The tattoo parlor of life

American culture, its books and movies and art — or so contended socialist realist literary critic Georg Lukacs — fixates on portraying what he called “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” and I might concur with him about the egregiously over-praised current film “Pollock,” which depicts American artists as loutish, violent, passive-aggressive, drunken, womanizing, suppressed homoerotic, self-destructive
brutes.

Surely no one I know.

“Pollock” is a pathetic calling card for artists if the American public does not know any painters in person. My friend Djuna’s husband, the brilliantly gifted abstract artist
Bruce Pollock, for example — yes, that’s his actual last name, no relation to the famous dead painter — is the exact opposite of
Jackson Pollock when it comes to behavior, but because Bruce is not a churl, no one is making a movie about him — yet.

I was thinking about the lives of artists the other day, while walking from painting to painting at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, when, after a legal meeting upstairs in that wonderfully historic Rittenhouse Square building, I stuck my head into their galleries.

Though I felt so decadent viewing art on a weekday when usually I was working, it was definitely worth it. I saw Andy Warhol’s four multi-colored silk-screens of the head of Mao, which were really really unforgettable, definitely larger than life, particularly that extravagant mole. And then I saw an exhibit dedicated to the love and life of a couple in art, Sylvia, a painter, and her husband, Lawrence, a critic. While Sylvia painted male nudes, and perhaps Lawrence panted after them, he clearly adored her and penned exquisitely romantic letters to her. None of the tortuous Sturm und Drang of that fun couple, painters Jackson Pollock and his wife/warden Lee Krasner, so Hollywoodized in “Pollock.”

Strolling through that gallery, who do I bump into but an actual living, breathing artist I used to know, this old poetry acquaintance Jerome R., from the funkily fabulous but now, alas, defunct downtown Philly poetry/art bar scene called Bacchanal. Charming and courtly as ever in his trademark beard, beret, and bandanna, Jerome was always a fascinating paradox — ghetto-born BFA graduate of art school whose signature poem was the deliberately ironic “I HATE ART,” leather-clad motorcycle gang member riding around with his black brothers in “Wheels of Soul” while painting oversized, complex paintings stunning in their sensitivity. Jerome had always been very gallant to me because of my boyfriend of that era, this very talented but vaguely dispersed poet, C., who looked like Joe Mantegna and who called me Consuela and with whom I broke up after a year and a half because he simultaneously believed he wanted to marry me and live in a cardboard box; clearly C. was a man who embraced contradictions, and I did not want to be one of them.

So Jerome walks in to this gallery last Thursday afternoon with the cutest little girl, Taylor, his daughter, who he was bringing for art lessons. In the intervening decade I hadn’t seen him, he had married an exquisitely beautiful Italian woman, D., someone he had met at Bacchanal, whose late Buddhist father he had previously known under separate circumstances. One day, D.’s father had come upon Jerome fixing his motorcycle, and asked him how much his motorcycle was worth, $5,000? Yes, Jerome said. Then D.’s father asked how much a particular bolt was worth, 39 cents, and Jerome said yes, and her father said, well, imagine if it was loose and you ignored it, you could trash your whole motorcycle, which then would be worth nothing, while the bolt’s actual true value was $5,000.

Jerome tightened the bolt.

Years later, when he met D., Jerome realized he had already known her late father, and, in fact, her father had saved Jerome’s life. After getting married, Jerome further realized he needed to make a better living than the iffy lifestyle afforded him by attempting to sell his paintings and sculptures. Some time back, he had purchased a storefront building on Market Street in West Philadelphia for $4,000, using it for storage of his artwork. Something, maybe getting a tattoo himself, made him realize there were no black tattoo parlors in Philadelphia.

So, after suitably apprenticing himself to tattooists locally and in L.A., Jerome opened his own tattoo parlor, helped along with some money from his wife’s mother, and began to practice the art of shamanistic tattoos and piercings, having researched the origins and folklore of tattoos not as some drunken sailor symbology but as esoteric spiritual emblems rooted in ancient mystical cultures, a fascinating paradox considering some major religions prohibit tattooed congregants’ burial on sacred ground. Jerome even studied gang tattoos in Watts, and the almost accidental anthropology behind those. The growth of the new tribalism — amid burgeoning technology — intrigued him.

Think of Zen calligraphy, but not quite, and you get the picture.

By now, Jerome serendipitously owns and operates three successful tattoo parlors all over the city, with savvy managers he could trust, so he has his days free to spend helping educate and entertain his young daughter, exploring the various cultural offerings of the city with her, all because of tattoos.

Which, of course, fascinated me, because the previous weekend, while attending a writers retreat in Valley Forge, I had bumped into a 75-year-old author-editor from Detroit named Annabelle McSomething who despite her Irish last name was Jewish, very feisty, into covering the labor movement and wore a very dramatic indigo tattoo of a butterfly on her cheek, right where Renaissance women had worn beautyspots.

These tattoos evoked in me the powerful memory of a book, an amazing illustrated novel from a few years ago, Barbara Hodgson’s
“The Tattooed Map.”.

Two ex-lovers, Lydia and Chris, travel to Morocco seeking antiques and adventure. One day the woman awakens with a mysteriously evolving tattoo of an ancient map of an unknown destination appearing on the back of her hand. A stranger in a cafe whispers, “Only your skin and your tears will allow you this journey.” And then, she suddenly disappears without a trace, goes underground, following that dream-map which is the truest art, walking the nonexistent streets of imaginary places — journeying like Orpheus into the underworld — on a physical and spiritual quest somewhat bewildering to the friend she left behind. And yet:

“The tattoo has grown and now snakes part way up my arm almost to my elbow,” Lydia wrote in her diary before disappearing. “It looks like a part of a map. I can see cities and towns, river valleys and mountain ranges. And I can see eyes and hands — talismans to ward away evil? What evil? Perhaps that which I might find if I follow the route on the map. … This is a gift I must accept, not a threat to be avoided.”

Now, that’s great art.