Polaroids
The Hate City Special
Sorry to double up on posts this week but this one just felt like it needed to see the light of day.
Blame the Deer.
POLAROID 1:
HATE CITY
Much of the Deer book, much of French Jeff, Ricky, Billy Squire, and the six plex with the stoop was inspired by the years I spent with these guys pictured below.
This was HATE CITY shortly after I left the gang.
We called ourselves a gang, but I’m not sure I ever knew what distinguished us from any other group of guys who sat in the same bar every day, drinking beer, port wine, and doing cocaine in broom closets.
Occasionally, we would come to arms in the streets of Capitol Hill, maybe beat up the odd group of Nazi skinheads that would come up from the south end of Washington. Who knew what made these Nazi-skinheads come up to Seattle once or twice a year, but we were always ready for them. I still sport a scar on my hand from breaking a bottle over the face of one of these Nazi-skinheads-fucks, a piece of the tattoo on my hand misplaced forever, when one of these guys tried to rape my friend Courtney in a photo booth downstairs at the Cha Cha.
I was the resident tattooer, and the characters that are based on Ricky and French Jeff both tattooed me. The guy French Jeff is based on, pictured above, in the hat with the kid—front and left—gave me my “Gang tattoo”, an HC mashed up with the Cadillac symbol. It took me a year of “Prospecting” to get into the gang. Which consisted really of making sure the guys, who Ricky and French Jeff were based on, mostly making sure they never ran out of beer, port wine, and cocaine.
A Tattoo machine buzzed, on, off, on, off. Frech Jeff, or rather the guy I based French Jeff on, noodled around with a mechanized needle in my skin for what felt like forever. As I tried not to micro-manage my “Gang elder,” micro manage how he kept retracing lines over and over again, me knowing most of it would fall out or blow out, if he went over those lines one more time, well, in my attempt to not micro mange every one of his high-as-a-kite moves I decided instead to ask French Jeff about his inspiration for the HATE CITY logo. Another dip in the ink, the machine letting out a loud BUZZZZZZ, my skin screaming, I questioned, “Why the Cadillac stuff, Jeff?” he said, “Why anything?” and kept thrashing my hand, overworking the skin to get his design in my flesh, just right.
It was as right as it ever would be forty-five minutes ago.
Later, when the guy that Ricky is based on tattooed me, we had been on a good bender, maybe 3-4 days of cocaine, Rainier thirty packs, port wine, and many visits to the LUSTY LADY in downtown Seattle. During that time, in general, we would go to the Lusty Lady a lot, and this 3-to-4-day bender was no different. We would take a bus downtown from The Hill, since none of us could manage to hold onto a car for too long. When we got to The Lusy Lady, we would charge the front desk, purchase enough coins from the sweaty, oily guy who ran the place for one dance each, then we would charge back to the “Jack off booths” and find three in a row. This was Jeff’s thing; we always needed to be side by side for some reason. So, then we would put the coins in the machine all at the same time—on Jeff’s cue—when the windows to the “Stripper room” would open up, we would all, once again on French Jeff’s cue, take our shirts off and start dancing for the ladies—Stripping for the strippers—really just us moshing in the tiny cramped booths until the sweaty oily guy working the front counter would kick us out as we laughed the whole way out.
A few times, a couple of the dancers/strippers would think it was hilarious and come out into the lobby, and we would all dance and mosh in the front lobby as older men in business suits squeezed out of the jack off booths behind us and tried to make their way out, make their way back to their 9-to-5 jobs. With their jizz hands holding a sandwich that said they went out to get.
So, that night after we had gone down to The Lusty Lady, and stripped for the strippers, and made our way back to the six-plex, we all sat around huddled in my apartment talking about how there hasn’t been a “Real Man” since our grandfathers were boys. We said all this usually— had the same conversation surrounding masculinity, what it meant to be a man, almost every time—the party would always devolve into this if it lasted more than three days. So, this night, French Jeff decided we all needed more matching tattoos, but none of us had the bodily strength or cab money to get us all back down to the tattoo shop where I worked, so we improvised!
I had made homemade tattoos a few times, and I gathered some shampoo, a frisbee some hippy chick left at my apartment, and a sewing needle. We poured some shampoo into the underside of the frisbee, then burned the edge. I remember watching the re frisbee bubble and smoke, gross black smoke, wafted up to the ceiling of my apartment, staining it. A stain that is no doubt still there. Some of the black soot that didn’t rise to the ceiling collected at the edge of the frisbee, and we let it fall into the shampoo, then mixed it together to make our homemade ink.
I readied the needle, wrapping a bit of string around the sharp end to collect the ink at the end of it, and so these high as fuck fuckers wouldn’t stab right into a vein or something.
I was first up since I was the newest member of the gang. I remember looking at Ricky holding the needle in his shaking hands, poised over my ankle—the only bit of space I had on my leg—and asked him and Jeff, “What are we gonna get tattooed?” To which Ricky yelled, “CRIME!” and French Jeff agreed. Sure, the word fit our anarchistic, outdated ideals of masculinity, and sure, I knew one of Ricky’s favorite bands was the band Crime, so it was a bit of a two-fer for him, but it really didn’t mean anything to me beyond a connection with these guys, which honestly when your 3 to 4 days deep on a bender with a couple of dudes, is about all the excuse you need for anything, let alone a shitty stick and poke tattoo. So, I said, “Fuck yeah, CRIME!” and watched Ricky pluck the letters into my skin with the sewing needle, with love and care.
POLAROID 2:
Braveheart sword(Fiction)
This guy, Rich, I worked with at the tattoo shop, who had about three teeth to his name, when he took his dentures out, that is, swung a replica of the Braveheart sword at one of the Nazi-skinheads that were screaming “Faggot,” and beating up the guys coming out of The Cuff. Rich had dreadlocks down to his knees and looked the part of one of the Scottish warriors. His dreadlocks swung perpendicular to the sword, on the opposite side of his body. He was a helicopter of violence, and when the sword hit the Nazi-skinhead in his shaved head, Rich’s dreadlocks finished their half-circle path in the air and wrapped around Rich’s body like a baby blanket made of long turds.
Blood exploded, bright red gushed from the shaved head of the Nazi-skinhead. Everyone froze in the street.
Me, the Deer, Ricky, French Jeff, Rich—his baby blanket of brown turds, the Nazi-skinheads, the gays lying sprawled out on the sidewalk, cars once drunkenly zooming home, now frozen—everyone watching, as the Nazi-skinhead who Rich hit with the sword fell to the ground and poured his hatful-blood out for all of us to see.
No one cried.
No one said, “Somebody call an ambulance!”
Everyone just watched the blood pour out of his head.
Watched him die there in the wet Seattle streets, until the Deer said, “We gotta go, kiddo, I’m not rotting in prison again for this piece of shit!”
We took off down the street, the gang of us, and Rich trailing behind, hefting his Braveheart sword and head full of dreads.
POLAROID 3:
The Hide Out or “Ricky’s” mom’s crack house
The character “Ricky,” in the deer book, was based on my hot and heavy best friend of about four years. I say for four years because after that, both our addictions, getting sober, and who we hung out with after that took us down different paths. We still talk, “Ricky” and I; we still see each other about every 2-3 years, laugh over some sparkle waters, talk big, with big smiles on our faces about how lucky we are to be sober and have families and kids. If you could ask us, the past version of ourselves, I’m sure they would say they could never imagine we would be where we are, never imagined we would live past thirty, so happy and yet still so far away from each other.
A few years into “Ricky’s” and my friendship, towards the middle of our complete downward spiral of addiction, we got into one of these yearly fights with the Nazi-skinheads that would come up from the south end and start trouble in the queer/punk neighborhood of Seattle, Capitol Hill. Our friend Rich took a sharpened replica of the Braveheart sword to one of these Nazi Skinheads’ heads. He lived in real life, but not in my fiction, of course, but the cops and the Nazi-skinhead’s friends in real life then, were looking for us now.
So, “Ricky,” “French Jeff,” this guy that was a piece of the character puzzle that is “Billy Squire,” and I all headed down to “Ricky’s” mom’s house. A dilapidated crack house deep in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Rich, I think, went off to his dad’s house in Ohio to lay low, too. I guess a crack house adventure didn’t sound appealing to him. He had spent a lot of time in them in the 90s, from what he told me.
We took the bus out to Beacon Hill, walking the four or five blocks from the bus stop to “Ricky’s” mom’s crack house.
The house was a faded green, to my recollection. Maybe the green was faded paint, or maybe it was green from years of mold and moss accumulating on it; I can’t remember being able to tell at the time, but I could tell that the front door had been kicked in at some point, and no one had thought to fix it.
When we walked in the house, “Ricky’s” mom yelled from upstairs, “I’m not coming down, but make yourself at home, boys! I love you, Rick!” “Ricky’s” stepdad had taken off at some point, gotten sick of “Ricky’s” mom’s crack head bullshit, but had chased away most of the stray crack heads before he left. He was a real strait-laced black guy who wore overalls and a trucker hat all the time. He looked like he might be a farmer if he didn’t live in a city. “Ricky” loved the guy, his stepdad that is, and how he loved his mom even though she was a mess of a crack head, how he loved “Ricky” even though he wasn’t his kid by blood.
Walking through the house, “Ricky” tried to avoid a pile of loose needles and stepped on a rotten floorboard, which sent him crashing through to the subfloor up to his knee. “French Jeff,” the guy who was part of “Billy Squire,” and I all helped “Ricky” up from the floor, dusted him off, and checked to make sure he hadn’t been stuck by any needles we hadn’t seen. “Ricky’s” mom had yelled down to check if we were ok, and then said, “You boys gotta stay down there, ok? I don’t want y’all seeing me like this. I think there’s a bed in the office next to the kitchen, you boys can bunk up there!”
We traversed bags of half-eaten fast food, used needles, and piles of scorched tin foil until we found the “Office” that “Ricky’s” mom told us about. She was right—“Ricky’s” mom—there was a bed in there, but it looked like at least seventeen people had been murdered on it or had at least lost a battle with a land shark and shit themselves in the process. I think we all looked at “Ricky” then, “French Jeff” looked like he might just puke right on his shoes, and “ Billy Squire “ and I looked at each other, then back to “Ricky” as if “Ricky” or any of us really might have any answers beyond sleeping on that bed together for as long as it took for the cops and the Nazi-skinheads to stop looking for us.
It only took three days, of sleeping on the bed, shitting gas station burritos into a toilet that looked like it may have been built out of shit itself, and about one thousand bed bug bites on each of us for “Ricky,” “French Jeff,” “Billy Squire,” and me to decide we just weren’t man enough, or high enough maybe is closer too it, to sleep in “Ricky’s” mom’s crack house one day longer. I think it was when “Ricky” and I woke up with bed bug bites on our penis’ when the scales got tipped to “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”
So, we said goodbye to “Ricky’s” mom, and her crack house, and walked out the lack of a front door to catch a bus back to Capitol Hill. As we stood there in the summer heat, sweating, waiting for the bus, this guy walked right up to “Billy Squire” and knocked him in the front teeth with a Glock 17. “Billy Squire” grabbed his mouth with both of his meaty hands, and blood poured through the open spaces between his fingers onto the concrete. The guy held the gun on me, “Ricky,” and “French Jeff,” saying, “Give me your money, white boys!” And just as we were pulling out our wallets to do so, the bus pulled up, not aware of what was transpiring. I yelled out, “Get on the fuckin’ bus!” and we all piled on, without paying, “Billy Squire” leaving a trail of blood down the aisle, and “Ricky” yelling out to the driver, “Fuckin’ drive that guy’s got a gun!”
By the time we got back to the Hill, after switching buses twice, “Billy Squire’s” mouth had stopped bleeding, and we all marveled at how the hit to the face with the Glock 17 had only knocked out one of his front teeth—and clean out too!
We all went to the Comet Tavern right when we got back to the Hill. There didn’t seem to be any urgency to go home or take a shower now that we were out of “Ricky’s” mom’s crack house, out and away from the bed bugs and used-up needles and burnt tin foil. And Mike the bartender, being the generous guy he was, gave us all free shots of port wine the whole rest of the night. If that wasn’t enough, if we were surfing on cloud nine and feeling invincible yet, the Jamaican guy who sold us coke gave us each a free bindle and bought us a round of Rainers.
Days went by. And then weeks, and neither the Nazi-Skinheads nor the cops ever came looking for us. We went on about our lives, me tattooing, and the rest of the guys catching the odd job here and there, making enough money to pay for a bindle and a couple bottles of Rainer. One thing’s for certain, after that day, well, the four of us were inseparable, inseparable for better or worse—through thick and thin, until “Ricky” and I got sober and found a new way of living. Some other way of living other than Bindle, booze, and beating up Skinheads.
POLAROID 4:
SORRY I PARTY!
I forgot I bought this weird rubber deer mask online. It just came in the mail—where from exactly, I’m not sure, but I remember now, as I lie here in bed writing this, I bought it while I was hopped up on cold medicine a few weeks back, trying not to die from whatever my kid brought home from daycare a month ago.
The Deer often reads as funny or a bit of a jester, but the picture above better embodies his true tendencies, I believe.
Which reminds me of a story from around this time, now that I think of it! From around this chaotic era of me—us, the guys I based Ricky, French Jeff, Billy Squire, and the six-plex on.
+++
Ricky and me had been on a bender for a few days by the time French Jeff’s birthday party rolled around. French Jeff is one of those people who takes the whole month of his birthday and makes everyone celebrate all 30 days of it with him. So even though he’s a Leo, and his birthday is at the end of July, we started celebrating around July 4th.
I’m pretty sure I was still new to the gang at this time; I probably didn’t even have my tattoos that French Jeff or Ricky would give me much later. Still, me and Ricky were thick as thieves, and we pulled ourselves from some bushes in Cal Anderson Park, where we had drank and partied with some girls until the break of dawn. By the time we stumbled back to the six-plex, French Jeff’s Fourth of July early birthday party was already off to the races. Billy Squire, or rather the two guys that I smooshed into one, for the book im still writing about this whole time, well, they and French Jeff had somehow found some falconing gloves or at least French Jeff did, and the rest of them wore cheap canvas and leather gardening gloves as they shot bottle rockets at Ricky and me, as we approached the six-plex in our drunken stupor.
The morning grew into day, and the party kept going. More friends came, burgers, beers, and brats were had, and then as the night wore on, I decided to attempt to rest my tired Bottle rocket-burned body back at my place. My little piece of the six-plex. The two guys I based Billy Squire on asked if they could come with and watch some TV at my place and cool their heels a little bit, and I said yes if they promised to keep the volume down and let me sleep, because I had to work the next day.
As soon as we blasted through the front doors of my apartment, one of the halves of Billy Squire flopped out a bag of brilliant magic powder, and asked if I wanted a before-bed toot. Never one to look a gift horse, or Deer in this instance, in the mouth, I said, “OF COURSE!” and hoovered up a sharp little railway that instantly sent me flying flat onto my ass. I grabbed my face, felt the magic powder stab at my sinuses like a million miniature glass shards, and yelped out, “What tha’ fuck did’ja just give me?”
Both Halves of Billy Squire roared on the floor laughing, and then one of them said, “Oh shit, that was meth bro, I didn’t want to tell you because I wasn’t sure you’d be cool with it. Well, actually, now that it’s out in the open, do ya mind if we smoke this shit in here?”
“GET THA’ FUCK OUT!” I screamed over and over, as I pointed to the door with the one hand of mine that wasn’t still holding my methed up face.
Fuck I gotta work tomorrow.
It was just a small line, just a toot really.
I should be ok.
But I wasn’t, and the high kept growing and growing. It felt like coffee and battery acid flowed through my veins. The Deer was clanging on my cerebellum, tugging and kicking my pituitary or hypothalamus. Wherever he was, he was charged up and raging. At one point, I looked at this little vintage digital clock I kept by the bed I had on the floor. I saw it read 5:03 AM. I now had to work today! I needed sleep, some sleep, of some kind. There was no beer in the fridge, the two halves of Billy Squire had seen to that, had left with what was left of my case of Rainer when they went to smoke their meth outside, but I remembered I had a full bottle of NYQUIL in the medicine cabinet, in case of sleep emergencies or actual sickness.
Going into the bathroom, I tried not to face the Deer in the mirror and kept the light off as I entered. The medicine cabinet door creaked, and there was my salvation, my Mr. Sandman himself. I tore off the top and threw caution to the wind. I knew it would take more than a hero’s dose to put this Deer to bed, so I drank nearly half the bottle in one fell swoop.
Something I don’t recommend for pro-junkies or regular people alike.
The rest of the early morning, well, you would have to ask others about that, I think. The next thing I remember was the lights coming on in the tattoo shop, probably somewhere around 11:30 AM or so, when a couple of my coworkers came in to open up for the day. And there they found me, ready for work, dressed in a cape I had made from a bedsheet and a cardboard cutout—a hand-painted Batman mask tied neatly around my face. They stood there stunned, as I, in my cape and home made batman mask, wheeled a child’s tricycle—that I found god knows where— in neat circles in the lobby of the tattoo shop, all while swiggging back gulp after gulp of Mr. Sandman himself.
My coworkers laughed at first, then one of them yelled out, “Hey, asshole, we gotta work, you think you could take this party somewhere else?”
To which they told me later, I said, “SORRY I PARTY!” Which became a bit of a shop slogan after that, with even our boss loving it. How he even ran an ad with the slogan “Super Genius tattoo, sorry we party!” featuring a picture of me from another time when I found a Wizard of Oz monkey costume and wore it to a different work function. He ran that ad every week for over a year in the Stranger, a free Seattle weekly entertainment newspaper.
All of Seattle knew me as the Monkey that couldn’t stop partying.
At some point during that whole year that the “SORRY I PARTY” ad ran, a few of us tattooers got the phrase tattooed on us with pot leaves behind it. Truthfully, we all agreed the pot leaves didn’t fit the story, or the vibe of the tattoo at all, but it did seem more publicly ok to get a pot leaf tattooed on your body than a big bag of meth or a bottle of NYQUIL.
dancing for the strippers and homemade tattoos are top-tier anecdotes. real-life adventures that read as fiction.
Done. Read them all. Wow. I don’t know how you do it. I’m right there with you with every line. I could smell Ricky’s mom’s house. My skin itched and burned. I’ve done a bump of crack against my will and the nightmare still haunts me. I have not snorted anything since. Gun shy. Fuck it, I’m sober now anyways. All of this was good. Loved them all. Once again, you fucking killed it.