Family Ties Of The Tattooed Lady

Copyright © 2008 by One Real Story Cover photo by Kelly J Kitchen Book design by Katie Cummings All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. One Real Story Visit website at www.onerealstory.com Published in the United States of America First Published: September 2008

About the Author Marco Kaufman has published in several different fields, including literary criticism,

medical writing, and Holocaust historicism and currently writes on The Big Book of Grievances, his weblog of short fiction, flash fiction, and works in progress.

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Contents The Tattooed Lady

5

Continental Divide

6

The Ugly Guy

7

Polite

8

Headphones

9

Live and Don’t Learn

10

A Way Out

11

Omission

12

Organization

13

Jewboy

14

Family Ties

15

The Tattooed Lady

Brian was Catholic in the way that a lot of Catholics are. He didn’t get to mass every Sunday, he hadn’t made an act of contrition in a decade at least, and he ate meat on Fridays during Lent. But there was one thing he was certain of, and that was that he intended to marry a fellow Catholic. After all, he believed in Jesus Christ and the sacraments, even if he didn’t partake of the latter as often as he should. At a party in Brooklyn one night, he met a Jewish girl named Lydia. He was a little drunk, so he flirted with her and sang the Groucho Marx song to her that bore her name. They kissed a little, and she asked him if he wanted to go upstairs to her apartment, which was in the same building, with her. Brian was interested, but he had scruples: It could only be about sex, he said. It couldn’t be about anything more than that, because he was Catholic and she was not. She agreed to his terms (she had had a bit to drink herself) and so they went upstairs. Eventually Brian fell out of touch with the mutual friend whose party he had been at that night. When the Catholic clergy abuse scandal broke, he took what he believed to be a moral stance and left the church. He thought of Lydia then and how he had probably come off when he gave his conditions to their sleeping together. He wanted to apologize, but he hadn’t asked for her phone number, or even her last name.

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

5

Continental Divide James had just moved to the suburbs from the city after living downtown for eight years. It was only then that he was mugged in front of a convenience store only a few blocks from his apartment building. The men that mugged him were black and had, James figured, come from the neighborhood across the street from the convenience store, which was almost entirely black. What the men didn’t know was that in crossing that street, they had crossed a county line and, if they were caught, would be under the jurisdiction of a town with very few black people living there. They would be lucky, Bob thought, if they had a single black juror, and in a wealthy town such as that one, they would assuredly not only be found guilty, but they would get some jail time as well. It frustrated James that the men were never caught. He wanted them to know that he had worked for divestment from South Africa when he was in college. How could they have attacked him when they owed him their thanks?

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

6

The Ugly Guy

Nancy was stuck with the ugly guy while her friend was somewhere behind the shopping center screwing his better-looking friend, Stuart. They didn’t say much to each other while they waited for the other two; instead they smoked cigarettes and listened to the radio that the ugly guy had been carrying with him when they met up. When the other two finally emerged from behind a dumpster, the four of them walked to Nancy’s house, where her friend was staying the night since Nancy’s mother was away. Stuart kissed her friend good night, gratuitously and graphically in front of Nancy and the other guy, who must have felt obligated in some way, because he leaned toward her and kissed her, very briefly, but on the lips. After that, when they would pass one another in the halls of their high school, where he was a year or two ahead of her, she would smile and say hello. She never did learn his name.

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

7

Polite Matt met Suzy at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square North. It was the first time he’d set up an Internet date. They hadn’t exchanged photos online, but they managed to find one another. Matt bought coffee for them both — these were the days before the latté — and they talked about books. She had been an English major in college, as had he, and he was talking to her about Bierce’s The Ox-Bow Incident, which he had only recently read for the first time. When it came time for Matt to leave, he asked Suzy for her phone number and whether he could call her, and she said yes and gave him her number. Matt called a few days later, only to be told by Suzy that she wasn’t interested in seeing him again. Then why did you give me your phone number? He asked her. She said it was to be polite. Better you’d have been honest, Matt said. That would have been polite. She hung up on him.

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

8

Headphones Chris and Don were sitting in Chris’s dorm room when there was a knock at the door. It was a guy named Jay. Chris had never met him before, but Don knew Jay because they had the same major. Jay was stopping by because Don, who was editor of the school’s literary magazine, had rejected a poem by him, and he wanted to know why. For several minutes, Don tried to explain to Jay the reasons he rejected the poem; meanwhile, Chris put on a CD and was listening to both the music and the increasingly heated conversation. When finally Jay’s anger exploded and he tackled Don, Chris didn’t move. Eventually, Jay had Don pinned to the ground and was punching him in the face over and over. Chris put on a set of headphones and turned up the volume on the CD player. He had never really liked Don.

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

9

Live and Don’t Learn They sat at a table in a local club. She was unhappy, she told him. She was depressed, even. She was an artist, and he didn’t understand her. (She was an artist, by the way — a painter and sculptor of some renown.) She didn’t think they should see one another anymore. He wasn’t surprised: It had seemed to be heading in that direction for some time. Ten years later he married another artist. This artist was in retirement, although he encouraged her to begin working again. When she did begin to work again, however, she told him that their marriage was in trouble. She was unhappy, she told him. She was depressed, even. She was an artist, and he didn’t understand her.

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

10

A Way Out He had wanted to break up with her for some time. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her. Rather, he was disintegrating psychologically, and he didn’t want to put her through that. He began faking a case of agoraphobia and canceling dates with her, hoping she would get tired of him and dump him. When she was invited to a Halloween party, she asked to him to accompany her, and he said no. She indicated that a former boyfriend of hers would be at the party — clearly a ruse to get him to come with her — but he would not relent. The next day on the telephone she told him that she had slept with her ex-boyfriend the previous night. He broke up with her and hung up the phone. Now he could fall apart all my himself.

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

11

Omission Mike had not spoken to most of siblings for several years when he died. When he was nearly dead, he told his sons-in-law, Nick and Eddie, to stand guard outside the funeral home where the viewing was held to keep any of his despised family from attempting to attend. And he told his one brother who he was talking to, Frankie, not to tell any of the rest of the brothers and one sister that he was dead. Mike’s viewing and funeral went off without a hitch; no unwanted relations arrived. Ten days later, Frankie was walking around the neighborhood, and he bumped into his and Mike’s oldest brother, Joe. They talked for a while, and Joe got around to asking Frankie whether he had seen Mike lately. “Yeah,” Frankie said. “I saw him about ten days ago.” He neglected to mention Mike was in a coffin that day.

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

12

Organization

Whereas Philip organized his records alphabetically, Paul organized them by the order that they were acquired. Philip wondered how Paul could remember, since the collection of records was at least twenty years old. It’s easy, Paul would explain. The first record I bought was Ziggy Stardust by Bowie. I liked it so much that I bought the rest of his records. That brought me to Eno, which brought me to Roxy Music, which brought me to Bryan Ferry, which brought me to . . . and so on. Philip thought that Paul had an extraordinary memory to be able to organize his records and books that way. If Paul had tried it, he’d never find anything. The first record he’d bought was Billy Joel’s The Stranger and he didn’t own it anymore. As far as what Billy Joel had led him to, he had no idea. Philip asked Paul what he felt like hearing; Paul told him to put on Velvet Underground’s Loaded. Philip asked where he could find that. Next to the Lou Reed records, Paul said. Where did you think?

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

13

Jewboy Jack’s grandfather had been Jewish by birth, but he had become a Catholic when he married Jack’s grandmother, who was of Austrian parentage. Jack’s father had married Jack’s mother, an Italian-American, and they raised Jack in a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood. Jack’s wife Rachel was Jewish by birth, and even though Jack had converted to Judaism long before they met and got married, Rachel always insisted she was “more Jewish” than Jack. To prove her point, she would cite instances of anti-Semitism, her early awareness of the Holocaust, her grandmother’s repeated rapes at the hands of Don Cossacks in Ukraine, and so on. Jack never told Rachel that his nickname among his childhood friends in his Italian-American neighborhood was “Jewboy.”

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

14

Family Ties They had lived in the same apartment building for years, but they had never met. He had done odd jobs for her father, who was the superintendent, and she knew all of his aunts and uncles and many of his cousins because her grandfather lived on the same street as his grandmother. It wasn’t until the superintendent invited him to dinner that he met her. They began dating soon after that. But the parents didn’t become better acquainted until the superintendent had brandished a gun in a nearby bar and someone had called the police. The young man went to his father and told him that he needed him to hide the bullets from the superintendent’s gun. That way, the police couldn’t charge him with assault with a deadly weapon; an unloaded gun only amounted to a misdemeanor. The young man’s father agreed to help, and when the superintendent was bailed out, he came and thanked the young man’s parents for helping him out. He left with the bullets, of course.

Family Ties of the Tattooed Lady

15

Published by One Real Story © 2008