Session #18 (NYC)

Today's appointment was an easy one. The outside of the thigh wasn’t bad; the back of the leg, above the knee, was a little worse. Shinji sounded like he was coming down with a cold. With his sniffling, I was reminded me of one of my sessions with Horiyoshi III when he was working on my arm on one of my last trips to Yokohama, in Japan:

Getting tattooed by hand, Japanese style, means instead of a Western-style tattoo machine, the tattooer is using a handle, maybe a foot long, to which a needle cluster is attached to the end. Assuming the tattooer is right-handed, the handle is held in the right hand, while the left rests on the client, putting pressure on the skin and guiding the handle’s end, where the needles are puncturing the skin. (A quick Google search turns up numerous videos showing the technique.)

In Horiyoshi’s case, the needle cluster is metal and able to be sterilized (run through an autoclave), while the back part of the handle was not. That being the case, he would use a glove on his left hand, the hand coming in contact with the skin, and sometimes leave his right hand ungloved. This made it easier for him to multitask, such as talk on the phone while tattooing—a typical conversation on his end was pretty much: “Hai…. Hai…. Ungh…. Ungh…. Hai…. Hai…." *click*—and it also allowed him, when he had a bad cold, to grab tissues, blow his nose, and dispose of the tissue with the ungloved hand—all while barely pausing the prick, prick, prick of the tattoo.

Now, Horiyoshi 3 followed standard precautions when tattooing, and being a piercer (and one who teaches classes in bloodborn pathogens), I had no doubts about the sterility of his tools and the cleanliness of his technique, but on the day when he had a bad cold—and was pausing every fifteen minutes of so to blow his nose—I was pretty sure within the next few days I was going to have a cold too.

And I did.

9/11 Memorial and Museum (NYC)

On the Saturday of Veteran's Day weekend I went with my sister to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City. It was a strange experience, visiting such a huge space dedicated to memorializing something that happened so recently.

The outside pools, in the physical locations of the old towers, are massive. The water flows down the sides of the recessed squares, falling into a hole where the bottom is purposefully just below the sight line, where the names of those who died in the attacks and punched out of brass, around the edges. It's a lot of empty, empty space.

The museum houses pieces—“memorabilia” isn't the right word; “artifacts" seems inappropriate for things of such a recent history—from the events of 9/11: coats, shoes, and gear from first responders; photographs and video, mostly from amateur photographers and journalists who happened to be close to the towers on that morning; and wreckage. The debris was… otherworldly. It looked like set pieces left over from a monster movie or a Japanese anime film: a section of the antenna from the second tower, looking like a piece of a crashed spacecraft; a fire engine, with the front cab and ladder smashed and twisted into a gnarled mess of steel tentacles.

There was a display of the stairs that were one of the final escapes taken by people fleeing one of the burning towers, titled the “Survivor’s Stairs.” The jagged slab was recovered and transported, whole, to the museum, where it is displayed parallel to a set of stairs still in use—but behind Plexiglas, like how you would view the stones from an Egyptian archeological artifact, and not a crumbled mess of cement and rebar.

Audio recording were interspersed throughout the exhibit: snippets of black-box recordings from the hijacked flights; messages left for loved ones from passengers calling from the pay-mobile phones on the planes. (Many recordings of “tell the kids I love them.”) The two most memorable were: 1) a woman describing fleeing from the debris of the falling towers, where she said she literally “ran out of her shoes,” and 2) a woman who was taken away in an ambulance, covered in debris after the second tower fell, who describes being told by the medical staff they need to make way for the expected rush of the injured. She said she looked at her companions and said, “Nobody’s coming…” because anyone who was trapped in the buildings when they fell didn’t survive.

It was all very affecting.