Three days ago, the notion came to me to get a yellow rosebud tattoo juxtaposed over the vagrant tattoo I had gotten in Key West, in 2007, when it was vogue there to call homeless people “vagrants”, even though Jesus was the most famous vagrant in human history.
A yellow peace rosebud was on my infant son’s simple oak casket, when I buried him on September 12, 1968 in the family plot at Elmwood cemetery, in Birmingham.
Crib death (sudden infant death syndrome) took him.
I googled tattoo shops in Birmingham and called one that showed it was open. The young lady who answered the phone said, sorry, they now only do body piercings,
The next morning, I called Classic 13 in Birmingham and asked the young lady who answered the phone if they do tattoos? She said, yes. I asked if they accept walk-ins? She said, yes. I said I’d be there around dinner time.
I drove to a bridge club in Shelby County south of Birmingham, and played that ancient partnership game for several hours with some pretty interesting people.
After the game ended, I drove back to Birmingham, straight to Classic 13, where I saw a parking place in front and three well-tattooed men standing around chatting.
I parked my van and got out of it and walked over to the three well-tattooed me and asked if they were tattoo artists? They said, yes. I said I had called that morning about coming by to have a new tattoo put over an old Vagrant tat. I rolled up my polo shirt to expose the old tat on my right shoulder, and said I want a yellow peace rosebud put over the vagrant tat
One of the men said, yeah, we can do it, and which of us do I want to do it? I said it looks to me like the Great Spirit arranged our meeting and I'll leave it up to you three to decide which of you will do it. He said, well, he will do it. I said my name is Sloan, and he said his name is Chip.
Chip and I walked into the tattoo shop. Chris left me with a lady at the front desk and walked back to his studio to design the tattoo.
The lady gave me a form on which were maybe a dozen questions about medical conditions that ruled out getting a tattoo: HIV and types of Hepatitis were at the top of the list. I checked No for all of them. There were no questions about being crazy.
I paid the lady for the tattoo and two Classic 13 T-shirts.
Chip walked back up front and showed me what he had drawn. I said okay, and we walked to his studio. I told him the history of the vagrant tattoo and the yellow rose bud, and that originally I had thought I would put a tropical flower over. the vagrant tattoo, but I never got around to it.
Chip had me sit in chair and he rolled up the right sleeve on my polo shirt. I asked about how long it would take? He said about an hour and fifteen minutes. I said, let's do it.
On the walls in Chip’s' studio were lots of tattoo art.
I asked him if he had a tattoo of the pirate saying, “The beatings will continue until morale improves”?
Chip said, no, but he could get it and put it onto my left shoulder. I said, perhaps, but let’s get this done today.
Also on the walls of Chip’s studio was stuff about John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. Chip said Dillinger and Nelson and others like them were latter day pirates. On a side platform was a Thompson submachine gun like the ones used in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre.
Chip said his Thompson was not operable, but was just art.
Chip said Thompson sold a lot of those submachine guns in Europe. Then, the U.S. Army wanted the submachine gun, but it had to be modified to shoot fewer bullets a minute. Chip said Thompson had a lot of those submachine guns in a warehouse and modified them and sold them to the Army.
Chip and I talked about our respective times spent in the Florida Keys and Key West, and about how Key West is nothing like the rest of the Florida Keys.
I told Chip that at one time there was a movie theater on Key West's Duval Street called The Strand, which now is a Walgreens Drug Store, and every afternoon The Strand had a matinee showing "Deep Throat” for the boys at the local navy base.
Chip said, for real? I said, for real. He laughed.
I told Chip that when I practiced law in the City Federal Building in Birmingham, the men in the law firm where I worked all walked down the street the Lyric Theater to watch "Deep Throat," so we know what was in it, if any of our men client's got caught by their wives in the Lyric Theater. Our legal secretaries were really pissed when we told them they couldn’t come with us, because someone had to be in the law office.
Chip laughed.
I didn't say anything about how I feel about submachine guns today, because Chip was holding the tattoo needle.
Nor, after telling Chis that I am a writer, and I wrote many books and maybe 50,000 pages at blogs, what I wrote about, because Chip was holding the needle.
Yes, the tattoo needle hurt, sometimes it hurt a lot, but I hung in there, and after about an hour and fifteen minutes, Chip said it was finished.
Chip already had wiped my shoulder several times with a sanitary hand napkin, and he did it again.
Chip told me to wash the new tattoo three times a day for three days with warm water and Dial soap, and to dry it off with a paper towel, which is far more sanitary than a bathroom towel or washcloth. He gave me two vials of antiseptic jell to spread over the tattoo after each washing.
Chip said there was blood in the tattoo, but after the wounds healed in two weeks, the colors would be vibrant. Meanwhile, when the tattoo started itching, I could pat it, but not scratch it.
I told him that the first tattoo had taken a long time healing, and I was worried that I would catch MRSA flesh-eating bacteria, which I’d already caught in Key West.
Chip said he knew about MRSA, it can form in old distilled water. I said the ocean around Key West and the Florida Keys is full of MRSA, and the local doctors treat it all the time, and the local divers know about it, but nobody tells the tourists, if they cut themselves shaving and go into the ocean, or if the cut themselves on coral, they can get MRSA and be fighting for their lives, because it has mutated and it hard to kill with antibiotics.
I told Chip that a friend in the Florida Keys had told me to buy a jar of petroleum jelly and a bottle of red iodine at a drugstore, and to use a table knife to scoop a little of the jelly out of its jar and to fill the hole with the liquid iodine, to use the knife to mix the iodine into the petroleum jelly until the jelly was pink, and to put that concoction onto a MRSA lesion 4 times a day, until the lesion is gone.
I told Chip that no bacteria can survive in iodine, and I had used that concoction several times to heal myself of MRSA, when I was Key West.
I told Chip that when I published all of that about MRSA and the petroleum jelly and iodine cure at bigpinekey.com’s popular Coconut Telegraph public forum, I was ridiculed by other readers- until a woman wrote a post there, that she was going insane because of MRSA sores on her body, and she saw what I had posted and she used it and it saved her life and her sanity. After that, it was the sound of silence on the Coconut Telegraph.
I tipped Chip $50, and left.
I washed the new tattoo in dial soap and water twice last night.
Some years ago, I rescued a small aloe plant from a dark corner in a Home Depot garden shop and bought it home and repotted it into a much larger pot and set it on a table under the large east facing window in my apartment. The aloe plant loved being there, based on how large it became.
I cut a fat leaf off the aloe plant and used the knife to split the leaf, and several times last night I slathered raw aloe jelly onto the new tattoo. I knew I would do that and do the Dial soap wash religiously.
Why not? In the Gospels, Jesus's secret disciples Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea slathered a hundred weight of aloes and myrrh on Jesus's body, which they wrapped in linen cloth and put him in Joseph’s personal tomb, where Jesus then had a near death experience and return from the dead. Aloe is a powerful wound healer, myrrh increases white cell count to fight infection, and linen is a sterile bandage.
I turned in that night thinking I would write a blog post about my personal history of being a vagrant in Key West, but a string of dreams convinced me that was not in the cards.
However, I will tell one thing what happened in 2001, as I stood in line with maybe 100 other homeless people one Sunday afternoon in Higgs Beach Park, waiting to be served a meal by Glad Tidings Tabernacle Church, which did that every Sunday afternoon.
A young couple from the church, whom I had not seen before, told us, if we were saved by Jesus, we would ot be homeless. I said pretty loud, “What’s wrong with being homeless? Jesus was homeless! Every person in this line, but a Jewish man, has been saved several times by Jesus, and we are homeless.”
A great hush fell over the gathering.
While I was eating my meal, for which I was truly grateful, a young pastor named Mark walked over to me. I knew from talking with him before that he had come with his wife to the church from central Florida, thinking he would be its assistant pastor, but when he arrived, he was put in charge of the church’s homeless ministry.
Mark asked me why I had said Jesus was homeless? I asked Mark if he read his Bible? Mark asked why I asked him that? I said, because in the Gospels, Jesus said he was homeless.
Mark asked where did Jesus say that in the Gospels? I said, when a man told Jesus that he wanted to follow him and Jesus told the man what that would be like: The foxes had their dens and the birds had their nests, but the Son of man had no place to lay his head.
Mark said that passage didn’t mean Jesus was homeless. I said, of course that’s what the passage meant. Mark said, Jesus could have stayed with his mother. I asked, where does it say in the Gospels that Jesus ever stayed with his mother? I said, “In God’s eyes, we all are homeless."
I knew from what Mark had told me about his life, that he was called by God into the ministry, and I told him that from time to time time, and that he would be pushed to his limits, if he stuck to that calling. I told him that again at a farewell dinner given for him at Glad Tidings Tabernacle Church.
In my soul alchemy, Jesus is a great blacksmith, represented in this poem, in which he is the voice:
I am the blacksmith,this storm is my forge,you are my carbon gemsteelI hammer into my blackdiamond laserswordto forge lighting and thunderinto gold and pearlsand to cut hail and sleetinto diamonds and rainbows.
Some years later, a dear friend told me that she had first met me when she and her sons were serving homeless people meals in Higgs Beach Park for Glad Tidings Tabernacle Church, and I had told her that she and her children needed to be very careful about that church.
She was very attached to the church’s minister, and I kept telling her that she needed to be very careful with that church, especially for her children.
One day, she implored me to attend a service at Glad Tidings, because she was sure something would happen to cause me to feel differently about that church. I told her, okay, I would do it.
The next Sunday, I rode my bicycle to Glad Tidings and sat in a rear pew. The minister stood up in front of the congregation and told them, “You are the choicest of the choicest of the chosen.” I got up and walked out of that church and emailed my friend what had happened, and told her that she was supposed to be there and hear it, but since she wasn’t, I did it for her.
We ended up parting ways after I told her and her youngest son that they should steer clear of that church, and any church.
How we met was stranger than fiction.
I was living in a trailer on Little Torch Key in 2006. Some days, I drove down to Key West to hang out. I got into the habit of stopping at Key West to Marathon city transit bus stops and asking people I they wanted a ride into Key West? I was meeting interesting people in that way.
Driving my Toyota Highlander down to Key West one day, I passed several young men and a young woman standing at the shuttle bus stop on Cudjoe Key and got an awful crick in the left side of my neck. I drove a few hundred yards and the crick got a lot worse. I turned around and headed back up US 1, wondering if I was supposed to give those kids a ride? I slowed down as I neared the bus stop and did a U-turn and pulled up beside them and asked them if they wanted a ride into Key West? They said yes, and piled in. The awful crick in my neck was gone.
As we drove down to Key West, they asked me about myself and I told them a little bit, and that I had just gotten a novel published and there were copies in a box among them, and to take a few copies and spread it around. It was my novel Heavy Wait; A Strange Tale, which a street performer I met in Key West had inspired in 2001, when I was living on the street. They told me they worked for a woman, whom I might wish to meet, I told them to give her a copy of the novel. They said they would.
A year passed. One day, I got an email from a woman, who said it was her kids I had picked up at the bus stop and she had read Heavy Wait and had loved it, and she had given it to her father in Kentucky to read, and he had loved it, and she had been trying to find me every since. I emailed back that we should meet for lunch at a restaurant on Cudjoe Key, and she met me there, where she told many grubby things about the sheriff department, in which her family was involved, and that’s how it began.
it would take a new book to tell all of the stuff that Sandy and I got into in the Florida Keys, which was arranged by something a whole lot bigger and smarter than us. I wrote about some of my part of that in Heavy Wait’s sequel, Return of the Strange, which I wrote in 2003. Both novels now are free reads at the internet library, archive.org, which is funded and run by American colleges. I took a little poetic license, but Sandy's priceless, withering "A Time to Choose” poem, which begins on page 56, is verbatim.
In 2016, as I recall, at the fabulous Harpoon Harry’s Diner in Key West, I gave a copy of Heavy Wait to Shirley Freeman, the grande dame of Key West. Her husband had been the county sheriff and she had been a county commissioner. About a month later at Harpoon Harry’s, Shirley told me that she had read it straight through in one night, she could not put it down. Maybe I should email her a link to Return of the Strange?
At the cash register in Harpoon Harry’s is a sign, “In God we trust, all others must pay cash". Across from the cash register is an ATM machine.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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