beneath them. They’d attempt to aim their jump-shots with an arc so acute as to never hit the rim with the ball on its way down; ecstasy came from the long sound of ball hitting net, only net, which sounded like what it must sound like to pass through a portal in time. They played shirts versus skins, and at the height of summer, mainly just skins; with armour, Jack’s armour-artworks on full display, an animated exhibition, interactive, vibrant and engaging. They blow-dried their hair straight out of the shower, otherwise it shrunk and clumped against their scalps, all recalcitrant and stubborn. Some went full nappy; no combs, only that hard water, some shampoos, some conditioner and some quality hair grease. Air and their fingers did the rest, pushing grease down to their scalps, and lifting up clumps of ‘fro, slightly voluminous, roughly done, defiant. No exacting shape-ups of their hairlines, no conformity, nor neat corners, nor order to who they were, rather, they let their natural splendour spread and live all its richness, at least in however was possible to them, and no one was going to tell them shit. Who were they supposed to listen to anyway? Jack’s artworks sat in church pews and absorbed the words of the lord, in delivery and oration which sometimes encouraged goosebumps, adding haptic texture to his creations. A scene carved below the skin of a young boy’s back, where Christ squared up with the devil, each brandishing long blades, connecting the two collarbones in perfect symmetry, and when drawn together they clash, and the wearer of this art holds his upper body aloft, tense, shoulders back, while he slowly and awkwardly enters the girl lying beneath him, she too, unsure yet of herself, of her body’s power, of what they were trying to do together. Spread across these collarbones, Christ and the devil come together, their swords clashing in earnest. This kind of transference was the power Jack thought existed in what he was doing. He’d never talk about his craft like this, but his work was everywhere, and it lived.