A TATOO FOR MY BIRTHDAY

SET-UP FOR MY PREVIOUS STORY ENLISTMENT DAY

For my seventeenth birthday, I decided to treat myself to a tattoo. Now, today that is no big deal, but in 1957, it was out there, on the edge. Vietnam and the protest years were far in the future, Hippie was slang for part of your anatomy and the Beatnik craze was still a mote in Jack Kerouac's eye.

I lived in an affluent community on Long Island. People from the area referred to the section as the, Five Towns. My town, Hewlett, was not only affluent it was predominately Jewish.

In the Jewish religion, the Talmud, our laws, say that you should not adorn your body, meaning no piercing and tattoos. There is even a myth that states they will not bury you in a Jewish cemetery with a tattoo. It is an untruth as I can testify. My dad had one, a small bluebird on his left forearm, and they interred him without problem in one of New York's most active Jewish cemeteries. As a rule though, Jews seldom wore tattoos, with the exception of the numbers assigned and written on the arms of the prisoners in Hitler's concentration camps.

In the junior year of high school, on my sixteenth birthday, I dropped out. For whatever the reason it left me without a direction and purpose. After a few months I knew I was not headed anywhere but down and decided to join the Air Force as soon as I turned seventeen, the minimum age for enlistment. Unfortunately, my parents said they would refuse to sign for me and continued to hold out for a return to school. I got a job, and bided my time.

On April 23, 1957, my birthday, with twenty-dollars in hand, my friends and I drove to Coney Island in Brooklyn. The most famous tattooist of our time held court there. I only wanted the best to mark me.

His name was Blackie, and well known to the historians of American tattoo as Coney Island Blackie.

For my first time I chose the Air Force insignia, a screaming American eagle. It turned out to be my last. I wanted it on my left shoulder. This way when I drove my hot-rod Ford around town I could hang my arm out the window. That and a Lucky Strike stuck in my mouth would impress all the chicks, or so I thought.

Blackie sat me in a chair next to a large window facing the street and began his work in front of dozens of onlookers. Form a selection hanging on the wall, he asked me to pick the eagle of my choice. Then he selected the appropriate stencil. While he traced the lines, I nervously prepared myself for the oncoming pain and when the whirring of the electric needle began, I involuntarily winced. Blackie smiled, calmed me down and pointed to my adoring public. I had no choice but to bravely smile at the skeptical audience.

He completed a good third of the work before I realized I had placed my right arm, the wrong one, in front of him. It was too late and I would spend the rest of my life showing a bare arm to an uncaring world.