Session #5 (NYC)

When I walked into Shinji’s studio for my appointment, Johnny Cash was playing, coming out of his computer.

“You like country music?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “You like?”

“Yes, very much,” I answered.

While I was getting undressed and into my fundoshi, he explained he’d recently gone to the New Jersey tattoo convention and saw a country band playing there, and he had been gone on to hang out with a few of the guys.

“They teach me how to play country music. I’ve been practicing,” he said, pointing at a guitar in the other room that I hadn’t noticed when I came in. I was trying to picture this, wondering what songs they had taught him, what songs he had been practicing. I didn’t ask.

“Stand up please,” he said, after I had my Japanese almost-underwear tied. I stood facing the wall and he started to draw on my back.

“You know moonshine?” he asked, continuing to draw.

“Yes,” I laughed.

“I try,” he said. “Is good.”

He tattooed me while Johnny Cash continued to play, interspersed with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson duets. (I remember “Luckenbach Texas” playing while he tattooed a particularly sensitive part of my spine.) There were a few ads between songs, so he was streaming music; it wasn’t from his own library. I wondered what “station” he typed in. I was most likely “Johnny Cash,” but the selection leaned decidedly toward his “outlaw country” period and contemporaries—as that was most likely the music the redneck-aspiring moonshine-drinking tattoo artists Shinji met would have introduced him to.

(I’m assuming they were urban-living—or at least suburban—tattoo artists aspiring to a sort of rural downward mobility. At least this is what I expect from attendees to a tattoo convention on New Jersey. I could be wrong—and he may have encountered some authentic, Southern good-ole-boys—but I’m betting the moonshine most likely was the type you buy at a liquor store, in an “authentic” mason jar. Where is the nearest corn-liquor still to New Jersey, anyway?)

By the second hour, the music took a surreal turn, as he tattooed while we heard Elvis’ “Hound Dog” followed by “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and then Kenny Roger’s singing “The Gambler” a few songs later—the last two giving me mini-flashbacks of being a kid in the late 70s, wondering what the nine-year-old me would make of the current setting. I remember thinking that the only thing stranger would be if “Dueling Banjos” came on—and sure enough, a few songs later, it did. It was one of those times where you just take a step out of yourself and try to make sense of the place you’re in. For me, it was being tattooed by a Japanese, newly-converted country music fan in New York while  “Dueling Banjos”—a song I probably heard last in its entirety coming out of my parents eight-track player when I lived in Georgia—was playing in the background. Weird.

Between tattooing, during one of the drawings sessions, he said, “I said maple leaves last time, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, having gotten used to the idea since my last visit.

“You already have peonies on the front,” he said, “So it should be peonies.”

“Okay,” I said. “I like peonies.”

I wonder how much of this he already has planned, and how much he’s deciding as he goes.

“Maybe green fire?” he said, showing some excitement at the idea.

“Green fire?” I asked. He pulled up a picture on his computer.

“It looks like…plants,” I said, picturing a dragon/Christmas tree hybrid across my back.

“Plants…? Aah…plants,” he said, as he understood.

I didn’t say any more, knowing that I had some time before he would decide.

We just worked on scales today, which was fine with me. I wasn’t really up to him continuing on my other ass cheek. “We do that next time,” he said. Sitting on the two-hour bus ride back to Philly would be a lot easier this time than next.

At the end, as I dressed, he said to me, “I need to reschedule next visit. Is okay?”

“Is okay,” I said.

“I need…vacation,” he laughed.

I laughed with him. “Where are you going?”

“Maybe to the beach,” he said. “Maybe to…Tennessee.”

“There’s a lot of country music in Tennessee, I said, surprised.

“Yes, I know,” he laughed again.

“You can see Elvis’ house,” I offered.