Permanent Scratches

I just got back from the tattoo parlor on my block (although, technically, it's more on Maggie's block, since the tattoo parlor adjoins her house. How come it's always a "parlor", anyway... I'd never been in a place like that, believe it or not, and it wasn't at all like the parlors that I have been in...)

It's been just over two weeks since Elvis (my cat) died.

Elvis, as many of my readers know, was pretty boisterous, and was not afraid to assert his rather large and intense opinion to me. As i sat thinking about some other stuff tonight, it occurred to me that his last actual physical marks upon me were literally fading, since the scratches I have carried with me (proudly) on my forearms for the last five or six years as the owner/roommate of a part-mountain-lion haven't been re-wounded since he's been gone.

Anyway... a few minutes after I noticed that my last Elvis-inflicted flesh wound was fading, I left my apartment and went up the street (these, I guess are the advantages to living on St. Marks Place) and went to the tattoo and cappucino place. (I kid you not. Until 8 months ago, I could comparison-shop a tattoo without leaving my block. The dot-com implosion apparently dried up the demand for high-priced impulse tattoos, though, so now there's just the one. But they have cappucino, too, which is nice.)

I went inside, and asked the solo dude there what kind of color pallate options they offered. In response, he showed me his forearm, which pretty much answered the question.

I said that I had a kind of strange request, although I was willing to bet that it was by no means the strangest request he'd had before, and very possibly not the strangest request he'd had today. (and, as I remember my days on St. Marks Place, probably not the strangest request I've had of ME within a 50-foot radius of his store.)

I wanted a line drawn (preferably in red or light pink, to approximate a scar) over the last remaining mark that my best friend and kitty had left on me, not in a fit of anger, but as a mark of "This is how hard we play. We play hard, Up to this point."

The guy told me that he didn't think he could do the scratch justice, and that'd just look like someone had drawn on (or in) me with a pink pen. I don't want that. There's a lot of things I don't want, though, I guess. I'd like my pal back.

I guess this is my eulogy, Elvis. I miss you, and the wounds aren't going to heal for a long, long time.

Posted by ryan at November 07, 2002 11:08 PM