We slouched, wordless, our weary bones burrowing into sun-drenched car seats. Sometimes the solace of a Home Depot parking lot is the sweetest gift you can afford yourself. Two whole minutes of suburban suspended animation unpunctuated by the stress of doing, going.
When you’re younger, these moments of quiet resemble roadblocks to the action. But then you get to the action. Protests. Suicides. Addiction. Abusive partners. Nothing hits the spot like shutting the fuck up and watching people come in and out of the combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell after a long week of watching all that you know and love writhe in practiced agony.
He and I’d made the decision together, to get to the action, but made the journey apart. He draws and erases and draws it over in Palo Alto. I take pictures of police in Oakland. He has a boyfriend and two cats. I have four partners and just ate mushrooms on purpose for the first time. You change a lot in a decade—I look forward to these respites in the consumerist hellscape. This silence, this shared being alive for no particular reason—a motionless victory lap. It’s hard but we’re making it. Suck it, life.
He motions me to look at his phone. We are more alone than we thought here in the parking lot.
Tala Brandeis, our brilliant and trusted tattoo artist, had left us. Muscles mournfully shuffle—he looks on the Norse compass on his arm, me on the octopus sashaying along my calf.
We’re all constellations, reference points. At any moment, people you know are talking about or around you. Yeah, we were doing that thing, I remember—that person we share was there too.
Tala was a weird and wonderful star. We talked about her often—the reflection of her audacity lit a lot of people’s way.
The average lifespan of a trans woman is 30-32 years. Some even consider (if coercively) going back to the closet upon reaching middle age. There’s just not much of a visible, maintained community. When you have your youth, you are contextualized by your immediate sexual capital.
People may not agree with your choice (and/or harass you into trying to kill yourself over it) but they understand that someone wants to fuck you and that this could be motivating your life’s decisions. When you’re older, and that sexual capital becomes more latent and learned, you are looked on with pity. Oh, of what use is this thing?
And if I didn’t meet Tala, who followed your notions of age out of the club screaming, “Fight me you fucker,” I might have known to fear growing old. But if you find anything, anything at all, scarier than a greying dyke with a tattoo gun who simply speaks over your gasps of searing anguish to continue her story about what it’s like to be in a biker gang, you might be in hell. In which case—good news, there is something after life. But you’re not gonna like the bad news.
We seep into these silences because there is always the security that when we throw off that duvet, when we turn the ignition and pull out of Home Depot, that we will have re-entered the game. That we will be a more or equal amount of alive than we were.
People pay money to look at art made by the since departed—I have an incomplete map of mastery and expression embedded in my fucking leg. I will now shave the hair that grows through and over art history. My history. Our history.
And he’s looking at his Norse compass? Which way does he go now?
OK, that’s—I’m being a little melodramatic here. But not one of the countless tattoo books we’ve perused in Portland parlors contains an appendix on bereavement.
God, are you there? It’s me, and I’m a fucking museum of flesh now. Help me out.
I have my reasons. And this tattoo—actually, her name is Octavia—goes on that list of reasons, along with “remain to care and love for your girlfriends” and “figure out what the fuck they are trying to do with the show The Blacklist.” Reasons to eat, to flush the pills and look both ways before I cross the street. I must carry on, as long as I can, to steward the oeuvre of an artist who worked on that most precious and tender of mediums, the skin of wriggling and crying people.
My octopus was not a sacred profession of my personality. If it said anything, it’s oh god this hurts so much more than people prepared me for. But oh shit, am I reconsidering these allowances of alchemical profundity. When I catch a glance of another person’s tattoos, either in passing or while sliding back into bed at 4 in the morning trying not to wake her, my eyes will breathe in the effervescent hints of unknowable elements.
The pain, the pleasure, the mutual ecstasy of artist and canvas. We might never be able to quantify what goes into this torture of aesthetics. That’s what makes them sacred and worth preserving, though—that and the occasional free sample I get at the beauty supply store because the girl at the counter really likes octopi.
He and I form an archive. Between and on us is the indelible mark of a diamond since faded. Every parking lot breather is now a private exhibit. We must continue on, together—because we love each other and no one else understands my obtuse obsession with Black Butler and also because we are part of a radical woman’s history, one that should be preserved because that history is always under threat of erasure and also because fuck you, why not.
Fight us, entropy. Get over here and fight us, you punk ass motherfucker.
He turns the engine over and we creep back onto the streets. Doing. Going. More alone, but more alive—if only out of defiance.
RIP Tala.
