Tattoo facts about yours truly: I got a lil’ Homer head drilled into my virgin flesh when I was 18. I had just graduated high school and it seemed like a kooky way to confirm my adulthood. The look on Homer’s face is blank. It’s the look of Homer as he appears in the dictionary in the episode “Homer Defined,” if you wanna be an obsessive nerd about it.
It wasn’t until 2016 that I got a follow-up. With so many things in this world to choose from, my choice was easy: I got a second lil’ Homer head drilled into my flesh. Teenage Homer, this time. Picture him in the one where he meets Marge in high school and asks her to the prom. That Homer could belt out “Space Cowboy” with the best of ‘em.
A few months later, I grew weary of this duo and demanded a trio. My friend Scott did the honors again at Akara Arts in Milwaukee. The third installment was more of a strange, fever dream-type Homer: Mr. Sparkle. Mr. Sparkle is a logo for a dishwashing detergent in Japan that, by coincidence, looks a lot like my main man Homer. In his commercial, Mr. Sparkle shouts “I’m disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?” What a brave corporate logo.
In late 2020, I switched over to my left arm for body art. This part may be hard to believe, but tattoo #4 was not a Homer. Nor was it a Simpson, or even someone from Springfield. It was musical in theme, taken from the album cover of Beck’s 1996 classic, Odelay. I have a black-and-white image of a shaggy dog jumping over a hurdle high on my bicep. The breed of dog is Komondor, I just learned. I felt like a goofy-looking animal overcoming an obstacle was something to live by.
Finally, number 5 was inked in 2021. Scott and I enjoyed the Clash album London Calling as he drew the cover art of a man smashing his guitar on my left arm. I wish he was done by the time the album finished at 65 minutes, but nope, the session took about four hours. I was tired and bleeding and tired of bleeding by hour three, but if we’re gonna do these things, then we gotta do them right.
I’m telling you this in order to call out the intro I wrote for this story in my book More Stories and Additional Stories. I wrote: “In all likelihood, I have met my quota for body art.” Of course I said that in a way that was too wordy, instead of just “I think I’m done with tattoos.” I wasn’t. I want more. Hopefully this summer I’ll be getting a Bowie or Jimi or Nirvana to make three music tats on my left arm. That’ll balance three Homers on my right arm. I can’t wait for the symmetry.
Turns out, I’m more like Theodore “Grunk” Grunkowski than I realized. I became a little bit more like the guy I created in order to mock. Years after I published this book in 2014, I dated and got serious with a woman named Tina. Like Grunk, I very much valued her feedback. Grunk and I may act like know-it-alls, but we both knew damn well that our Tinas were smarter than us.
For those reasons, I’m not going to portray Grunk’s voice as a vapid surfer or a lackadaisical hippie—no! Grunk needs to sound like me.
Grunk:
What’s up, bro? I’m thrilled you’re open so late. You never know when a guy like me is gonna want some ink in the wee hours of the morning. Kudos to you, Party Marty. You know your clients.
I got the urge to get a new tatt like an hour ago. It was towards the end of the Tool show at the Metro. I found these blue-and-gold pills on the floor of the men’s room. On the way home, riding the el, I got all these rad ideas for tatts. They just started shooting into my brain, one after another–like beams of color in a laser light show.
I could taste vibes, man. Good and bad–-one flavored like butterscotch and the other like battery acid.
Anyway, I turned to my old lady–say hi to Party Marty, Tina—and told her we had to stop here. Like, I was going to explode without that throbbing buzz of the needle on my back. Tina understood.
I jotted down some options in this notepad. I mostly use it for doodling. Get a load of this one. Darth Mal motorboating Wonder Woman. What really makes me hard is that you can tell they’re in love. For a minute, I wanted this to be my next tattoo. It seemed like the perfect imagery for my relationship with Tina. But then I broke up with her and started dating another chick named Tina. And Tina here really has more of a Batgirl figure, as you can see. So I had to scratch that one.
But that hardly matters when I consider the tatt-thoughts I got on paper on the train. With your help, Party Marty, I’ll get one of these pictures etched into my flesh.
OK, how about a zombie in a wheelchair? Don’t you see? It makes a profound statement about the frailty of human flesh. Whether alive or undead, Man is always vulnerable. His Achilles’ Heel persists. When it is torn, the human can no longer run or jump, much less walk, just as the zombie can no longer stagger. Both will need a wheelchair.
We all know the threat of a zombie takeover is real. And since I’ve been stockpiling tuna cans and honing my skills with a Samurai sword I got from a pawn shop, I plan to survive it. But once the war is settled and the wounded undead are left to crawl across the land, I will show mercy on my zombie foes by helping them into wheelchairs.
The main drawback, I guess, is that the zombie takeover hasn’t happened yet. When it does, I don’t want to be seen as a zombie sympathizer to my brothers at arms. Sure, decades later, our enemies in World War II have become our allies, but it wouldn’t be cool to get a tattoo of an American and a German working together to straighten out a swastika before the war even started.
Forget about the zombie in a wheelchair. That’s the price I pay for seeing the big picture.
Plan B is to get a tattoo of the Grim Reaper sitting on the toilet. To explain, my senior thesis in Philosophy was titled “Everybody Poops.” In it, I offered proof that “everybody” includes the embodiment of death, the Grim Reaper. He poops just like the rest of us, and ergo, should not be placed on a pedestal to strike fear in us.
But now, in this wicked awesome state of mind, I recall that Tina shot this one down just before we walked into this place. She pointed out that the Reaper is only a skeleton, that he lacks the digestive tract needed to poop. Damn.
Tina put it simply: “Skeletons don’t have guts.” Perhaps that’s what my professor meant to say when he called my paper “incomprehensible malarkey.”
It’s a shame I’m not getting ink of the Grim Reaper sitting on a toilet on my back. Now I have to go on being afraid of death because it’s philosophically correct.
Alright, let me get my head together. Third time’s a charm, maybe.
Eureka. The Princess Frenching Bowser. Follow me closely, Party Marty. It represents my theory that the average woman prefers the villain, yet she will conduct a phony kidnapping in which a hero she won’t sleep with goes on a crusade to rescue her. Bowser– or King Koopa, if you will—is the arrogant dictator, who is more alluring than Mario, the virtuous plumber. A plumber isn’t fit to provide for a princess, not on that salary. But a dictator owns a castle. He’s got a legion of minions working for him, eager to please. Monster or not, a dictator hires a plumber to unclog shit from his nine golden toilets. A princess isn’t gonna fall for some Italian stereotype dressed in overalls, like a damn toddler. Timidly wringing his Little Rascals hat in his hands, stammering “I fix-ah yous-ah toilet.”
Princess Peach longs for luxury, not self-reliance. Mario is sweet and easy to manipulate, but once he’s done adventuring, he has to offer Peach a lifetime of clipping coupons, endless housework, exhausting childcare, and debt in pursuit of the American Dream. For Peach the choice is easy, but the guilt is a burden. She eases this guilt by making Mario feel like a hero. She does this by staging her abduction. Meanwhile, she’s Frenching Bowser.
Tell me you’ve got canary yellow to get Bowser’s flesh just right and we’ll make this a reality, Party Marty…
You’ve only got the extremely close honey, corn, and dandelion?! That’s a dealbreaker, Party Marty. Don’t disappoint me again.
OK, I’m getting another vision.
It’s a Ford logo peeing on Calvin as Calvin pees on a Chevy logo. Yes! Sure, I like Ford more than Chevy if you’re putting a gun to my head, but that doesn’t give Calvin the right to soak a Chevy logo with piss. You know, both companies make fine automobiles. Before I moved to the big city, the backseat of my ‘88 Chevy Caprice saw plenty of action. The same goes for my ‘89 Ford Probe. And I got good mileage from both cars. In both cars, I banged a hot Goth chick who blew the drummer from Rammstein, so what does that tell you?
No one can go back in time to stop Calvin from peeing on a Ford logo, but we can do the next best thing. Get revenge. Piss on Calvin. I never liked his comics, anyway. Talking to a stuffed animal… I think he had mental problems.
But wait. I am just now recalling a chat I had with Tina a week ago. She said that both Ford and Chevy could be doing more to fight condom missions.
What’s that, Tina? Oh, my bad. I meant carbon emissions. The point is, either way it’s a bad thing.
Well, maybe I could get a tattoo of the environment taking a wiz on a Ford logo as it pees on Calvin while he pees on a Chevy logo… but I doubt I’d have enough space on my back for that.
So, that’s a dead end.
Ah-ha! This tatt-idea is a can’t-miss. Keeping in mind the principle that nature should dominate man and not the other way around, I want Bigfoot, the beast, destroying Bigfoot, the monster truck—with Donald Trump inside screaming for his life.
Put on a pot of coffee, Party Marty, ‘cause I need to elaborate. Trump is a symbol of the bourgeois elite. The richest people in the world don’t care about the environment, man. If they did, we wouldn’t be using dinosaur fossils for fuel, but rather for badass stage props at heavy metal concerts. And like, if they did care, then the hole in O-zone would have been mended by now—with space glue or something. Trump and his ilk control an evil vessel of industry that runs over and crushes the Earth like a row of shitty cars at the county fair.
It’s time for an agent of Mother Nature, Bigfoot, to exact revenge on the powerful elite. With your pulsating jabber, Party Marty, I ask you to carve a flesh-mural of Bigfoot crushing Bigfoot. For the rest of my life, I want my back to tell the story of Bigfoot in the clutches of Bigfoot, the truck splitting in half high above the beast’s head, Orange Trump hollering in the driver’s seat, begging to be saved by an absent God.
Hey Tina, I spent a lot of cash on those Tool tickets. Plus, as we were leaving the venue, I bought some acid and Bolivian Super Freak. So, is it cool if I borrow 400 bucks? C’mon, it’s for the environment.
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