Fingerprints of You (2 page)

I’d lost my virginity that spring to a senior at school, and even though we only did it four times before he got suspended for selling weed at a soccer game, I considered myself to be experienced. The first time the pothead and I tried it regular, the second time he did it from behind, and the last two times he used his tongue first, so even though I was just getting started, I thought I knew what felt good and what didn’t. I’d learned enough, at least, to recognize that a guy like Johnny Drinko could teach me all the things I still wanted to learn.

I moved next to his chair and looked at the photos taped on the wall behind his head: Polaroids of bandanna-wearing bikers and big-haired blondes with crooked teeth showing off sharply inked dragons and crosses on forearms and ankles. “Roughnecks” we called them, the townies who never left town, never went to college or got a real job, the grown-ups who never grew up. There were also photos of sports-team emblems tattooed on fine-tuned athletes and pictures of girls in low-slung jeans sporting new tramp stamps: fresh flowers and vines inked at the base of their spines. Aerosmith played from a set of cheap speakers mounted on the wall, and a fan blew warm air inside from a corner by the window while Johnny leaned over a leather notebook sketching a tree with long-reaching roots and thin, naked branches.

“You going to the race next month?” he asked me.

I shook my head, and behind us my mother said, “Oh, I think I like this one” to no one in particular.

Stella and I lived in a small city in southern Virginia that had a NASCAR racetrack built on the outskirts of town. We’d been living there for over a year and a half, and race weekend happened twice a year, but the closest I’d come to going was parking with the pothead in a cul-de-sac near enough to the
track that we could listen to the buzz of cars between beers and awkward conversation.

“I must have inked a hundred NASCAR fans last spring. This one guy had me do a foot-long car driving up his back. It was pretty cool, really.” Johnny nodded to the photos on the wall. “I did a good job.”

I shrugged and popped another pink bubble, my trademark gesture that fall. My mother called the habit white-trash, but my friend Molly-Warner read an article in one of her magazines about the importance of drawing attention to your lips when flirting with boys, and she insisted we follow the rule.

“His old man had been a racer, got killed back in ’81 in a crash,” Johnny said between drags off his smoke. “That tat was really important to him.”

I could see the black ink of a design inching up the back of his neck, and I suddenly wished my mom wasn’t there so I could reach over and take a drag off his Marlboro. I needed my mouth around the tight white tube where his lips had just been. I was looking at him, and he was looking back, but then a woman with bright red hair pushed aside the white sheet that separated the waiting area from the tattooing room, spoiling the moment. She had wet, glassy eyes and a square of Saran Wrap taped below her collarbone.

“All good, Suzie Q?” Johnny asked, and they moved to the register.

“It’s a keeper.” She smiled at him and then at me.

I nodded like I knew exactly how it felt to walk into a room without a tattoo and to walk out of the same room permanently adorned. She shifted her attention back to Johnny, who was eyeing her with a slick smile slapped across his face, and I had a quick but detailed vision of them screwing in the
truck bed of a white pickup. She was on top, bucking back and forth with her palms pressing into his chest, and his eyes were closed while his body pulsated beneath all that pumping. He might have liked it, or maybe not. I couldn’t decide.

My mother called my name then, and I looked up and winked at Johnny before I turned away from him, checking to see if I could get his attention the same way Stella and the redhead had.

It took about twenty minutes for Stella to settle on the hummingbird, then she handed Johnny the sketch and leaned over the counter where he sat. “You mind?” she said, and she took a smoke from his pack. I thought of her mood swings back when she quit and the nervous way she used to chew her fingernails. She caught me watching her when she brought the Marlboro to her lips. “See something you like, kiddo?” she asked, and then she followed Johnny Drinko to the customers’ chair behind the white sheet.

The other tattoo artist, a man with a thin black braid, finished cleaning his gear while Johnny completed the stencil and poured ink into tiny white paper cups sitting on the stand next to his chair.

“I’m taking lunch,” the other guy said, and he pulled off a pair of pale blue surgical gloves and tossed them into the trash.

And then it was just me, my mom, and Johnny Drinko squished inside the heat of the tattoo room.

That was the third town we had lived in since we’d left Denny, and I liked it best, because of the low mountains and the sticky summers and the way our apartment smelled like fresh bread all the time, since we lived next to the sub shop by the mall. It was a rough ride to get there after the six months
at the Jersey Shore with Rocco from the pool hall, and I was glad to be in Virginia, where my mom seemed calmer and the men she dated were quieted by the innate laziness of a small town. My best friend, Molly-Warner, had a car and a fake ID, and we had spent the summer making out with boys from school and smoking cigarettes at the public pool in town. I’d finally found my lady curves, as Stella called them once while watching me under raised eyebrows, and when school started that month, Molly-Warner and I would head to the neighborhood park after class and spend our afternoons in our bikini tops, lying out, reading books, and gossiping about our teachers, our classmates, the latest school scandal. Stella liked to take her notebooks up to the Blue Ridge Parkway on the weekends to sketch split-rail fences and ragged farmhouses she’d paint back at home. It was the first time I felt like we were ready to put Denny and Rocco and those last years behind us, and I hoped we stayed in town until I finished high school. It was my senior year, and I was sick of moving boxes and cheap motels and having to make friends every time my mom picked a new place for us to live. I needed to finish driver’s ed. I needed to stay in one place long enough so I could recognize the faces in the crowd when graduation finally happened. I’d finally found a group of friends, mellow kids like me and Molly-Warner who partied a little but also knew how to keep out of trouble, and the librarian at school liked me enough to drop the late fees I’d accrued over the summer. Plus, Stella had a good job working in the jewelry department at J.C. Penney, and I could tell she liked the cheap rent and the apartment that smelled like bread too.

Johnny Drinko was pressing the hummingbird stencil against my mom’s skin when she licked her lips and said, “Get
me a mint from my purse, Lemon. I need something to suck on.”

It was not the first time I’d watched my mother throw herself at a man. She’d been throwing herself at men in each town we passed through ever since we left Denny after the black eye. She was pretty and thin and wore cute clothes, and after all the drama when she and Denny split up, I was just glad to see her back on her feet. I knew she liked the game—the chase and the satisfaction of getting what she wanted—but there was something about Johnny Drinko that made me nervous, something I sensed right away that day at the shop. He was mysterious like he had a secret, and controlled like he knew what he wanted, and that had me worried. If Stella wanted him and he didn’t want her back, if the game lasted too long, she’d walk away. While we’d been living in Virginia, things had finally evened out, but I was constantly afraid she’d get bored or, worse, vulnerable, and I knew it would be someone like Johnny Drinko who would send us moving again.

I used to tell my friends my mother was made of metal and glass. She was smooth and sturdy on the surface, but there was always that part in danger of shattering, a childlike aspect that never disappeared. I resented that unpredictability and tiptoed around the threat of her cracking apart, of her dragging us out of one city and into the next.

“Let’s motor,” she said as she took the breath mint from me, sucked it between her lips with a smile, and settled into the chair. Then I watched Johnny Drinko ink a perfect permanent hummingbird above her shoulder blade.

T
HE NEXT TIME
I
SAW
J
OHNNY
D
RINKO,
he was sitting in my living room on a Tuesday afternoon in early October. Molly-Warner and I had ditched our last class and headed to my house because I knew my mom would be at work. Molly-Warner wanted wine coolers and I wanted something to eat, and Johnny Drinko was on the couch watching
The Crocodile Hunter
when we opened the front door.

“What are you doing here?” I said, and Molly-Warner mumbled “he-llo” behind me.

He looked good and cool, his golden arms stretching out from the sleeves of a tight black T-shirt with the Rolling Stones tongue printed on front. His hair was loose that time, thick waves drifting above his shoulders, making me think of surfers in California or Hawaii. He smiled and checked us out
from the couch as I combed my hand through my hair and sucked in my stomach.

“Stella gave me the key.” He leaned for the remote and turned down the volume.

I tossed my backpack onto the floor by the door and tried to decide if I liked or didn’t like seeing Johnny Drinko in our apartment. My afternoon had gotten a lot more interesting with him sitting there looking at me that way, but I didn’t like that he’d seen my mom, that they were together earlier, and that she’d invited him over.

“Business was slow at the shop, so I closed early.” He leaned back in the chair and put his feet up on the coffee table like he owned it, and I decided that, overall, I did in fact like his presence taking over our apartment like that. “Your mom said I could hang here.”

We moved into the room, and I hitched my weight on one hip, hooked my thumb through the belt loop of my jeans, and arched my back a little. I’d topped out at five feet five inches that summer, and I’d been experimenting with bangs, so with the layers growing out my brown hair finally had some shape, some curl. I didn’t bother much with makeup, but my skin was still a creamy summertime brown from all those hours at the pool. I knew I wasn’t model-hot like the popular girls in school, but it could have been worse, so I didn’t mind Johnny looking at me like that. Even if I was nervous, having him there made me feel important, him looking at me and me looking back at him. I was glad Molly-Warner was there to see it.

“Who’s your friend, Lemon?”

Johnny Drinko taught me and Molly-Warner how to make tequila sunrises, and we drank them in the living room
while we finished watching the episode “Journey to the Red Centre.” The two of us sat on the floor in front of the TV, and Johnny stayed on the couch, but I could smell him from where I was, the distinct mix of sweat and tequila with the chemical scent of ink from the shop.

When the credits started rolling, Johnny Drinko rose to his feet and announced, “Jesus, I need a cig,” but I told him Stella didn’t let me smoke in the house, which I guessed was true since I always hid my Camel Lights from her. He shrugged, and Molly-Warner and I followed him out when he left the apartment.

The three of us stood in front of the sub shop and took turns using Johnny’s Zippo to light one of his Marlboro Reds. I’d recently discovered the Beats, and something about the way he propped himself against the wall of the building and clamped his smoke between his thumb and pointer finger reminded me of the cover of
Desolation Angels
, a photo of Kerouac I’d studied a hundred times when I’d read the novel that summer.