I Am So Popular: I Heart Vicodin

Which means that— meditation retreats, double lattes after 1 p.m., and the occasional exposure to indoor fireworks at wrestling events notwithstanding— I avoid mind-altering experiences 99.9999% of the time. And that’s okay by me. Being sober doesn’t bum me out. Because being sober is proof that, I am, in addition to being incredibly popular, also an amazing overachiever: See, I used up my lifetime allotment of fate-assigned opportunities to get wasted by the time I was twenty-five. Which is why I gave up all that. When I was thirty-five.

But every now and then I am granted a legitimate opportunity to render myself pharmaceutically idiotic. Like the foot surgery I had in 2005. Or the occasional root canals that net me a little Rx to take the edge off. Or, as was the case the other night, the need to ingest drugs to dull the agony of a cosmetic procedure to reverse some Really Really Dumbass Behavior (which I’d like to say I’ve only indulged in now and then. But that would be a heap of crap).

Which is all to say that I popped the painkiller as a preemptive strike against the laser tattoo removal I was about to undergo. This was my second treatment. I will need at least two more sessions to fade the tattoo in question. Probably more like three or four more. And if I want the fucker gone altogether, we’re looking at maybe eight or more treatments.

Before I describe the exquisite sensation of epidermal searing, let me begin at the beginning, and explain the tattoo itself. I got married in May, 2006. I was very in love. Very. You know that Billy Bragg song where he sings about celebrating, My love for you… with a pint of beer and a new tattoo? Well that’s how I felt, only without the beer.

So I did a little research and found Karen Slafter, who was voted the Best Tat Artist in the Chron’s Best of Poll in 2005. I went in to talk to her and told her what I had in mind.

I said, “Look, even though I know my new husband, the one who promised to love me til death do we part, is going to dramatically walk out on my ass in a few months and send me into a spiral down into the utter depths of hell during which I will not be able to eat or sleep or think for a very long time, I want you to permanently place upon my arm the biggest, darkest tattoo you can, and I want you to put his name prominently in the center of it so that even people with massive cataracts can clearly read it from four blocks away, okay?”

Karen smiled and said, “No problem, Spike, there’s nothing I like doing better than spending three hours making someone wince and bleed while indulging them in the dumbass dream of thinking that if they put someone else’s name on their body that person will stay forever and be nothing short of incredibly fantastic, adoring, and faithful to their wedding vows at all times.”

Okay, so neither of us really said those things. But we did have an awesome three hour conversation when she put that tattoo on me. It was my third, and by far my best experience. Karen was swift and light handed and for the first time I actually experienced the endorphin high I’d only heard about until then.

When my husband split, I was left to contemplate this mass of ink, which goes from my shoulder to a few inches above my elbow, and takes the form of a Top Notch washboard. (And thanks to the sort of luck I have, you can contemplate it, too, since there’s a picture of me getting this tattoo in the Keep Austin Weird book.) Initially, still being in StupidLand, I fantasized a reunion, even a remarriage maybe, some solution that involved love, love, love. So I left the tattoo on for a while, hoping that might help foster a reunion. But even a slow learner like me eventually puts two and two together and so at last I concluded that it was time to take the L out of Lover, it was over.

Still, I hesitated de-inking. Not only is it expensive and painful, there’s also a part of me that thinks it smacks of something like cowardice to take off what was supposed to be permanent. Tattoos, some people believe, are acquired to tell the story of one’s life, for better or for worse. You can’t erase the past. You shouldn’t erase a tattoo. But damn, that guy pissed me off. And there it was for me to look at, every day: His Name His Name His Name.

It became an icebreaker at parties. Someone would see it peeking out beneath my sleeve and ask for a full view. I would explain I was having it taken off. Suggestions would be made to convert the existing picture into something similar but different. There are a lot of things you can transform a washboard into, and there are a lot of words that rhyme with my ex-husband’s name. Thus I was offered the following ideas:

Change it to a beach chair that says Merman.

Change it to half of the Ten Commandments and have it say Sermon.

Change it to another instrument and have it say Theremin.

I thought maybe I could change it to a couch and have it say Therapy, which was a stretch, but, still, therapy saved my post-divorce ass, and I’m sure therapy really will always be a part of my life, so that would’ve been a safe bet.

But in the end, I knew I would still see a washboard and that just wouldn’t do. And so I made that first appointment. The nurse told me ahead of time, “This will take sixty seconds.” She paused, then added, “And I can stop as many times as you need me to.”

Stop? No thanks. I did my meditation breathing and got through all sixty seconds consecutively. My son’s father, Big Red, was with me and, as I had during childbirth, I crushed his hands when they fired up that laser and aimed it at my arm.

Then I took a break. For, like, seven months. I didn’t mean to wait that long—really you only have to wait five weeks between sessions—but the thought of shelling out all that money over and over deterred me. And then, after looking at it for another two hundred and something days, I said, fuck it, that thing is going away if I have to chew my own arm off to make that happen.

By the time we got to Mad Dog Tattoo Removal, which is about ten minutes from my house, the Vicodin had kicked in and my sweet, sweet Warren (who, the first time he saw the tattoo stuck his lower lip out and said, “Oops!”) guided me up the stairs. We entered the Room of Pain and donned the Glasses of Eye Protection and my supermodel nurse fired up the machine. I crushed Warren’s hand, giving him yet another topic upon which to compare notes with Big Red.

ZZZZZZZZZT. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT. Sparkety Spark Spark went the laser. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT.

I winced. I cursed my idiocy. I felt the burn. And after a minute I looked to see my arm, the skin seared white, already bruised and swollen.

Then I stumbled outside and immediately walked hard and fast into a trailer hitch on a parked pickup. This maneuver managed to momentarily distract me from the pain in my arm. We drifted down Sixth Street and over to Chez Nous where I attempted to speak and Warren got more than one good laugh. What did the people around us think—all those well-heeled, well-dressed folks, all of them older than us and me, hanging like a cougar onto my man’s arm, opening my piehole to speak only to have drool run out instead.

The next appointment is Mid-March. Right now, I can’t even tell that it’s faded at all. But they swear this laser stuff works. And my friend Kristine says she’s going to invest in laser removal machines, that there’s no better place to put one’s money. All that ink in this town. All those exes names. Out out damn, spot. Ouch ouch.

Spike Gillespie puts on The Dick Monologues and blogs for LaunchPad Coworking and for her own amusement at www.spikeg.com. She knows who you are.