Easy On, Easy Off

They say that having a tattoo removed is less painful than having it installed in the first place. Perhaps my memory is skewed, but I don’t agree. I’m writing with an ice-pack on my hindquarters.

But I’m ahead of myself. You see, I got my first tattoo many years ago, back when only sailors did it and way before it was a trend. It was before Yo-Nenny was born, and she’s almost 33. Ever since that moment, I’ve hated that tattoo. Back then, pretty much the only thing  parlors knew how to do were were roses, bloody Jesuses, and Mom. I asked the tattoo woman for the smallest rose possible. The result was more like a large melanoma.

As Mom once said, when you go into labor, you have no choice but to go forward. Same with a tattoo. Once the black ink starts getting jack-hammered into your flesh, you’ve got to keep going. And once you’ve got the tattoo, you’re stuck with it. With a bratty child, you can try behavior modification. With a tattoo, all you can do is make it bigger. The objective is to try to disguise the offending bit by folding it into a larger image. It’s sort of like the Highlights Magazine game I loved, where you search the drawing of the kids in the playground to find the gun that’s hidden in the hair of the boy who’s hanging upside-down off the Jungle Gym. (That seems frighteningly prescient, when I think about today’s schools.)

It had been subtlety I’d wanted, but I had to let that go in the name of aesthetics. A couple years later I had my small, ugly rose modified. It became a larger, uglier rose. Years later, I tried once more. If you want to see a really large, really ugly rose, I’m your gal.

And so the little thing I hated is now the big thing I hate. Whenever I’m in a public place where people are naked, I keep my back to the wall. (No, not that kind of naked place, you silly. I mean the shower room at the pool and the gym and places like that. Nice places.)

When I was young and unmarried, Mom used to send me clippings from the local paper about high school classmates who’d gotten married. (Remember, Mom?) When I was in my thirties, she began to send clippings from the local paper about laser tattoo removal. (Remember?) But it was a new thing back then: very expensive, and liable to cause serious scarring uglier than what was there before. I never did it.

Times change and technologies improve. Now, electro-convulsive therapy causes only serious memory loss instead of complete insanity. Now, only about five percent of laser tattoo removal causes blistering and scarring. Time to give it a try at last.

I had my appointment this morning. To my delight, Eleni and Emmy agreed to accompany me to San Francisco. We boarded BART and headed for—I’m not kidding—Maiden Lane—in search of Tattoo Be Gone. Such a location is ideal for all society girls with extra ink. (They also do liposuction and botox and all kinds of things, but that’s another story. When I go for my next appointment, remind me not to ask the other woman in the waiting room, What are you in for?)

Emmy was tired by the time we arrived, and looking appropriately serene.

The procedure takes only about ten minutes. James explained the process with care. Then he gave me two rubber balls to squeeze, should I need to. He was kind enough to warn me each time before he lasered me. It’ll feel like a rubber band stretched to about here, James said, pointing to a spot in the air about 18 inches from my flesh. I would have said it was more like sticking my butt into a hive of hornets, but that’s just me.

Afterwards, Eleni, Emmy and I strolled to Union Square and stumbled upon a very talented silver guy who was miming Michael Jackson performances on a small marble pedestal. He gave Emmy candy. I took it. I ate it. She’s not the one who had her backside zapped. Plus, she was scared of him and I wasn’t.

 

I wish I had more time to write. Oh, the stories I would tell. Most of them would be about riding BART. That’s all I ever do. In the past week there has been: a man who peed on the seat, right there, standing up; a woman who rhythmically slapped the back of her hands against each other all the way from Fremont to the Oakland Coliseum; a guy standing by the door who kept wheeling around and yelling, WHAT did you say! to someone invisible to me; another crazy person, this one deaf, furiously signing to himself (if a deaf person signs to himself and there are no other deaf people around to see, did he really say anything?); a homeless guy screaming into a payphone, I said, sell 500 shares. Now!; a woman who would’t smile at her infant in the stroller; and someone pacing the cars spare-changing “for a hamburger,” not realizing perhaps that if he hadn’t gotten onto BART, he’d have money for a hamburger.

Emmy, like her mother before her, is drawn to people of questionable character. Today on BART, sitting on my lap, she would not take her eyes off a crack-head. It was a friendly crack-head, but I kept trying to flip Emmy around to look out the window instead. Emmy wouldn’t have it. She spun back, and gazed. Luckily, it was a situation of mutual admiration. For the entire journey, Emmy’s new friend dug around in her bag for stuff. First, she reached across and gave Emmy a new Happy Meal toy (a scented pink doll). Then she laboriously punched out a crown from the Happy Meal box, assembled it, and gave it to rapt Emmy, whom I dubbed Queen of This BART Car, and who by then had Scented Pink Doll in her mouth. When we reached our stop, our new friend looked crestfallen. You’re leaving me already? She filled our hands with mini-candy bars as we departed, my derrií¨re feeling like I’d been sitting on a hot coal.