Naturally, Jack was making a ton of money. Yet Jack knew that wasn’t all there was, or all that he was supposed to be.
Jack was in Toronto—unwillingly, as usual. Emma wasn’t with him, though she generally spent more time there than he did; being a writer was such a big deal in Canada.
“Life is a call sheet,” Emma wrote in The Slush-Pile Reader. “You’re supposed to show up when they tell you, but that’s the only rule.”
Hanging out with his mom in Daughter Alice, Jack started arguing with her about tattoo conventions. There never used to be tattoo conventions, but lately Alice had been going to one every month. She’d attended one in Tokyo and another in Madrid, but mostly she went to the conventions in the United States. They were everywhere.
The rare times Alice came to Los Angeles were usually in the fall, and not exclusively to visit Jack. Not so coincidentally, that was the time of the annual Inkslingers Ball—the L.A. tattoo and body-piercing convention. It was allegedly the world’s largest; they held it in the Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Boulevard, a former swing-era dance hall.
The New York tattoo convention, where Daughter Alice was also a regular, was held in the Roseland Ballroom on West Fifty-second Street—that one was in the spring. The one in Atlanta was also in the spring. There was even one in Maine—in February! Despite her promises, Jack’s mom never once came to Maine to visit him at Redding, but she wouldn’t miss the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Portland.
Alice went to the Hell City Tattoo Festival—this being in Columbus, Ohio, in a Hyatt Regency Hotel. (That one was in June, if Jack remembered correctly.) He thought his mom liked Philadelphia the best. She had a photograph of herself with Crazy Philadelphia Eddie; he always wore a yellow sports jacket and had his hair so stiff with gel that it stood up like a rooster’s comb.
Wherever the convention was—Dallas or Dublin, the so-called Meeting of the Marked in Pittsburgh, the annual Man’s Ruin in Decatur, Illinois—Daughter Alice went.
She had been to Boston and to Hamburg, Germany. To her great disappointment, Herbert Hoffmann had retired, but she met Robert Gorlt in Hamburg. “He’s six-nine and played basketball in Canada,” she told Jack.
Tattoo artists from all over the world came to these conventions: from Tahiti, Cyprus, Samoa; from Thailand and Mexico, and from Paris, Berlin, and Miami. They even came from Oklahoma, where tattooing was illegal. (There was nowhere Alice wouldn’t go to meet with her colleagues—including some Sheraton in the Meadowlands.) And it was always the same people who went.
“If it’s always the same weirdos, why go?” Jack asked his mother. “Why go again and again?”
“Because we are the same weirdos, Jack. Because we are what we do. We don’t change.”
“For Christ’s sake, Mom, do you have any idea what sort of shit can happen to you in a Hyatt Regency in Columbus, Ohio, or in a fucking Sheraton in the Meadowlands?”
“If Miss Wurtz could hear you, Jack,” his mother said. “If poor Lottie, or Mrs. Wicksteed—may she rest in peace—could hear you. It’s so sad what’s happened to your language. Is it California or the movie business that’s done this to you?”
“Done what to me?”
“Maybe it’s Emma,” Alice said. “It’s living with that foul-mouthed girl—I know it is. It’s for Christ’s sake this and fucking that. To hear you talk, you’d think that shit were an all-purpose noun! And you used to speak so well. You once knew how to talk. You enunciated perfectly.”
She had a point, but it was just like Alice to change the subject. Here Jack was, trying to impress upon her—a middle-aged woman—that these tattoo conventions were freak shows, and his mother got all in a knot about his language. The conventions were absolutely terrifying. The full-body wackos turned up; they had contests! Ex-convicts were tattooed—prison tattoos were a genre as distinctive as biker tattoos. Strippers were tattooed, not to mention porn stars. (Jack’s “research,” meaning countless Hank Long films, had taught him that.)
Just who did Daughter Alice think these conventions were for? Jack had seen those angry voodoo dolls and the slashed heart with the dagger in it—the latter inscribed NO REGRET—at Riley Baxter’s Tabu Tattoo in West L.A. (On Baxter’s business card, under one such voodoo doll, it said DISPOSABLE NEEDLES.)
Alice’s waist had thickened, but she’d not lost her pretty smile; her hair, once an amber or maple-syrup color, was streaked with gray. But her skin was surprisingly unwrinkled, and her choice in clothing took noticeable advantage of her full breasts. She liked dresses with an empire waist, and usually a scoop or square neckline. At her age, she wore an underwire bra—she liked red or fuchsia. That day in Daughter Alice, she wore a peasant-style dress with a neckline that dropped from the apex of her shoulders; her bra straps were showing, but they usually were. Jack thought that she liked her bra straps to show, although she never wore a dress or blouse with a revealing décolletage. “My cleavage,” Alice liked to say, “is nobody’s business.” (Strange, Jack used to think—how his mom wanted everyone to know she had good breasts, but she never bared even a little bit of them.)
And what was a woman who wouldn’t bare her breasts doing at tattoo conventions? “Mom—” Jack tried to say, but she was fussing with a pot of tea; she’d turned her back on him.
“And the women, Jack. Do you know any nice girls? Or have I just not met them?”
“Nice?”
“Like Claudia. She was nice. What’s happened to Claudia?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“What about that unfortunate young woman who had an entry-level job at the William Morris Agency? She had the strangest lisp, didn’t she?”
“Gwen somebody,” he said. (That was all he remembered about Gwen—she lisped. Maybe she was still at William Morris, maybe not.)
“Gwen is long gone, is she?” his mom asked. “Do you still take honey in your tea, dear?”
“Yes, Gwen is long gone. No, I don’t take honey—I never have.”
“Actresses, waitresses, office girls, meat heiresses—not to mention the hangers-on,” his mom continued.
“The what?”
“Do you call them groupies?”
“I don’t know any groupies, Mom. There are more groupies in your world than there are in mine.”
“What on earth do you mean, dear?”
“At the tattoo conventions, there must be,” he said.
“You should go to a tattoo convention, Jack. Then you wouldn’t be so afraid.”
“I took you to the Inkslingers Ball,” he reminded her.
“Yes, but you wouldn’t go inside the Palladium,” she said.
“There was a motorcycle gang outside the Palladium!”
“You said it was bad enough to see a bunch of fake boobs at night—you weren’t going to hang around a bunch of fake boobs in broad daylight. That’s exactly what you said. Honestly, your language—”
“Mom—”
“That Brit you were with in London—she was as old as I am!” Alice cried. Jack watched her put honey in his tea.