About the time Jimmy got out of rehab, Sammy leased a space in Alameda that would become Tiger’s Blood Social Club. I had gotten in the habit of taking Jimmy to see Sammy in the hopes that maybe he’d decide to stick it out with his recovery. At first I’d drop Jimmy off and figured the two of them would talk. As time wore on it became clear that that wasn’t happening, so I went with him.
Truth be told, I missed Sammy. I missed my conversations with him. From the day I met him he became one of the few people in the world with whom I felt compelled to be completely honest. He didn’t judge me. He made me feel safe. The first time I met Sammy, Jimmy had had me call him to join us at the sober living facility where he was living then, introducing him as his sponsor.
Sammy drove up in his brand spanking new black Camaro, wearing the old-school punk uniform. Jimmy had come up with a sponsor from my world. It turned out that not only was Sammy a member of my extended punk family, but one they’d all revered. I mean, we’d listened to a whole lot of Fang back in Goleta. Over the years Sammy had met a lot of my people and befriended some. Of course he knew Bruce and Fraggle. Although Jimmy had known Sammy longer, Sammy was in my corner.
By the time I walked into Tiger’s Blood for a tour it was really close to opening. I fell in love with the space immediately. It was beautiful. It had huge skylights, a wide-open space in the middle with white and black squares in the linoleum flooring, punk music blaring, and some fantastic art on the walls.
I had just started thinking about renting an office space for myself. Working from home wasn’t working anymore. Having my art studio in the kitchen was getting messy. But more than that, I was living almost entirely in isolation with the exception of my visits to Beer Revolution.
There were two empty offices inside Tiger’s Blood. I’d always wanted a space to make art and now I needed an office for my business too. It took me a while to figure it all out. The first thing was that Sammy wouldn’t give me a key to the office unless I broke up with Jimmy. He was pretty standoffish about the whole thing. But once Jimmy and I broke up, we quickly came to terms on a rental fee and he installed some track lighting. I was in.
Not long after I moved in, he caught me at a burrito place around the corner and asked to join me.
“Of course. Have a seat.”
“I promise I wasn’t stalking you.” And he grinned at me. I laughed a little.
“Okay.”
“You know you can do a lot better than Jimmy.”
“Yeah, like someone with an actual job.”
“Well, among other things. It’s possible that Jimmy will never recover. He doesn’t want to be clean. He doesn’t see any reason to do so.”
“And he sure doesn’t want to stop breaking into places either. He thinks he’s too smart to get caught. Mostly he’s right.”
“People like him don’t think they can learn from anyone. They’re the ones who rarely make it.”
“I get it, I really do. It makes me sad, but I get it.”
I’d spent years dancing around psychiatrists myself, never letting them in. And right then, right after breaking up with Jimmy, my guard was up so high that the best anyone could do was say a word here and there and hope I was listening, maybe give me a hug.
For the first year I had my office in Tiger’s Blood, I hid. I had picked up a sales role that had me commuting to Burlingame a few days a week. The other days I spent holed up, office door shut.
I’d wander out to the shop floor from time to time, as unobtrusively as possible. Whenever I felt as though I was the least bit in anyone’s way, I’d apologize, pull my hands up to my chest, curl my shoulders and drop my head as though I could disappear if I tried hard enough.
Tommy was the first to break through that wall. He was my age, my height, and going through what looked to be a pretty traumatic breakup.
He’d run into my office, shut the door behind him and look around as if to check out my desk before crawling underneath it and toying with the idea of eating me out. The thing was, I knew he wasn’t serious. Even though it was totally inappropriate, it made me feel a little bit better. It made me feel as though maybe I wasn’t completely undesirable. Those days I barely recognized myself in the mirror. I was too disgusted with my body: the way it looked, felt and smelled to masturbate.
I’d crashed my own business trying to rescue Jimmy from himself, carrying myself along with serving, sales, and teaching jobs as I maintained the few clients still willing to work with me. I’d quit caring about my appearance. I’d let the gray grow into my mousy, dark blonde hair. My foot still hurt too much from the foot surgery to walk let alone run, so I drank instead. I blocked out the voice in my head that loved me along with the voices of all my friends and family.
I doubled-down on self-destruction in every way except for one. I decided that I needed to be celibate for a year. I recognized that my relationship with myself was bad enough that I had no business bringing anyone else in.
For the first time in my life I knew that maintaining celibacy was a matter of life and death. I’d even chosen to move to a studio apartment with very questionable privacy as insurance against my baser instincts. Now it feels a little stifling, but it was without a doubt necessary at the time.
Even with that, it didn’t mean I didn’t need a little bit of attention. Every now and again I’d realize some guy was flirting with me on the shop floor and I’d run into my office and hide.
But the people in the shop were nice to me. Over time, the little smiles, kind words, and lack of judgment drew me out. The people in the shop showed me kindness and compassion. All of them, this motley group of tattoo artists and piercers, mostly guys. But there was a young woman in the shop too, Casey.
Casey was in her late twenties and had a very distinctive art style that featured mythological figures and the symbolism of tarot decks with her own raw pain and vulnerability.
And yet, I don’t remember what she said the first time we talked, just the feeling that she cared. It felt really, really good.
I saw so much of myself in her, even though our lives had been very different. Mostly it was because of the way she carried herself. She frequently hunched over and held her hands across her stomach. She wore giant sweatshirts that covered most of her body, but short skirts and revealing tops. It was all very familiar.
But everything about the shop was familiar. I’d chosen to move in there because it was the closest thing to the compound I’d lived in with the skate punks in Goleta after Jimmy and I had broken up the first time. There was always the sound of a tattoo gun, punk rock playing, and lots of punks in and out of the shop. Except the punks here were sober. And even a few of my former housemates (now sober) showed up from time to time. I was home.
I often wondered if they knew how and why I’d ended up there. My best guess was that they’d assumed Sammy had met me in rehab or at a meeting or something. That was pretty close to the truth, but my recovery was from so much more than drugs or alcohol or my eating disorder. I was broken, my identity shattered into so many pieces I wasn’t sure how to put them back together or if it was even possible.
One night, after a long day of working, maybe three months after I’d moved in, I walked over to Casey and Tommy. “Thank you for making me feel welcome.” And I got teary-eyed and could barely finish my sentence before I choked up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry.” And Casey gave me a hug. I cried some more, but then backed away and took off.
After that, every now and again I’d talk to Casey a little, but mostly I still kept to myself. She treated me kindly, as though I were a good person with something to offer. As if I was one of the cool kids I’d always wanted to be.
Every now and again there’d be a humorous interlude from Tommy, popping in my office and crawling under my desk to make sure it was “okay.” Still inappropriate, but completely safe and flattering. If I said stop, he’d walk back out of my office and shut the door. No one had looked at me like that in an exceptionally long time. Or maybe I’d stopped paying attention.
One day Casey was sitting in the back of the shop on the big blue leather sofa, writing. She told me she was writing her sexual inventory, to which I quipped, “If I ever decide to do that, I think I’m really going to write it. As a book. Sex sells.” And Sammy just kind of looked at me and grinned, “Yep.” As much as he’d heard Jimmy’s stories, he’d never heard any of mine. Neither of them had any idea I might actually be serious about the book, let alone going back into recovery and writing an inventory.
Writing about my sexual misadventures had a fair amount of appeal, in an inventory or any other format. Beyond that, I thought it just might end up being profitable in a way that my writing about bulimia probably wouldn’t be. I had no idea how painful this book would be to write. But I am glad I started writing anyway.
The good news was that I was surrounded by people in recovery. They seemed a whole lot happier than I was, with my eating disorder raging in the background. Not that I wasn’t doing some things right: I wasn’t having sex. I hadn’t dabbled with meth in months. I barely drank. Mostly I was bingeing and purging and taking laxatives and diet pills. I even tried going on a diet for a month before I finally took a leap of faith.
The day I gave it all up I was sitting in my office at Tiger’s Blood looking at bottles of diet pills and diet books. I had a giant blank piece of wood and started laying everything out on top. Most of the diet pills were brown, so the first thing I did was paint them pink. Then I took some of the gummy diet candies and coated them with glitter. Then I took a stack of women’s magazines and started tearing them up before I hit the mother-lode of images of Barbie puking into toilets, doing drugs and fucking up, right there in Cosmopolitan.
The only things I was missing were chocolate-flavored Ex-Lax, enemas, and my personal favorite, cocaine. I walked across the street to CVS and bought a little mirror, some white eyeshadow, superglue and a box of Ex-Lax. For the enema, I printed out a JPEG of an ad for a Fleet enema. The cocaine I made with the eyeshadow, adding a rolled-up dollar bill on the mirror for good measure. When I was done, I spelled out the word “Stop” in pink-painted diet pills across the entire piece.
That piece of art is my marker of the day I stopped. I quit drinking Diet Coke and energy drinks and didn’t buy another bottle of diet pills. I didn’t measure another meal or count calories again. It’s been a couple of years now. It might not sound like a lot after 28 years of bulimia, but it’s what I have. I’ll take it.
No one knew that I was doing this. I was in a recovery group where it would have been appropriate to talk about this, but the only thing I did was share the art piece. I was too afraid of telling anyone. I rarely talked about my eating disorder to begin with, not with my therapist or in one of the meetings with my fellow recovering bulimics, except to state that I was walking away from the one thing that had always been there for me, the one internal struggle that was totally and completely mine. I didn’t want to fail publicly. My relationship and breakup with Jimmy had been performed with a huge audience: our neighbors had witnessed our shouting matches, my professional peers knew about his multiple arrests and everything I’d done to help him, and worst of all, my friends had seen me crying: obsessed and afraid of his rejection up until the day I finally broke up with him. I never wanted to face that shame again. Plus, there were always people who told me nothing was wrong with me. They’d take one look at me and assume everything in my life was hunky-dory.
I did finally open up a few months later. To Casey, my tattoo artist when she tattooed a giant rose on my left ass cheek. It was a gift to myself for my forty-second birthday. As a fan of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” I viewed forty-two as the meaning of life. This would be my meaning-of-life year. To me, the meaning of life would be all about stepping into myself and being the wonderful, intelligent, charming, and loving person I knew I could be.
I wanted a rose tattooed on my ass as a reminder to bloom. But not just any rose. I wanted the rose from the Mutiny In Heaven album cover by the Birthday Party. My life had come full circle. I’d hit bottom twice, dating the one man most like my father. Except that this time, I knew I could recover. I replicated the circumstances to the best of my abilities, but this time, there were people in recovery, including many of the friends I’d left behind when the heroin had rolled in over twenty years before. The experience back then had been very much like being cast out of heaven. The song that came to symbolize that whole period for me was “Mutiny in Heaven”. My friends and I had become the fallen angels, imperfect, or maybe totally fucked up, but ready to fight to keep the rest of our extensive punk family alive.
This was the rose I wanted. It captured my story as nothing else could. And Casey was the woman to do it.
I had to come clean with her. I told her, “I hate my ass.”
“But you have a perfect ass.”
And once she drew up the cover artwork and placed it against my skin, I saw what she meant. My ass was the perfect canvas for the tattoo. It was perfect. It still is. I’ve learned to love my ass and every memory that piece of art represents.