Lucky Supreme

  Also by Jeff Johnson:

  Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink (2009)

  Everything Under the Moon: a novel (2016)

  Knottspeed: a novel (2017)

  Copyright © 2017 by Jeff Johnson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Gigi Little

  Cover photo: Morguefile

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-757-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-759-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  Old Town.

  The heart of a city is a thick place, where the towers have their footprints, where the sugar deals get made, and where the big brains nest and the roads and freeways become arteries for something hatched in an incubator made out of random parts. But you have to keep the tumors somewhere, and in every case it has the same name. It wasn’t a place where the strong survived, because they either became overnight kings and winged to higher ground, or they became part of the blur of fire and gears and something else altogether. The weak never figured into the permanent population, because the nature of the game was too constant, and there wasn’t enough junk protein to make chewing the rest of the package worthwhile. What was left in between was the dream factory, where people hid in plain sight, where colossal miracles died at birth unnoticed, and where everything floated on a stagnant ocean of vice, lies, and decrepitude. The right mixture of animal stamina and imagination by the pound could take you to the far side of that sooty wilderness. Or so I kept telling myself.

  “Darby. There you are.” Delia looked up at the sound of the door chime as I walked into the tattoo shop. The lobby was half full of college kids banded together for numeric boldness, a few larking housewives trolling for a few drips of bad news, and one serious fucking biker. Delia was a short, scrawny punk chick in her late twenties and a mouthy but superb tattoo artist with consistently unfortunate taste in clothes. Today she was wearing black peg-legs, engineer boots covered in layers of graffiti, and a shredded old Fang T-shirt that did nothing for her flat chest. She smacked her fluorescent-green gum at me and wrinkled her tiny pug nose. What little hair she had was last night’s wine maroon, a change from yesterday’s hellbino blanco. “About time, you lazy fuckin’ shitass.”

  Romanticizing the islands of neon in those places was more than easy; it was natural. It happened somewhere deep in the limbic psyche, hardwired in the marrow of the ape. Behind the wet red glaze the dream factory dreamed its hardest. The front of Lucky Supreme, alive with buzz and pulse and bent lines of glow, was about as inviting as a ruby stuck in a hornets’ nest.

  The romantic neon was mine. As in, I owned it.

  “Up yours, dummy,” I said affectionately. I pushed my way through the lobby with proprietary graciousness. “It’s my Saturday. All day. But I thought I’d stop in to monkey with the stereo.”

  I tested the air as I made my way through the place. Tattoo shops were a balmy mix of soap and chemicals, with an undercurrent of the nervous, sweaty popcorn stink that effervesced from a waking carnival midway at noon, blending perfectly with the sweet, breathy bourbon-splatter of a backseat on a Monday night thrown in for good measure. At the Lucky Supreme, we also had all four tablespoons of Delia’s running custom perfume. She was currently trying to duplicate the heady essence of birthday cake.

  In many ways our neon barrier formed the perimeter of a miniature bubble in the greater psychosphere of Old Town. If I closed my eyes, which I didn’t, I might have been able to feel it and let my imagination paint the cast of characters within. Delia, a bright white spot with a great deal of internal motion, like a clock and dynamo hybrid made out of fluorescent tubes and firecrackers. Everyone else was dim in comparison except the biker, who would have registered in the eyes-closed interpretation as a big black toad. I liked to think of myself as a tidy gray rift of nothing at all, but it wasn’t true. And outside of our hard little bubble were nodes of blank, songs, wings, and trashcans.

  “You’re just in time to settle a score for me,” Delia chirped, “so snap the fuck out of it.” Her chubby skate kid customer winced. He winced because she was still talking. “I think I need to market a special form of vodka that can also act as a shampoo and a lube. Righteous idea whose time has come. Purse-sized bottles. I’m calling it Early Morning Luvopoo. These douchebags all say it sounds too much like bubble bath.”

  “It fuckin’ does,” her customer whined. It was obvious that she’d been tormenting him with her train of thought for the entire time he’d been sitting there. Delia would always abuse a captive audience in lurid and creative ways. She couldn’t help herself.

  Alex and Dwight looked up from their stations and smiled by way of greeting. They were working on the leading edge of the college gang. The two of them were relatively new at the Lucky and still on their best behavior. Alex was a chunky half-Chinese, half-maybe-Irish guy in his mid-twenties. Dwight was a few years older, a rawboned greaser with tree-root hands and a farmer’s beard jutting from a Lincoln jaw. They were on the better end of the stale sort of character that had come to dominate tattooing once it became popular enough to need them. Bold showmen or fountains of originality they weren’t, and they didn’t suffer from the excess of personality of the people who had been sitting in their chairs a decade ago. Delia had been with me for a rambling three years, the minimum amount of time necessary to insult me on a regular basis. She’d wormed her way into my affections in a thousand little ways, some of them possibly unintentional. It gave her an edge when it came to insubordination.

  “Zombie music,” I said as I passed through the iron gate in the tip wall. Delia rolled her eyes with snap drama. I’d banned Nordic metal on purely aesthetic grounds. “No undead can play guitar that fast, sweetie. Dudeboy’s a fake. And Early Morning Luvopoo is way lame. Roll with Hoe Go. Great big picture of your itchy spot on the label.”

  “Whatevah,” she replied, projecting sullen. I stopped and stared her down. She scrunched her face at me like she was trying to squeeze something out.

  I continued through the bodies into the back room, where I made a passing inspection of the elaborate stainless steel crappery of cleanliness. The newer Ritter steam autoclave always gave me a tiny pulse of relief when I saw it. The old chemclaves exploded occasionally, and the popping and groaning they made through every cycle had been nerve racking. It was good that they were gone. Even cold and unplugged and sitting in a box, the sight of one still gave me pause. Clean stainless steel buckets full of deadly chemicals sitting on shiny stainless steel. The little ultrasonic tank always looked out of place in all the metal, a forlorn plastic robot scout from the future. Nothing was on and none of it needed tending, so I kept going.

  The room beyo
nd it was the secret stronghold of the Lucky operation, where sinister plans were hatched, wicked and misguided vengeance plotted, love dismissed for all the wrong reasons, where visions of nightmares and fables were put to paper. Pretty much all of it. The lounge was as big as the other two rooms combined, packed with a mad assemblage of mismatched bookcases full of art books. The cases were stacked on top of each other and rose into dusty obscurity up to the sixteen-foot ceiling. There was a graphite-smeared drafting table with a makeshift light box mounted underneath it, an old cherry-red crushed velvet sofa with matching recliners scored from the outer ring of a dumpster in a pimpy kind of neighborhood, useful for wipeouts when the night shift guys had their occasional post-shift blackout binges, and a small workbench with a grinder, a drill press, and a nasty array of soldering equipment. In the far corner was my desk, a huge antique I referred to as my office. The desk was sandwiched between two filing cabinets, decorated to total surface encrustation with the stickers of forgotten bands with lunatic names and visiting tattooers who sounded twice as bad. Gleeclubfoot, the raging punk band from no-one-remembers, was my fave music-wise, so we had five or six of their bumper stickers. One rainy night some tattoo kid named Timmy Runny had dropped off some of his magnet cards with an antlered roach head, so there were several of those on top of the mix. Runny had a crazy story, all of them did, so the stickers and magnets were a little like the spines of books that way. Ads for weirdoes, the garden flowers of the dream factory. I sat down at the desk and didn’t look at any of it. Instead I waited for inspiration, which never, ever turned out to be a good idea.

  With as much shit as I had to do at any given moment, I spent an inordinate amount of time sitting at the desk, listening to the shop stagger forward through another day, generally doing nothing. It occurred to me that I might be depressed, but I doubted it. Probably too shallow. Bored was a definite fit, but it was impossible to get debilitatingly bored in a tattoo shop. So I don’t know why I was just sitting there. About then I realized that I was waiting for something to happen. Something wonderful. Something possibly even magnificent. Which is probably a tremendous way to jinx yourself. Magical thinking aside, there was something to be said for charting a path to that wonderful magnificent stuff. Sitting around just made me a target.

  I looked at the clock above the back door, frozen since I could remember at 2:04. My social life was in the toilet. That was my first thought. I had a mild but persistent hangover. The state of the shop was a direct reflection of my inner self. Everything was broken, but not so badly that it didn’t actually work in some semi-desperate way, like a redlined engine with no oil that was still screaming fast. It was out of control in a way that was hard to define, but everyone was there and pretending like it was a real business. The back sink had about a week left before it stopped draining completely, in the same way that I had about a week before some basin inside of me became backed up with the tiny stresses of a million forgettable problems, all gathered together like a clump of hairy plastic in a drain. The light in the emergency exit sign had burned out, and finding the tiny obsolete replacement bulb could take days, if not weeks. I couldn’t draw any direct parallel there, but it was a queer and telling omen. I sighed, powerless to enjoy the act of sitting, unable to settle into a state of spiritually restorative nothingness.

  “Did you get my tampons?” Delia called, loud and sweet, from the front. I got up and wandered out. She was still working on the fat dude.

  “They were out of super jumbo,” I replied, patting her bony shoulder. “You’ll have to hunker down on three or four of the regular ones.”

  “Heyyy,” she whined. Alex and Dwight snorted in perfect unison.

  “Dmitri came by,” Alex said. “Right when we opened.”

  Dmitri was the landlord. He ran the truly morbid pizza dive down the street, a place so powerfully awful that the street crazies believed he put mosquitoes in the sauce, and those guys could generally digest anything. It was never a good sign when he came around. It wasn’t just that I hated him, and I did. Dmitri was the wrecked sort of blur crazy who sent uneasy currents out around him as feelers, like an eel electrocuting his way around through muddy water. A ticking time bomb, essentially. When he finally went off for good we were all going down and we knew it.

  “What’d he want?”

  Alex shrugged.

  “He was drunk,” Delia said brightly. “Smelled like white wine. With some beer. Sweet champagne. Snails. Raging BO. Very Parisian.”

  “He was definitely wet,” Dwight added. He gave the tattoo he was working on a boxer swipe. “Looked like the poor dude had been wandering around in the rain all morning without an umbrella.”

  “Portlanders don’t use umbrellas,” I told him. Dwight had moved to the City of Roses six months before from Denver, a place he somewhat disturbingly described as a high-altitude ‘foggy’ zone saturated with military radar and itinerant frequency waves. That description, that small measure of character, was why I’d hired him in the first place, but it turned out to be the only odd thing about him. It was his freshman fall in the Northwest. “That’s how we bust the Californians.”

  I ducked out into the rain for a quick smoke, leaving Delia in charge of the rain lecture, which she immediately launched into, beginning with how constant moisture lends fortitude to mucous membranes. Old Town was in that strange twilight transition between subreality and the true Night Madness. The scuttling office commandos who’d parked in the cheap pay-by-the-week lots scattered around the area were beginning to give way to the sidewalk night shift. A couple of surly homies in watch caps and puffy plastic team coats were huddled under the awning of the old brick apartment building across the street. They hadn’t been there twenty minutes before. Monique, the Lucky’s pet hooker, was savagely berating someone on her cell phone under the saggy awning of the Korean mini-mart next door. Apparently one of her boots had been stolen. She was wearing flip-flops from the Walgreen’s down the street. I briefly entertained the notion of offering assistance, but Monique’s foul temper was in full swing, and all she’d do was spit at me or anyone else until she went from hard boil down to her resting state of scalding steam. Maybe a day or two.

  I took a deep breath of rainy street. More of the rock-and-weed tag teams were coming out a little early and vying for the best corners. The lights of Old Town were powering up, spraying the wet pavement with bright smears. I recognized the archetypes of the night watch, even if the faces changed. The haggard identity of the place had its own white pages, and sometimes, when I was just bored enough, I could see it with surprising clarity. In many ways, the goings-on would never be fully understood by anyone, but at times I was close, in the same way I’d often been close to the wrong kind of woman. I could almost hold all of it in my mind’s eye for an instant and see the entire picture, but to do so would do absolutely nothing for my sense of well-being, so it wasn’t the kind of thing I focused on. Especially recently.

  Over the last year, I’d seen signs of “progress,” and it was just like Saturday night’s red dress on a Sunday morning coke habit. Little mom-and-pop places that served spinach pies and a hungry man’s meatloaf dinner were relocating to the outskirts of the city, to be replaced by boutique coffee shops and upscale fusion restaurants that sold seared tuna belly and a raw quail egg with a fractal of truffled pomegranate soy sauce. Way out of the local price range, though “local,” “price,” and “range” all had newly flexible definitions. There were more cops around than last year, a younger, beefier variety who hassled anyone who so much as touched their zipper in front of an alley where people had been pissing for years. Parking was growing scarce with the flood of new SUVs, most of which sported at least one paradoxical tree-hugger sticker.

  The net effect of pressuring the nightlife was that it made the entire culture more mean and desperate, which was why my schedule had gradually come to straddle the day and the night shift, even on my hypothetical day off. It was true that Delia could handle almost an
y situation, and my two night shift guys were dangerous animals, but at forty I’d been tattooing longer than all of them combined, and much of that in the dark, richly complex environment that had been Old Town in its glory days. I knew, or thought I knew, every trick in the book. I’d even invented some of them. I shot my spent cigarette butt into the swollen gutter as a TriMet bus roared past in a torus of dirty mist. Boredom breeds overconfidence.

  “—cut me up some ’Bama poon,” Monique snarled. She was coming my way. “An’ I’m gettin’ me some tape an’, yo hang!” She glared at me. “What!”

  “I like your outfit,” I said, offering a smile. She spit and her lower lip quivered. I went back into the Lucky before she tried to scratch me.

  Dwight was bandaging his customer when I went back inside. I took a moment to straighten the wooden chairs in the lobby and tidy the magazines in the bookcase, even though it would all be trashed again in less than an hour. The plants had all been watered recently. Delia’s handiwork, though she’d bitch about it. I looked up at the Buddha statue with the cholo headband we kept on top of the bookcase in the lobby. As smiling and enigmatic as ever.

  The walls of the tattoo shop were covered with sheets of tattoo designs known as flash, but since I’d purchased the Lucky Supreme from an old-timer with a gnarly pedigree, ours was far superior to most. Wally Langdon, the previous owner, had retired a few years before and left me with a laundry list of things to fix or destroy that were the collective result of his stunning and secretive ineptitude when it came to business, his astonishing ability to steal things and hoard them, and his amazing reinterpretation of anything that might ever make him feel guilty. Smiling Good Time Wally, forever fixated on ripping off the devil. I’d wound up with a ton of furniture he’d borrowed but never returned, most of it from me, a ton of bad plumbing and dangerous electrical work he’d traded for but weaseled out of—that kind of thing. In the end the price tag was mostly for the name and the lease and all the infrastructure I’d kept going through his reign. The only valuable stuff was the collection of tattoo art and strange artifacts he’d inherited from his former boss, who had himself started tattooing almost one hundred years before. The history of the Lucky Supreme was part of its charm. I’d never had a chance to meet Wally’s former boss, who’d died a few years before I ever hit the scene, but I felt some kinship with him. More than I did with Wally, anyway.