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jack_babalonAt first glance you'd be forgiven for believing that it was just another ice-cream truck rolling up the block on a particularly brutal and late July afternoon. For that's exactly what it was, once, an ice-cream truck. But as the vehicle approaches you quickly realize that something's not quite right. Through the heat haze shimmering off the asphalt, you begin to see that it hasn't been in shadow but rather painted the jet black of high salary mid-life crisis's and cocaine induced mood swings. Look. There's a white, winking Jolly Roger on the hood and though the windows are tinted you somehow know the driver has a grin to match. Then you hear it. Blaring off the tinny speakers mounted on the truck's roof. Not the usual sinister but sweet nursery chime loop but the drunken banshee and guitar wail of the Reverend Horton Heat.
See the children emerge curious from their phone shelled attentions and week-before-school distractions. Abandoning action figures in the wilds of lawns, disembarking from bicycles and skate boards, walking mesmerized out front doors towards the approaching truck. It begins to slow down, now you can see that the front grill is decorated with crucified baby dolls, their diminutive faces painted in Kiss Make-Up. The music squawks into static and then a voice echoes down the block: "Piercings. Tattoos. No job or customer too small. Impress your friends. Express yourself. Be the life of the party. Win a glance from your true love's eye. Piercings. Tattoos..."
And as the parents storm furiously down from front porches, rounding driveway corners from hidden backyards, barreling out of parked cars and peering out of suddenly yanked open windows... the voice hastily adds: "Must be 18 or older with a valid state ID."
Collectively the children sigh disappointed and meander back to their prior activities as the truck passes by. Along the side of the vehicle, emblazoned in a sand gray tribal font the words "TATS STAT!" It quickly picks up speed and rounds the corner as fleeting as a bad dream.
Jimmy and I are hunkered in the back of the truck, sweating our balls off and smoking a joint. With us is the driver's girlfriend - an expressionless rockabilly vampira dressed like a nurse if nurses worked at mortuaries. If she's ever said a word this trip I haven't heard it. Up front we got the driver, "Pierce" Anthony, who hangs up the handset to the speaker system to the sun visor and cranks back up the good Reverend. Sprite of figure and lethargic of body language, Pierce resembles a bleach blond goat in a newspaper boy hat and giggles like one to.
The interior of the cab has been gutted out and replaced with a dentist's chair that has been bolted into the floor, one with a large fluorescent lamp attached to its back. Next to the dentist chair is a stool straight out of a Norman Rockwell soda shop, similarly bolted to the floor. Around these seats are scattered boxes filled with inks and sterling silver barbells and spare tattoo gun spare parts and Christ only knows what else. Fireworks? Porno mags? A dead body? Your guess is as good as mine. This is what we're sitting on incidentally.
"Should we even be doing this?" I ask accepting the joint off Jimmy's pass and warily scanning the cab, taking note that it has been completely wallpapered with Famous Monsters magazine covers.
"What?" Jimmy asks, with his big puppy dog eyes and bulldog snarl.
I hold up the joint like it was Exhibit A.
"Pffft, why?" he scoffs.
"Well I'm no lawyer, Jim... but I'd have to say there isn't an inch of this ride that doesn't qualify as probable cause in your choice of any of the 50 states."
"Bitch, you're paranoid." Jimmy laughs and waves me off dismissively.
Which was true, but not so true that I didn't hit the joint.
Now while I sputter and cough up this hit of harsh, I'll let Vampira here bring you up to date.
"That's Cynthia, asshole. Tch. Anyway, so, like Jimmy and whassisface were driving around in the 'HateMobile', doing whatever it is they do (hint - drug deal), when their piece of shit finally breaks down here in fucking Crackville. Well, apparently, because no one else these two scumbags know are awake in the middle of the day, they decide to call Anthony from some payphone or something and Anthony, who let me tell you I'm already fucking pissed off with in the first place, decides to pick them up and drag my ass along for the ride. Meanwhile, because some idiot had to buy a truck with no passenger seat, I'm stuck back here in a cloud of pot smoke while these two losers do their best not to stare at my breasts."
Jimmy and I finish the joint in silence, with Vampira, er, Cynthia, reluctantly passing the joint to Pierce back and forth without taking so much as a hit. Unfortunately with Pierce stoned, we somehow end up overshooting Liberty Parkway and getting on 85 North. Just in time for rush hour.
Cynthia rolls her eyes to a heaven long defied and mouths the words of a curse so obscene, so frightening that it even draws a rare nervous gulp from Jimmy. And keep in mind this is the same Jimmy, who not but last year duked it out in the Square with some roided out skinhead named 'RoboHitler'. And ended up winning too... even it took a little help from a sucker-brick to the throat.
The truck soon rolled to a halt and I didn't have to look outside to know it wasn't going anywhere fast for anytime soon. It's then in our mutual moment of terror that Jimmy and I are struck with an idea apiece.
Mine was to kick open the back doors to the truck and make a run for it to the next exit.
But Jimmy reacted quicker on his than mine and shouted to the driver. "Hey man, I feel really bad about putting you and your lady through all this bullshit. Tell you what, I've been meaning to get some work done. So if you've got, you know, some time or something maybe you could do a little something for me."
"What'cha want?" Pierce asked.
"Y'know the Dead Kennedy's logo?"
"Oh, hell yeah. Where you want it?"
"Shoulder." And Jimmy slapped his right one. "How much?"
"For you, we'll call it 80."
"For your troubles we'll call it a 150." Jimmy fished a roll of cash out of his front pocket, he never carried a wallet, and counted off some bills in his hand that he waved victoriously for Pierce to see.
"Deal!" Pierce shouts and puts the truck in park, unhooks his seat belt and scrambles back to the cab. "Baby take the wheel, Cyn. Daddy's got some work to do."
"Uh...?" Jimmy and I harmonized. Cynthia stabs a venomous glare into her man's face before scuttling up to the driver's seat. Around us car horns start blaring.
"What? " Pierce shrugs with his goat grin, "You got the cash, I got the skills, let's do this!"
"Now?" Jimmy cocks a brow at him in that way he does when he's deciding whether to keep listening or to just start punching you in the face.
"Yeah, fucking now!" Pierce hops on the stool and swivels the dentist's chair around. "C'mon this'll be great. I bet you'll be the first mother-fucker to ever get some work done on 85."
"And you don't think there's a reason why he would be the first?" I ask with a friendly smile that comes off somewhere between Uncle Fester and a used car salesman.
"Hey, who the fuck is this guy again?" Pierce stares menacingly at me.
"S'okay. This is Jack, remember? My boy."
And I bristle at the word. 'Boy'? I'm nobody's fucking boy. I'm 25 years old. I've seen war in the pit and the Suck in the service, I've seen jail after seeing Mardi Gras on acid, I've seen bad luck, I've seen the wrong side of the gun up close, I've seen love and loved ones die with slow cruelty, I've seen beatings and pussy galore and lived through it all.
"Alright, well listen here, Kojack. I can't have you fucking up the scene with your negativity and shit. So I'm gonna need you sit up front and ride bitch with my woman."
As enticing as that last part inadvertently sounded I had to point out the obvious: " There's no passenger seat up front."
"And I didn't ask you if there was. Now you sit up there or you and me can step outside and have some words."
"Everyone be cool," Jimmy speaks crouch walking over to the dentist chair and strapping himself in. "Jack, just get up there. It'll be alright. Pierce. Let's do this if we're doing it."
I gave Jimmy a look, he gave me one back that sent mine scurrying away. I shambled my way forward, just as the truck lurched forward and almost tripped over Pierce.
"Hey, watch it."
I looked back at the doors and contemplated walking out once again, but it was too late we were moving steadily, albeit at a crawl. I crouched down into a ball and took my seat, barely able to see over the dashboard the relentless tide of cars ahead.
Forty minutes of stop and start. Forty minutes with a mechanical whir drilling away in the back and cars barking at each other for as far as the eye can see. Forty minutes of leg numbing fetal positioned me. Forty minutes that pass like I'm stuck in the interior of a cast iron stringed instrument being sawed open by an endorphin deprived performance artist. Forty minutes before I attempt small talk with Cynthia.
"So, how many times has he done this?"
"This would be his first."
"What?"
"I mean in the truck, genius." Cynthia rolled her eyes and leaned into the horn. The Lincoln in front of us honked back. She leaned out the driver's window without a window to shoot the driver the bird. She leaned back in and lit up a cigarette. "But yeah, for some reason no one wants to get a tattoo in a fucking ice-cream truck. Big surprise there, huh?"
"You know I can hear you!" Pierce hollered from the back.
Cynthia looked backwards and shouts: "Well that'd be a first."
"What, we gotta do this now?" Pierce shouted back.
"'We gotta do this now?'" Cynthia mocked and sneered, "What are we in bed now or something?"
"Don't make me come up there, Cynthia."
"Oh yeah, right and what are you going to do , Big Man."
"Ow! Hey watch it!" Jimmy barked. I lit up a cigarette and tried rubbing the headache out of my temple.
Cynthia bit her lip and yanked the truck over across three lanes of traffic, her rage somehow prying open a space to navigate through and pulled over into the emergency lane.
"Hey whaddya doing?" Pierce screamed clambering his way towards the front. Cynthia opened the door and stormed out.
Pierce followed quickly behind. I rose awkwardly out of my crouch and made my way to the door, Jimmy was right behind me, having unstrapped himself from the chair. Blood dripped down the black outline of the Dead Kennedys logo on his shoulder. We made our way outside. Cynthia and Pierce were screaming various obscenities and death threats at one another. What little velocity the traffic tide had picked up slowed back down to a crawl.
Jimmy lights a cigarette as I finish mine and replace it with a light off the first one's cherry.
I glance up the road and spot that we aren't too far from the next exit.
"So what do you think?" Jimmy asks.
"I think I'm standing with a guy with no shirt on, a roll of money despite not having a 'job' and a quarter bag of weed in his pocket. I think I'm standing with him on the side of a highway in rush hour next to a 'Goth' ice cream truck with a big fucking skull painted on the front of it. I think I'm also with a very pissed off couple about two minutes away from trying to kill each other. But mainly, mainly I think we should just start walking very slowly and calmly up the ramp, turn off that exit and see about us grabbing a cab or a bus or a fucking rickshaw, I don't care, so long as it gets us as far away from here as possible."
"What about my tattoo?" Jimmy motioned to it with a helpless wave.
"What about it? Did you pay this fucking guy his money already?"
"I did."
"Then I'd say he can finish it once he bails out of lock-up. Let's go."
Jimmy looked back and saw Cynthia pounding on Pierce with the side of her boot. Pierce staggered back under the barrage and started calling her everything but a child of god. Cars slowed down, there weren't cameras on phones yet but a few fools had to mental snapshot the scene for posterity. Random commuters gawked and heckled. Off in the distance a siren began to grind its way through the rush hour din.
"Let's go." Jimmy threw on his shirt and realized I had already laid down some serious strides towards the exit. We'll never hear from Pierce or Cynthia again. Routine calls and scene scuttlebutt will turn up nada .The Tats Stat truck would never be seen again cruising futilely for customers around Terminus. And yet in the coming months and years Jimmy will still ardently refuse to have the rest of the tattoo filled in. Feeling it would be wrong to let anyone else work on the piece and that he would one day run into the missing artist to have him finish the work he started.
See the children emerge curious from their phone shelled attentions and week-before-school distractions. Abandoning action figures in the wilds of lawns, disembarking from bicycles and skate boards, walking mesmerized out front doors towards the approaching truck. It begins to slow down, now you can see that the front grill is decorated with crucified baby dolls, their diminutive faces painted in Kiss Make-Up. The music squawks into static and then a voice echoes down the block: "Piercings. Tattoos. No job or customer too small. Impress your friends. Express yourself. Be the life of the party. Win a glance from your true love's eye. Piercings. Tattoos..."
And as the parents storm furiously down from front porches, rounding driveway corners from hidden backyards, barreling out of parked cars and peering out of suddenly yanked open windows... the voice hastily adds: "Must be 18 or older with a valid state ID."
Collectively the children sigh disappointed and meander back to their prior activities as the truck passes by. Along the side of the vehicle, emblazoned in a sand gray tribal font the words "TATS STAT!" It quickly picks up speed and rounds the corner as fleeting as a bad dream.
Jimmy and I are hunkered in the back of the truck, sweating our balls off and smoking a joint. With us is the driver's girlfriend - an expressionless rockabilly vampira dressed like a nurse if nurses worked at mortuaries. If she's ever said a word this trip I haven't heard it. Up front we got the driver, "Pierce" Anthony, who hangs up the handset to the speaker system to the sun visor and cranks back up the good Reverend. Sprite of figure and lethargic of body language, Pierce resembles a bleach blond goat in a newspaper boy hat and giggles like one to.
The interior of the cab has been gutted out and replaced with a dentist's chair that has been bolted into the floor, one with a large fluorescent lamp attached to its back. Next to the dentist chair is a stool straight out of a Norman Rockwell soda shop, similarly bolted to the floor. Around these seats are scattered boxes filled with inks and sterling silver barbells and spare tattoo gun spare parts and Christ only knows what else. Fireworks? Porno mags? A dead body? Your guess is as good as mine. This is what we're sitting on incidentally.
"Should we even be doing this?" I ask accepting the joint off Jimmy's pass and warily scanning the cab, taking note that it has been completely wallpapered with Famous Monsters magazine covers.
"What?" Jimmy asks, with his big puppy dog eyes and bulldog snarl.
I hold up the joint like it was Exhibit A.
"Pffft, why?" he scoffs.
"Well I'm no lawyer, Jim... but I'd have to say there isn't an inch of this ride that doesn't qualify as probable cause in your choice of any of the 50 states."
"Bitch, you're paranoid." Jimmy laughs and waves me off dismissively.
Which was true, but not so true that I didn't hit the joint.
Now while I sputter and cough up this hit of harsh, I'll let Vampira here bring you up to date.
"That's Cynthia, asshole. Tch. Anyway, so, like Jimmy and whassisface were driving around in the 'HateMobile', doing whatever it is they do (hint - drug deal), when their piece of shit finally breaks down here in fucking Crackville. Well, apparently, because no one else these two scumbags know are awake in the middle of the day, they decide to call Anthony from some payphone or something and Anthony, who let me tell you I'm already fucking pissed off with in the first place, decides to pick them up and drag my ass along for the ride. Meanwhile, because some idiot had to buy a truck with no passenger seat, I'm stuck back here in a cloud of pot smoke while these two losers do their best not to stare at my breasts."
Jimmy and I finish the joint in silence, with Vampira, er, Cynthia, reluctantly passing the joint to Pierce back and forth without taking so much as a hit. Unfortunately with Pierce stoned, we somehow end up overshooting Liberty Parkway and getting on 85 North. Just in time for rush hour.
Cynthia rolls her eyes to a heaven long defied and mouths the words of a curse so obscene, so frightening that it even draws a rare nervous gulp from Jimmy. And keep in mind this is the same Jimmy, who not but last year duked it out in the Square with some roided out skinhead named 'RoboHitler'. And ended up winning too... even it took a little help from a sucker-brick to the throat.
The truck soon rolled to a halt and I didn't have to look outside to know it wasn't going anywhere fast for anytime soon. It's then in our mutual moment of terror that Jimmy and I are struck with an idea apiece.
Mine was to kick open the back doors to the truck and make a run for it to the next exit.
But Jimmy reacted quicker on his than mine and shouted to the driver. "Hey man, I feel really bad about putting you and your lady through all this bullshit. Tell you what, I've been meaning to get some work done. So if you've got, you know, some time or something maybe you could do a little something for me."
"What'cha want?" Pierce asked.
"Y'know the Dead Kennedy's logo?"
"Oh, hell yeah. Where you want it?"
"Shoulder." And Jimmy slapped his right one. "How much?"
"For you, we'll call it 80."
"For your troubles we'll call it a 150." Jimmy fished a roll of cash out of his front pocket, he never carried a wallet, and counted off some bills in his hand that he waved victoriously for Pierce to see.
"Deal!" Pierce shouts and puts the truck in park, unhooks his seat belt and scrambles back to the cab. "Baby take the wheel, Cyn. Daddy's got some work to do."
"Uh...?" Jimmy and I harmonized. Cynthia stabs a venomous glare into her man's face before scuttling up to the driver's seat. Around us car horns start blaring.
"What? " Pierce shrugs with his goat grin, "You got the cash, I got the skills, let's do this!"
"Now?" Jimmy cocks a brow at him in that way he does when he's deciding whether to keep listening or to just start punching you in the face.
"Yeah, fucking now!" Pierce hops on the stool and swivels the dentist's chair around. "C'mon this'll be great. I bet you'll be the first mother-fucker to ever get some work done on 85."
"And you don't think there's a reason why he would be the first?" I ask with a friendly smile that comes off somewhere between Uncle Fester and a used car salesman.
"Hey, who the fuck is this guy again?" Pierce stares menacingly at me.
"S'okay. This is Jack, remember? My boy."
And I bristle at the word. 'Boy'? I'm nobody's fucking boy. I'm 25 years old. I've seen war in the pit and the Suck in the service, I've seen jail after seeing Mardi Gras on acid, I've seen bad luck, I've seen the wrong side of the gun up close, I've seen love and loved ones die with slow cruelty, I've seen beatings and pussy galore and lived through it all.
"Alright, well listen here, Kojack. I can't have you fucking up the scene with your negativity and shit. So I'm gonna need you sit up front and ride bitch with my woman."
As enticing as that last part inadvertently sounded I had to point out the obvious: " There's no passenger seat up front."
"And I didn't ask you if there was. Now you sit up there or you and me can step outside and have some words."
"Everyone be cool," Jimmy speaks crouch walking over to the dentist chair and strapping himself in. "Jack, just get up there. It'll be alright. Pierce. Let's do this if we're doing it."
I gave Jimmy a look, he gave me one back that sent mine scurrying away. I shambled my way forward, just as the truck lurched forward and almost tripped over Pierce.
"Hey, watch it."
I looked back at the doors and contemplated walking out once again, but it was too late we were moving steadily, albeit at a crawl. I crouched down into a ball and took my seat, barely able to see over the dashboard the relentless tide of cars ahead.
Forty minutes of stop and start. Forty minutes with a mechanical whir drilling away in the back and cars barking at each other for as far as the eye can see. Forty minutes of leg numbing fetal positioned me. Forty minutes that pass like I'm stuck in the interior of a cast iron stringed instrument being sawed open by an endorphin deprived performance artist. Forty minutes before I attempt small talk with Cynthia.
"So, how many times has he done this?"
"This would be his first."
"What?"
"I mean in the truck, genius." Cynthia rolled her eyes and leaned into the horn. The Lincoln in front of us honked back. She leaned out the driver's window without a window to shoot the driver the bird. She leaned back in and lit up a cigarette. "But yeah, for some reason no one wants to get a tattoo in a fucking ice-cream truck. Big surprise there, huh?"
"You know I can hear you!" Pierce hollered from the back.
Cynthia looked backwards and shouts: "Well that'd be a first."
"What, we gotta do this now?" Pierce shouted back.
"'We gotta do this now?'" Cynthia mocked and sneered, "What are we in bed now or something?"
"Don't make me come up there, Cynthia."
"Oh yeah, right and what are you going to do , Big Man."
"Ow! Hey watch it!" Jimmy barked. I lit up a cigarette and tried rubbing the headache out of my temple.
Cynthia bit her lip and yanked the truck over across three lanes of traffic, her rage somehow prying open a space to navigate through and pulled over into the emergency lane.
"Hey whaddya doing?" Pierce screamed clambering his way towards the front. Cynthia opened the door and stormed out.
Pierce followed quickly behind. I rose awkwardly out of my crouch and made my way to the door, Jimmy was right behind me, having unstrapped himself from the chair. Blood dripped down the black outline of the Dead Kennedys logo on his shoulder. We made our way outside. Cynthia and Pierce were screaming various obscenities and death threats at one another. What little velocity the traffic tide had picked up slowed back down to a crawl.
Jimmy lights a cigarette as I finish mine and replace it with a light off the first one's cherry.
I glance up the road and spot that we aren't too far from the next exit.
"So what do you think?" Jimmy asks.
"I think I'm standing with a guy with no shirt on, a roll of money despite not having a 'job' and a quarter bag of weed in his pocket. I think I'm standing with him on the side of a highway in rush hour next to a 'Goth' ice cream truck with a big fucking skull painted on the front of it. I think I'm also with a very pissed off couple about two minutes away from trying to kill each other. But mainly, mainly I think we should just start walking very slowly and calmly up the ramp, turn off that exit and see about us grabbing a cab or a bus or a fucking rickshaw, I don't care, so long as it gets us as far away from here as possible."
"What about my tattoo?" Jimmy motioned to it with a helpless wave.
"What about it? Did you pay this fucking guy his money already?"
"I did."
"Then I'd say he can finish it once he bails out of lock-up. Let's go."
Jimmy looked back and saw Cynthia pounding on Pierce with the side of her boot. Pierce staggered back under the barrage and started calling her everything but a child of god. Cars slowed down, there weren't cameras on phones yet but a few fools had to mental snapshot the scene for posterity. Random commuters gawked and heckled. Off in the distance a siren began to grind its way through the rush hour din.
"Let's go." Jimmy threw on his shirt and realized I had already laid down some serious strides towards the exit. We'll never hear from Pierce or Cynthia again. Routine calls and scene scuttlebutt will turn up nada .The Tats Stat truck would never be seen again cruising futilely for customers around Terminus. And yet in the coming months and years Jimmy will still ardently refuse to have the rest of the tattoo filled in. Feeling it would be wrong to let anyone else work on the piece and that he would one day run into the missing artist to have him finish the work he started.