“That diploma, it tattooed somewhere on your body, too? You gots everything else all over you—”
“On my behind, Mr. B. right on my cheeks. Wanna see?”
‘Smart mouth...stuck in the ghetto, is what you are. Put yourself there...if someone was to make you get them tattoos, then you wouldn’t like them so much. People’ll put up with stupid, crazy stuff, long as they do it to themselves. But made to do it is a whole lot of different. I knows. Been there myself. Whole lot of different.”
That Mr. Beniamino had been right about her more or less being forced to work in a nursing home rather than a regular hospital pained Gwynn so much she’d barely listened to much else he’d said that afternoon; she hadn’t intended to mire herself in such a depressing job. Patients who inevitably died, taking their personal flash, those designs forever marked “SOLD” on their respective tattoo artist’s walls, with them. Patients who would never get better, and actually leave this place once they were brought here. Patients who ultimately reminded Gwynn of her own inevitable mortality day after day...including the time when her own flash would be consigned either to the grave, or to the crematorium’s flames.
Which is why she’d become a flash-scrap courier; one of her patients had stipulated in her will that the full-back tattoo she’d gotten decades earlier was to be surgically removed like a patch of leather, then transported to an underground storage unit in the Iron Mountain area. The only problem was, the will had been executed long before the woman herself passed on, and the person designated to transport the flash-scrap had also died. But the storage fee had been paid for in advance, much like a pre-arranged burial, so the only problem was how to get the preserved tattoo from here to there. Flash-scrap has to be carried by hand, and transported on the ground. Airplanes are out; drug-sniffing dogs and pigs inevitably nosed out flash, and went berserk. Worse than someone trying to smuggle in meat from overseas. Flash-scrap wasn’t exactly illegal, but it was deemed unsavory, and undesirable in Muslim enclaves. So...you either had to drive it, or ride with it, on the ground. Usually busses were used, why Gwynn didn’t know. It was just something the other couriers did.
People like Roano from New Mexico, or Moreen Pinchos from Florida, the one who specialized in flash from Latino gang members, or that crazy Calvino Burrell, the guy who went from state penitentiaries to death rows, collecting flash from prisoners who had the time and patience to do the most fantastic blackwork on their bodies, as well as the bodies of their fellow prisoners. She and Moreen and Calvino had once found themselves on the same bus headed for Iron Mountain, each toting a red-and-white cooler of harvested flash. Some of their fellow passengers knew what they were carrying, and every time the bus stopped, they’d move around, playing musical bus seats, until the three of them were sitting in the middle of a ring of empty seats. So they’d actually had to talk to each other.
Which was the funny thing about scrap couriers; while they were all more or less part of the flesh tribe of extreme tattoo collectors, and all had the pigment ghetto job situation facing them at other times, none of them actually liked each other.
Moreen hated Roano for his facial piercings and turquoise lip plug (which she openly considered “primitive”); Roano despised that Indian courier, the one who dubbed himself Qochata because the name meant “white man” and Qochata was a full-blooded Hopi which Roano felt was some sort of ethnic slap in somebody’s face; Qochata thought Calvino was a nut job because Calvino had had his entire head tattooed, then let his hair grow back over it, just so he’d have “something to look forward to once my hair starts to fall out” and Calvino didn’t like Gwynn, because she insisted on wearing an abaya during most of her trips to the subtropolises...while Gwynn thought Moreen was pretentious for restricting all of her blackwork tattoos (a necessity on her dark brown skin) to what most canvas considered “safe” areas...her back, her upper arms, and her thighs, places easy to cover with clothes, to please canvas job service personnel.
On this trip, taken down this same highway, in what may have been the same damned tour bus, but definitely with a different driver, only six or so months earlier, Gwynn’s seatmate was Moreen, whom she disliked less than Calvino, who—once he noticed the overt migration of their fellow travelers to seats south and north of theirs—began rubbing their mission into the other people’s faces.
“Girls, what kind of flash you got in there? Mine’s primo—filet of serial killer. Man spent twelve years there on appeal...guy in the next cell over tattooed him through the bars, all over his lower arms. Never saw the face of the artist, but damn if he didn’t do fine work.”
“I’m sure there’s some squirrel sitting in a tree miles away that didn’t hear you,” Moreen had sniffed, as she crossed her legs under the small cooler perched on her lap.
“I ain’t loud...I’m proud. You want I should show you this flash? Once it goes underground, ain’t nobody gonna see it...it’s gonna be outasight, like all them archive pictures Bill Gates bought and hid down there—”
“If you’re referring to the Bettmann Archives, at least they’re safe in that vault. They won’t degrade, or be subject to mishandling. You did realize, didn’t you, that people had been scribbling on them, bending the corners, letting them fade—”
“This here flash, it didn’t get no chance to fade where this guy was...’course you don’t have to worry about yours fading, do you, Mo-Mo?”
“Black people can get sunburned, too. It just takes a longer exposure,” she’d sniffed, before uncrossing her legs and sitting with both feet flat on the floor of the bus.
“Rosa Parks is pissed...how ’bout you, Tent-Girl? You gonna roast under that thing? Broil off your tattoos?”
Under her breath, Moreen whispered “Ignore the putz” but Gwynn was used to hearing far worse from canvas on the street, so she set her cooler on the floor, and lifted up her abaya with both hands, revealing her blue-and-black covered face, and fully-inked body, covered only by a sleeveless tube dress. She could hear the hissing exhalations behind and ahead of her, as the other passengers got a first look at her, but they were only canvas. Not worth her discomfort.
“I don’t know, Calvino...do they look done to you yet?”
Calvino may have had his scalp tattooed but he was still a jinny (a skin virgin, in canvas-speak) when it came to facial tattoos.
Gwynn thought it was the blue side of her face that spooked him into a few minutes of silence, but like the British who kept on attacking the rebel Scotsmen centuries ago, Calvino soon re-armed himself and started in again. Humming softly at first, he soon broke into full-voice song, to the tune of “The Halls of Montezuma”:
“From the walls of Irezumi/to the shelves of pickled knees—”
Moreen leaned close to Gwynn, and said succinctly, her voice ringing in Gwynn’s ear, “If you ask me, that man’s momma watched too much Tom Green while she was carrying him,” pronouncing the work “ask” like “ax,” as some black people were wont to do.
Gwynn had digested her words for the next mile or so, then had to ask—even though she did find Moreen to be too self-righteous for words—if Tom Green was the one who played Bevis or Butthead on that Jackass show on MTV. She vaguely remembered her parents talking about all the strange things they used to show on that channel, but after a while all the weirdness tended to merge together. Maybe this Green person was part of The Real World?
Moreen had to think about it for another couple of miles, before saying, “I’m not sure...I just know he married one of Charlie’s Angels. Don’t ask me if she was one of the TV ones, or from the movie. Been too much going on in entertainment for me to keep up with it.”
And that had been all Moreen had had to say for the rest of the trip. Calvino’s song had more verses, all of them increasingly disgusting and deranged, but only the first two lines stuck in Gwynn’s brain.
From the walls of—
If she