In the Bathroom (With a Razorblade)
I got my first tattoo when I was fourteen. I did it myself in the bathroom, with a razorblade and a jar of calligraphy ink. It’s on my thigh.
It’s an angry face with wild, spiked hair. His eyes are squeezed shut. These are drawn as a group of lines that all come to a point on either side of his nose. Each eye is like a sideways letter V inside of another, inside of another. His mouth is one frustratingly crooked line reaching from one cheek to the other. Along the width of his mouth are short vertical lines. Stitches.
It’s a self portrait. This was back when my parents were splitting up. And just like every other fourteen year old kid going through his parents’ divorce, I was angry. I didn’t want to see it, so I closed my eyes. Nothing I could have ever said would have had the power to change a thing. My own mouth stitched shut. Just as that of my angry little tattoo self.
I had started with a sewing needle. Repeatedly plunging the needle into the jar of ink, repeatedly plunging the needle into my thigh. Over and over and over. Coming to the conclusion that tracing the entire drawing onto my leg with the needle was going to take forever, I opted for the razorblade.
Using the blade seemed more economical; practical. Plus, I had figured it would give me cleaner lines. The idea was to make my cuts, pour, and then rub the ink into the wound.
The blade tracing across my skin felt smooth compared to the hesitant punctures of the needle.
I watched curiously as each slice slowly opened behind the blade to reveal fleshy little canyons, flash flooding, spilling over with my own bright red blood.
There is a strange perversion that comes with locking yourself in a bathroom, sitting on the toilet in your underwear and methodically cutting yourself. Making a mess of blood and ink.
It didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would’ve, I think for the same reason why you can’t tickle yourself.
It was around this same time that a friend of mine began doing tattoos of his own. The difference between the two of us was that he had a tattoo gun and I had a razorblade. He made his gun from household junk. A bent spoon, a pen, an RC car motor, a pencil eraser, some tape and a length of guitar string to serve as the needle. It wasn’t pretty, but it certainly made tattoos.
He practiced his craft in a small room off his basement. The floor was dirt and the walls were stone. The ceiling was very low and from it hung a single, bare light bulb. The tiny room had a signature odor of dirt, mold and cat piss.
I imagine Buffalo Bill, from The Silence of the Lambs, sizing up the portly Catherine Martin as she’s chained to the wall of this dungeon. Only, he had that perfect hole in his basement. So I’m brought back to the image of a group of teenagers sitting on milk crates in the near dark. Surrounded by that dank smell and the sound of a buzzing tattoo gun in the air.
I watched as he tattooed himself and the others. It looked painful. The guitar string quickly dulled and seemed to pull and dig at the skin, dragging across their flesh, scaring them with jagged black lines.
I didn’t care much for his artwork. His skulls and snakes were of the sort you might expect to find tattooed on an eighteenth century pirate. This alone did not dissuade me from letting him embellish my arm with a crude jolly Roger, though. There was just no way I was letting him near me with that gun, not after he had dipped that same guitar string into the bloodstreams of four or five other kids.
I don’t know how his tattoos survived the years. I haven’t seen any of those kids in over a decade. My own tattoo, now sixteen years old, has faded with time, now amounting to nothing more than a few barely visible black scratches.
Copyright© March 2008 Chris La Cour
9 Responses
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Brave, bold and edgy. Today my friend you would be called a “cutter” and sent to a shrink, even perhaps drugged.
The way you describe the cutting is very much the way cutters do. The pain never the issue, it’s the bizarre high they get.
You, like so many kids went through a divorce, parents forget that they are not the only ones going through a hard time, and often kids are treated like bystanders rather than victims. In this case I can relate for I was 7 or 8 when my parents split up and my reaction was to stop eating anything but chicken broth. It was my protest, like your tattoo holding the mouth shut, eyes and ears closed to the world around you.
This piece hit me, as you can probably tell. Honest and soul crushing your writing cuts like that razor you used. Thank you.
ps I am incredibly honored to be on that blogroll.
I find this to be rather courageous writing given the public nature of this site… It is remarkably transformative wording and imagery (direct and simple, as the story demands) and I was placed closer than was comfortable to the scenes and emotional context. This was very affective writing to me and an interesting introspective turn from your earlier submission. I liked it very much, both because and despite the subject matter.
I get it.
As parents we do not relize that every move we make is a reflection on our children. We only think of ourselves and not the consiquenses of our actions. This is not a direct nor intentional hurt to the ones we love. Athough this is not my story it is yours, you bring out the memories kept so deep inside, the guilt. I can sleep at night knowing my actions were for the greater good of both of us.
Different story, differnt life.
chris brother… you’re weird
“These stories are the bomb, yo!” filled with captivating imagery… kinda gory…but totally the bomb!
The whole idea of memoir makes me uncomfortable, not because it’s personal, but because it purports to a degree of reality we don’t grant to fiction. It’s intriguing what you’re doing here, Chris, but I wonder why, just as you may wonder why I don’t just tell my own story straight out, the best way I can. I love the details here of the razor cuts and particularly the description of the homemade tattoo gun. I disagree with veronica. I don’t think these are the actions of a cutter. Lots to think about!
David, thanks for commenting. The whole idea of writing, or more so, publicly posting memoirs, makes me uncomfortable. I guess that would be one reason as to why I do it. It’s one way to put myself out into the world without actually stepping all the way out.
And about any sense of uneasiness, as a result of a memoir being based in reality is concerned, I think it’s wholly necessary during these days of distraction. Too much attention is paid to everything but what’s really going on in this world. People should at least be aware of things like troubled kids hiding out in their bathrooms playing with sharp things.
Another reason would be that I have found that people have always enjoyed hearing my tales. I’m not a vocal story teller, and I can convey a much stronger, richer tale on paper.
And finally, write what you know. You write “very short novels”, amazingly well by the way, and I’m sure much of your work comes from what you know. I think that we could agree that, “what you know”, is not limited to literally one thing or another that the writer has specifically experienced. What you know, could be a three block walk to the market and from that you could spin any one of a million tales that all come from that one short walk. Considering that a memoir is the writers version of something as they see it now, as something that has evolved in meaning, I think this applies equally to non-fiction as well as fiction.
The story which is not the story. The actual story of the parents, the selfmutilation, is hidden behind the tattoo story, so the story reflects the tattoo, mouth stitched shut. It has a flat and distanced tone too which is perfect. And teenagers in a dark hole all getting homemade snakes and skulls implies the much wider story, a whole generation with these scars. As always with your writing, beautifully made and deeply resonant.
I knew you would find it interesting, Paul. And I knew how much you would read into it. Thanks.