Parker’s old building, making a house call for an eight-headed dragon he’d been working on for months. The first several appointments had taken place at Johnny’s, but lately he’d insisted on a new arrangement. It was risky to sneak his equipment through the street, but it was riskier to have customers visit his apartment at all hours. Most of Johnny’s tattoos were done by his friend Gomez, whose whole studio not long ago had been raided and fined by the Health Department. And last week the artist they called Picasso had quit after one of his customers fell over and died of AIDS. The city had banned tattooing in the sixties because of hepatitis B, and AIDS made hepatitis look like a cold sore. “Too dicey these days,” said Picasso, but now Johnny had a new crop of customers. He was terrified of the virus—he sterilized every needle—but he was too broke to be picky. He would tattoo anyone.
It was the most extensive single tattoo Johnny had performed: the entire expanse of Rooster’s broad back, armpit to armpit, skull to ass. It was the one empty canvas left on his generously inked body. He had a hairy fucking back, Rooster, each black hair as long as the time since their last session, since the tattoo had healed enough to allow more work. On the Murphy bed that took up most of the room, Rooster lay on his stomach. On the nightstand, Johnny’s kit, plastered with band stickers, splattered with ink, lay openmouthed. Johnny sat on a stool, spreading a sheet of shaving cream on Rooster’s back. He worked the razor down the slope of his spine, rinsing it after each stroke in a cloudy mug of water. When he was done, he mopped up the cream with his cloth, took the Vaseline Rooster kept in the nightstand, and applied a dollop to the right shoulder blade.
“How’s it lookin’?”
“I thought you fell asleep.” They spoke loudly now over the sound of the needle.
“I did for a minute,” Rooster said. “I was dreamin’ about pancakes. I’m hungry.”
“You’re always hungry.”
“You work up my appetite, baby.”
Johnny worked the foot pedal, filling in the seventh head. He was getting close to the end. “One more visit,” he said, “and I think I’ll be done.”
“Then I’ll have to come up with somethin’ else for you to do.”
The needle was riding the dune of Rooster’s back, veining the thirteenth eyeball of the dragon, and Johnny found himself picturing what Eliza’s narrow back would look like.
“Rooster?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve been with girls, right?”
“It’s been a long time.”
Johnny wondered if he could bring himself to do it. It couldn’t be so different. A body was a body. “What was it like?” He’d tattooed a few girls before, and had felt a kind of awe at the smoothness of their skin under his hands.
“Where’s this comin’ from?”
“Just curious.”
“You thinkin’ about that girl?”
Johnny didn’t say anything. The needle throbbed in his hand.
“Well, you wouldn’t have to worry about knockin’ her up.” Rooster laughed, bumping the needle.
“Don’t laugh, man!” Johnny let up on the pedal and withdrew the needle. “You fucked up the eyeball!” He wiped at it with his cloth. The needle had scratched the dragon’s cornea, tracing a red tail through it. “It looks like he’s crying blood!”
“Can you fix it?”
“Fucking A.”
“Fuckin’ right.”
Johnny snapped off his gloves. Rooster sat up. His chest was dark with the same stubborn, wiry hairs, and imprinted with the texture of the tousled sheets. He wasn’t laughing anymore. For months, before Johnny had gotten his own apartment, this was the bed he’d slept in. He’d never quite been able to bring himself to leave it.
“Why don’t you sleep in my bed?” Rooster had asked him that first night he’d rescued him from Tompkins, almost two years ago.
“No, man,” Johnny had said. “It’s your bed. You take it.”
Rooster had looked at him, placing the big, calloused palm of his hand on Johnny’s neck, and said, “That’s not what I meant.”
Rooster did the same thing now, stroking Johnny’s Adam’s apple with his thumb. He was gentle, always gentle, but Johnny felt his breath stop, choked with indecision.
“You want to know what it feels like? Bein’ with a girl?” Rooster dropped his hand. “It feels like bein’ a fuckin’ coward.”
Ten
In the kitchen, Neena was butterflying a leg of lamb, an indelicate procedure that recalled neither lamb nor butterfly, but a bloody approximation of log splitting, diapering, and liposuction. She had learned the method from her grandmother, a billy goat of a