THE ILLUSTRATED MAN

I spend five mornings a week at the local YMCA, taking exercise classes, doing my physical therapy routines to aid with torn rotator cuffs and a damaged spine, and generally enjoying the quiet ambience of the early-morning crowd: lots of elders and young retirees, mostly, but also a few mid-careerists who enjoy open mornings. For the past twenty-five years I have maintained my “Y” membership, and with it, my access to the “Men’s Center”– the glorified term for a locker room. There, I revel in the luxuries of a permanent locker, hot showers, steam room, and sauna. There is also a large Jacuzzi, but I have never set toe in it – the thing reminding me too painfully of a cauldron of human soup I once escaped when I had been captured by cannibals. That, and the fact that naked men in the same bathtub have never appealed to me.

            Over all the years I have habituated the locker room, I have tracked with some dismay the increasing appearance of tattoos. We don’t see a lot of body piercings in Walla Walla but we do see tattoos. Lots of them, and lots more every year.  The thing about a locker room is that you never see just partial tattoos – say the wrists and forearms emerging from a short-sleeved shirt. You see every inch of every tattoo inked onto shoulders, thighs, ankles, feet, buttocks, neck, torso, and testicles.

            I’m certain there is a robust literature to explain all of this. People get PhD’s researching and writing about every conceivable cultural trend. But while I do note the tattoo explosion and take some interest in it, I have no desire to examine the theories of causation. It’s enough for me to wonder on my own why a skinny middle-schooler with alarmingly permissive parents and plenty of acne wants to look like a Māori warrior.

            For a long time, the tattoo trend seemed to stay in the innocent territory of the occasional small illustration of some sweet little subject drawn from nature, especially as more and more women started getting them, too. A butterfly on the ankle. A tiny pink rose on the nape of the neck. A hummingbird hovering on a deltoid, visible only in tank top season. But over the years as the mania spread, I started registering ever more ornate and elaborate displays. Intricate geometric patterns started showing up in broad panels etched on the back. Entire arms and legs wrapped in snakes, or vines. Or runes that seem vaguely Third Reich. Alarming red flames erupting from the base of the throat to the edges of the jaw. Forked tails and devil’s horns running up past a guy’s ass all the way to his shoulders.

            Then came the texts.

            I remember in my childhood seeing sailors with an anchor inked on one shoulder and on the other a heart etched with the word “MOM.” Or if the guy wanted to avoid the burden of a permanent suggestion of incest inscribed on his body, maybe something like “Peggy.” That sort of thing seemed to be the extent of the texting tattoo. Not now. I see more and more guys in the shower with increasingly elaborate messages etched on their bodies. It’s never the old men who carry these things. Invariably, it’s a fellow in his thirties or forties – and apparently a lot of them are evangelicals, as the body-messages, more often than not, are religious in nature. Lots of passages from scripture, sometimes a mysterious Latin word or phrase, frequent images of the cross or a fish as accompaniment.

            A few days ago, a new young guy showed up in the Men’s Center shower room sporting a – dare I say – ungodly load of scripture all over. Arms, legs, neck, tops of the feet (I wasn’t able to see the bottoms, and did not ask), back, belly, neck, hands, even ears boldly proclaimed a fiendish level of devotion to the Bible. Words, words, and more words. I tried not to stare, but the walking sermon soaping up at the center-most faucet demanded it. When he turned away from me, I tried reading his back to see if I might recognize any of the passages, but the first thing I realized was that the print was too small to read from the even the short distance across a six-person shower chamber. There were a lot of words penned onto this guy. Not just a few familiar, short adages of the “Ask and ye shall receive” sort, but what appeared to be entire pages lifted from the sacred text. He was big guy with a broad back (the better to help oar the ark?), and the big patch of dermis I could see looked like two full pages from the Bible.

            It occurred to me that these lines covering the guy’s dorsal side were not meant to be read – except perhaps by a wife, partner, or lover in a very intimate space. You could tell at a glance what they were – clearly scripture, what with the eight-inch-high crucifix planted right in the middle of them – but you would never be able to read them unless you approached the guy, maybe told him you appreciated his devotion, then asked him to turn around so you could read all of it. And how creepy would that be?

            I was contemplating this marvelous realization when the guy suddenly turned to train the water on his back. He was now facing me, and I could see at a glance that his anterior was as printed as his posterior. Now I was really trying not to stare, as the full Monty revealed itself indelicately. But something about the text on the ventral side seemed most peculiar. I did that thing where you pretend to soap your face while casting glances between your fingers until I identified the strangeness. All of the scripture penned across his chest and belly was backwards. The letters were the same aggravatingly small size as the ones on his back, but they could not be read with a normal scan from left to right.

            I was standing there soaking and wondering why this strangeness in textual presentation seemed so familiar, then it hit me. I suddenly flashed on one of those big hospital ambulance vans with the word “AMBULANCE” written backwards in blood-red across the vehicle’s banner, so that if you were driving and the ambulance approached you from behind, you would plainly read the word “AMBULANCE” in your rear-view mirror. As if you otherwise could not tell that the house-sized crimson spacecraft on your tail was an ambulance. As I looked at the guy again, all I could think was “Huh.”

            Hair washed and shower finished, I strode out into the drying foyer and left the pious newcomer to his spray. I did my customary thing which was to step into the warm, dry sauna to towel off. In old age I have come to loathe the cold and can’t stand the instantly chilling effects of evaporative cooling, so the faster I can get the water off me, the happier I am, and the sauna, that intimate, insulated heat box, is the best place to do it. Apparently, the new guy finished his shower-bath just a moment after I did, for when I stepped around the corner into the dressing room with its twin sinks and large mirrors, he was standing there, still toweling off in front of a mass of reflective glass. I passed slowly behind him, quite close, and looked, and sure enough the scripture on his chest and belly was readable in the mirror.

            I could not read it all without seeming really creepy, but the first words in the passage stuck in my mind, so I soon grabbed my cell phone out of my locker and begged AI for assistance. The full passage across his chest read, Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of prophesy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near. I didn’t recall anything from the sternum, down. But there was still a lot more to go.

            So, I submit a question to you, reader: Why would a guy do this?

            The sheer pain of all those tattoos would make him a modern-day Penitente, willingly bearing the lash for the sake of his devotion. Not to mention the monetary expense. I’m guessing somewhere north of twenty-thousand bucks to look like a walking example of the New Revised Standard Version. But why do half of it in such a way that it could only be read up close, in a mirror?

Then a startling thought occurred to me. This guy was moderately hairy – not the kind of hairy that makes some men look like black bears soaping up in the shower, but hairy enough. His torso was bare, though – and likely kept bare by shaving. I surmised that he gained some benefit or uplift when he stood before a mirror, lathered up his belly and chest, and then scraped away the stubble which threatened his access to the Book of Revelation. What satisfaction must accompany the erasure of one’s alarming mammalian heritage to perceive anew the clear and unobstructed articulation of God’s own words!

In His image, forever and ever, amen.