chapter 22
Her name was Carrie
Gardner. It sounded perky and Midwestern and plain, the name of an
airline ticket-counter worker, a waitress at Outback Steakhouse, a
kindergarten teacher.
Slowly and on shaky legs, I’d been emerging from
my funk for a few weeks. At Penny’s behest, I had begun seeing a
therapist named Paul Pavel. I rode the A train every day to his
uptown apartment. He was a man of uncommon hope, a man who rescued
half-frozen animals from Central Park in the wintertime, a man who
had himself been rescued half-frozen in the snow by American
soldiers after the liberation of Auschwitz. Paul reached his hand,
his tattooed arm, out to me and defrosted me as well. He led me out
of the darkest part of the depression that had come hard on the
heels of my abortion.
Paul was convinced, among other things, that my
biological origins were of far greater significance to me than I
was willing to admit. He made a connection between the loss of my
birth mother and my crippling guilt over my abortion. And just as
my therapy was excavating all this, Johnny called me with my birth
mother’s name.
Johnny was home for the High Holidays from yet
another boarding school. As usual, I wouldn’t be observing the
holidays except to call my parents and wish them l’shanah tovah: for a good year. And while I didn’t
miss the hypocrisy, the moneyed religion, the rigidity of the
doctrine, I felt a sadness I couldn’t put my finger on. Maybe the
holidays made me yearn for a time when I had believed in something
as unlikely as God, or a time when I had believed that I was a part
of something.
There had once been High Holidays when distant
cousins swarmed me in the temple lobby with open arms and
lipsticked smiles, smelling of Chanel No. 5. I remember pressing my
face into new wool suits that were too warm for a sunny September
New Jersey day. I remember sneaking out of the children’s service
downstairs and walking around the temple grounds while the sun
shone through the turning leaves, colorful and translucent as
stained glass. I remember cut apples dipped in honey, so sweet they
hurt your teeth.
Johnny, who ten years later would be so
religious he would have all these things and more, was at the time
a rather gifted criminal. Our parents had always told us that they
had no information about our biological parents. The only birth
certificates we ever saw listed our adoptive parents as our
parents. Period. Any previous records had been sealed permanently.
The pieces of paper were insistent and so were my parents. Johnny
called that day to tell me that he had uncovered evidence
discrediting my parents’ story.
My parents did, in fact, have information about
our birth parents. Johnny had found it by breaking into a lock box.
He uncovered detailed information about himself, as he was younger
and benefited from more relaxed adoption laws. But for me, Johnny
had found a name—a name and a brief story pieced together from an
attorney’s correspondence, and an old address.
Everything I know about what Johnny found I know
from my memory of our conversation. I have never seen the papers
with my own eyes. I’m sure my parents would show them to me now,
but I can’t bring myself to ask. It is still a sore spot for them
and a source of guilt for me. I’m guilty that we snooped, that we
cared in the first place. I am ashamed, illogically, to have
discovered that they lied to us.
I vaguely remember Johnny telling me that there
were some newspaper clippings about a birth father who tried later
to regain custody. But maybe this was a conflation of my life with
an episode of Law & Order or a CNN
sound bite. It was such a strange moment that I can’t remember
exactly what he said. But I do remember that there was confirmation
of a story my parents had always told me. I expected to discover
that this story had been a lie, too, but it wasn’t. My parents had
been telling the truth when they told me that my birth mother had
been a ballerina. I realized how much I had clung to this one
little thing only when its confirmation flooded me with a sense of
profound relief.
A young ballet dancer in
Chicago is pregnant with a baby she is unable to care for. . .
.
I wrote the name and the Highland Park,
Illinois, address on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer.
Somewhere there was a woman to whom this name belonged, who had
once written this address on the official forms she had signed when
she gave her baby away. My music-box mother, locked up safely with
satin lining and a perpetual soundtrack, a princess transmuted by a
spell into the body of a swan. Carrie Gardner. An airline
ticket-counter worker, a waitress at Outback Steakhouse, a
kindergarten teacher. A name that wasn’t an answer, it was a
question, a question to which I decided to seek the answer; I just
wasn’t sure how yet.
I had a habit during that time of browsing one of
New York’s many international-magazine stands, buying a few
beautiful and unfamiliar glossies and reading them at a café,
frequently Café Orlin, on Eighth Street. Before there were Ed Hardy
T-shirts (and bottled water and office supplies and motorcycles and
shower curtains), Don Ed Hardy was an artist who published a
beautiful art magazine called Tattootime.
Once I picked up the magazine, I was hooked. Each Tattootime had a theme: New Tribalism, Life and
Death Tattoos, Art from the Heart, Music and Sea Tattoos. As it
does with most people who are drawn to tattoos, the imagery and the
history of tattooing struck a chord in my soul. The San Francisco
tattoo artist who has done most of my work says that the tattoo
gods announce themselves to you when it’s time.
I looked at the people in the pages of Tattootime and felt an instant camaraderie. I, too,
was a pirate, a sailor, a prostitute, a gangster, a sideshow
attraction, but nobody knew it. Nobody saw it. It occurred to me
that I’d have to achieve a deeper level of authenticity in how I
was living or wind up a shapeshifter—will do whatever—for the rest
of my life.
The tattoo gods announced themselves to me. It
was nothing less dramatic than that. No sooner had I begun to seek
my first tattoo than I had a plan for what I wanted my whole body
to look like. With my story writ large on the surface of my skin, I
would no longer be tempted to fool people into thinking that I was
normal. Tattooing was going to be my own radical statement about
permanence and impermanence. It was the scarlet letter that I would
proudly embroider across my chest.
Reading Tattootime, I
learned that across the island of Borneo, in the rainforest of the
Sarawak, not far at all from the royal yachts and palaces and car
collections of Brunei, live the Maori tribesmen, who tattoo their
bodies from head to toe using a bone chisel. The spiraling,
swirling, black-ink tattoos have a sacred significance. The Maori
warriors emblazon their ferocity on their skin. Their tribal
designs have migrated to the West and shown up on the arms of
weightlifters in Venice Beach and street punks in Tompkins Square
Park. While I had sat in the palace in Brunei and spun stories for
Robin that evaporated into the air, miles away tribesmen were
embedding their stories into their skin.
These were the pieces of my story that I decided
were missing: I needed to find my birth mother and I needed to get
a tattoo. I wanted to find myself and at the same time I wanted to
create myself. The two things converged in an unexpected way. I
studied the magazines and found the perfect artist. His name was
Guy Aitchison and he lived in Chicago. The great thing about a
tattoo is that you have no room for the luxury of doubt. You have
to stand behind your decisions
A young ballet dancer in
Chicago is pregnant with a baby she is unable to care for. . .
.