[***This is POST #2 IN MY MEDIUM EXPERIMENT. IF YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW. IT’S MIDNIGHT YESTERDAY SOMEWHERE, YA’LL. Maybe I’ll post another very late tonight since this should actually be #3. But who’s counting? Hopefully all my irate new followers, who realize now how little I can be trusted to keep my freaking word.😊]
At21, none of us really know who we are, right? Multiply that by at least five if you’re a theater major.
Let’s say I was forming an identity, but it was fluid, ya’ll. At least as shaky as jello. I tried temperament on like a costume, not appreciating switching to another persona wasn’t as seamless as a quick change in the dressing room.
I loved Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and the almost sport of emotional mayhem. The boys who could not love me back. Not usually the ones who were mean on purpose, but rather those outfitted in flannel, Converse, and deep ambivalence about the nature of the universe or whatever.
They were usually funny. Complicated. Searchers as I searched.
The problem (and the solution), of course, is that everything changes. The trick is you don’t know this until it happens.
Photo by Kyle Cottrell on Unsplash
San Francisco, 1992. My boyfriend Chris, a vegetarian who played guitar — shocker — loved Henry Rollins and Neil Young, maybe occasionally smoked a little too much pot. Loving, smart, and funny. He. planned with meticulous care the armband tattoo he’d been designing for months. Researched the tattoo artist — found the best, thus our trip to San Francisco — whose name Chris said with reverence, and of whom I have almost no memory.
I didn’t have a design before we got there. As I was (and am) wont to do, I’d left it last minute. Once in the shop, I looked in a book like a menu. Paging through pictures of anything and everything, my eyes fell upon a fleur de lis symbol that struck me as beautiful.
Trite, I know; French royalty, I am not; in French, fleur and lis are defined as ‘flower’ and ‘lily’ respectively. I just thought it was pretty. Pretty apropos of the time I was in, actually. In love with a boy who hadn’t gone to college and wanted to be a doctor. From a family who had basically zero money.
I was in a year between college and graduate school with a BFA in theater. A year suspended like a shaky highwire, waiting tables, taking orders, realizing what I didn’t want and little about what I did. (So I went with the safe bet, a master’s degree in theater and a move to Los Angeles to become an actor😊. Another post.)
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Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash
The night before our tattoo appointments, after inhaling Ethiopian food, I lay awake next to Chris who slept peacefully beside me in our hotel room. Frozen in panic. What the fuck was I doing? I couldn’t get a tattoo. Who was I, a Grateful Dead groupie, a truck driver named Bill? I hadn’t actually thought much about it and now it was upon me. A piece of permanence. Was I crazy? What would my Type A sister say, my over reactive mother do?
I shook Chris awake at one point, quietly hyperventilating. “What?” he said, groggy. “I can’t get a tattoo!” I yelled. “Why not?” he asked. “Because I can’t!” I proclaimed intelligently. He fell back asleep. I bit my nails. Part of me worried I was doing this to impress my boyfriend. But at the same time, a thrill at the ‘fuck you’ of it all coursed through me. I could do what I wanted and no one could stop me.
You don’t know until you do. People are judgmental. Myself included. I’m not above caring what others think of me. My sister, by the way, was horrified, as predicted. I remember trying to hide my tattoo from my family until it became absurd. I scornfully judged them for being so judgmental, stupidly unaware of my own sanctimony. I recall an unusual mix of embarrassed and haughty when my mom finally asked. “It’s no big deal!” I shouted, as if it was a really big deal.
I didn’t know how to explain it. Even though Chris and I broke up a year and a half after San Francisco, even though I had gotten a tattoo in a moment of reckless abandon, even though at any other time I probably wouldn’t have, I did not feel regret.
I remember after we were freshly inked, walking Haight Ashbury. Feeling a smile on my lips, giddy. People passing us by, some asking, “bud? doses?” like did we want to buy any. We got ice cream instead and went to the water. We held hands. Simple.
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Photo by Ivan Torres on Unsplash
But life can also be complicated.
You don’t know when you’re 21, for example, the very real possibility you might want to wear a wedding dress that lays bare your back as you stand before your family and friends and say ‘I do’. That the space between your shoulder blades is not the most discreet location.
Nor do you consider years later a job interview with a Catholic School principal who might just mention, smiling,“Of course we want to dress modestly!” to your confusion. Until you get the job and realize she must have got an accidental peek underneath your sheer white blouse walking to the parking lot. That years after that you would give birth to children and be forced to attend pool parties. And go on family vacations to the beach.
It doesn’t matter but it does.
Photo by Kristin Brown on Unsplash
The first time my son, around age two, said, “Mommy, what’s that black blob on your back?” I told him all about tattoos. “Did it hurt?” he asked. “Kind of, but like a little bee buzzing and he stops every few seconds. It’s just ‘buzz, buzz, buzz,” I tickled him. He furrowed his little brow and asked sternly, “Mommy, why did you do that?” Out of the mouths of babes.
I have seen a sideways glance at a pool party. “Oh my God, you have a tattoo!” a couple of friends from my mom’s group shrieked when we went to the lake for the weekend. My husband doesn’t love it. But he doesn’t care either. Fortunately, tattoos have only grown in popularity; people have tattoos anywhere and everywhere; sometimes they got it when they were drunk, when they just broke up, when they just fell in love; never is our touch with reality and consequences more tenuous than moments of extreme emotion: remember Johnny Depp with the “Winona Forever” tattoo that he tweaked to “Wino Forever”?
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Photo by Paulius Dragunas on Unsplash
Chris McGee, I don’t know where you are. Not on social media or a Google search. The last time I saw you my son was a baby. We had coffee and laughed and watched him gurgle. How I loved you once. Like we love when we are young, with our whole heart. Without worrying whether we’re loving too much. Because we haven’t had the wind knocked out of us yet when love goes.
I want to hang out with that 21-year-old girl and buy her a coffee and ask her questions, maybe give her a little advice to wear sunscreen and maybe lay off the hair dye. And maybe to trust herself, not let the world of Hollywood knock her down. Remember who she is from the inside out.
There is a book my daughter loves. Things happen and you can decide it’s a mistake or a “beautiful oops.” There was a time when my kids were little and obsessed with my tattoo: “what is that on your back?” or “why did you do that?” I’ve told them the truth.
I didn’t know back then I would be a mommy. I couldn’t begin to imagine that some day I would trust myself to take care of a baby or find someone I loved and knew would be a great husband and dad. That I would have a house and a mortgage and a car payment. That I wouldn’t be famous. I wouldn’t be on Broadway. I would write, some for the stage, and sometimes that is better, to be part of the audience.
That the most special moments come in times at random when no one is looking, between the littlest of days, the smallest of hands, the oddest of dreams. The details no one else notices that make your life.
Our impulse actions become part of our folklore. A sign of our dizzy youth, that once-upon-a-time ridiculous, unpredictable glory. It delineates who we were with who we are.
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Photo by Patrick Schneider on Unsplash
There’s the me I was that day, the little ‘buzz buzz buzz’ sound from behind me as I looked out the open window into Haight Asbury. Kind of above. From the second floor. A breeze blowing. And I feel like Jane’s Addiction was playing or something definitely like them. And I felt free. It was my own body to fuck with as I wished. Everything black and white.
Now here I am at age 50. Where everything is shades of gray and that was over half my life ago. I’m the same idiot and I’m not. How hilarious is that?
I love my fleur de lis, not because it is particularly beautiful or something I would do now — the opposite really — it shows how I’ve grown.
That just as everything changes some things are permanent. And I don’t regret it for a moment.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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