Tony steps out of the shower wrapped in a scandalously short towel that’s obviously been stolen from the ambulance, wearing a pair of cheap plastic slides. The tiny white hospital towel barely makes it around his age-thickened waist, and there’s a deep slit positioned over his right leg to expose a large, colorful tattoo – a bird of paradise flower that covers most of his upper thigh. Standing in the hallway shirtless and grinning in his shower shoes, toothbrush and deodorant in hand, water droplets rolling down from the top of his shaved head, he looks a little like Uncle Fester and a little like the oldest kid at summer camp.
Tony has a couple other tattoos that could easily have been done in prison – a misshapen eagle’s head on one shoulder, a shaky Maltese cross on the other - along with a thick keloid scar that looks like an attempted brand on his left breast. The tattoos on his upper body are all rendered in the same faded, wavy green lines. They have probably been there for forty years, which makes the tattoo on his leg that much more incongruous. It’s noticeably newer, with bright colors, and crisp lines. While it’s not going to win any awards, it was obviously done by a somewhat more experienced hand. The subject matter is what makes it puzzling. The bright, flamboyant flower is an odd choice for a fifty-five-year-old macho Cuban firefighter.
“What’s up with that?” I say, pointing at his exposed thigh.
“Bro! I’ve got a story for you!” Tony laughs.
It’s getting late, but I figure we have time for one more shot of Cuban coffee before bed. I fill the moka pot and put it on the stove while Tony begins the story of his newest tattoo.
“So, I had this buddy who was a Sheriff’s deputy and he owed me like four hundred bucks.”
I find that - as an adult with a steady job and friends who are mostly adults with steady jobs - I don’t have a lot of people who owe me four hundred bucks anymore, but Tony and I don’t run in the same circles. Tony spends his free time working as a cutman for local boxing matches, taping up fighter’s gloves and faces and getting himself into situations where off-duty Sheriff’s deputies owe him four hundred bucks. He eats lunch in the same café every day where the same old Cuban men spend hours over cafecitos and card games, arguing politics and paying their tabs at the end of the month.
“My buddy told me that he didn’t have the money to pay me, but he had another guy who owed him like four hundred bucks, and that guy didn’t have any money either, but that guy was a tattoo artist, so my buddy told me that if I wanted a tattoo, he could get me a four-hundred-dollar tattoo for free and then everyone’s debts would be settled.”
Again, Tony and I are different people. I don’t have any tattoos at all, so this sounds like a bad deal all the way around to me, but even if I were covered in tattoos, the idea of getting one, unplanned, from an unknown artist in an unknown place to settle what is otherwise a very real debt does not seem like the best trade to me, but Tony didn’t see it that way.
“Sounded like a good deal to me, so I said ‘Okay, let’s do it!’” Tony says, laughing.
I could never commit to a tattoo because I never felt like I could find anything that I would feel comfortable having on my body for the rest of my life. As much as I might love something today, I know myself well enough to know that there’s a very real chance I’ll feel differently about it tomorrow. But that’s not what tattoos are for. Turns out, I had it all wrong. Tattoos serve as mementos of experiences, and just like the experiences they memorialize, they don’t all have to be good. In fact, when too many of them are too good, it makes the wearer just as suspect as someone who insists that all their past experiences have been positive. And this is where Tony and I are much the same. We are both collectors of experiences in our own distinct ways. Most of my experiences end up manifesting themselves as stories and works of art. Tony’s manifest as bad tattoos.
“So, we hop in my buddy’s car. He’s driving us further and further out of town which I think is weird, but I’m not asking any questions. When he turns into the entrance of a trailer park in Palm River I finally ask him what’s going on.
I go, ‘Bro, I thought we were going to a tattoo parlor.’
But my buddy just says, ‘This guy works from home.’”
Were it me, this is the point where I would have bailed out on the experience. I’m not really a confrontational person, especially with strangers, and I know that if we make it into this dude’s trailer, there’s no way I’m going to be able to say no to the tattoo, no matter how sketchy the situation. I could never be that rude to someone in their own home. It goes against literally everything I was taught as a kid. If I’m a guest in somebody’s home and they offer me a meal, or a bed, or even a hepatitis-infected tattoo needle, I’m going to smile and say, “Thank you very much”. But we’re not there yet. There’s still time to turn the car around and leave without hepatitis or a four-hundred-dollar trailer park tattoo. But, again, Tony and I are different people.
“So, we go into this dude’s single-wide and I’m looking around for the flash art. I didn’t have my own design, so I figured I’d just pick something off the wall, but he doesn’t have anything up on the walls. It’s not the dirtiest trailer I’ve ever been in, but it’s no tattoo parlor either. I ask if he has anything for me to look at and he just yells to his old lady in the back, ‘Hey babe, come out here!’
His old lady comes out of the back bedroom wearing a string bikini, and she’s covered in tattoos. He just points at her and says ‘Why don’t you pick out something on her that you like?' She’s his flash wall!
I didn't really like any of her tattoos that much, but she had this one bird of paradise tattoo on her shoulder that I thought was okay. Hers was really small though, and I wanted something that was worth four-hundred bucks, so I told him to give me the same one but to make it real big!”
I told this story to a friend of mine who said that it should be taught in every economics class as an example of why the barter system doesn’t work. I think of it every time a firefighter tells me that they are switching their pension over to the investment option because they can be a better manager of their money than the pension fund managers. And I think about it whenever I’m in a situation where I’m bending over backwards to broker a compromise on something where I was clearly at a disadvantage from the start.
It’s easy to laugh at Tony and what he got for his four-hundred dollars, but he doesn’t feel ripped off at all. He’s standing in the kitchen in an indecent towel and slides with a giant, ridiculous tattoo on his leg, a delicate little demitasse of espresso in his hand, and a huge grin on his face. Seems like four-hundred dollars well spent.