Back in February I contacted Michael Leonberger to let him know about the fact the Magical Menageries anthologies were going out of print.
Part of the reply he sent me in return included the reflection that you see below. I suggested he publish it as an essay somewhere (and not just because he says kind things about me), and offered my blog as that ‘somewhere’. He agreed.
Things have changed since he wrote this back in February, but I think it will still resonate with a lot of people — it does with me.
Without further introduction…
Tattoo Convention
I’m standing in a tattoo convention in Philadelphia watching a man hang above me, suspended with hooks and dangling from the ceiling. The crowd roars as the skin of his pectorals stretches like elastic rubber where the metal hooks have pierced, where they continue to pull. The announcer says this particular spot on the chest is especially painful, acknowledging his badassery – and the experience within the nerve dungeon of my own flesh confirms that this must be painful.
He’s swinging around like a ragdoll and I’m eating a caprese sandwich below, considering his pain and considering how my own experience of hunger somewhat blunts my ability to empathize. We’re all beasts.
However, his face suggests tranquility. Bliss. A faraway place, maybe practiced, maybe travelled, but certainly an arrival of some kind. What may look, at first blush, like mutilation actually reveals a solemnity – something transcendental, something created and shared, something extravagant – a beacon, a shooting star, someplace north beyond our veil of perception. Within the skin where he lives, he has found a way to get home.
Tattoo conventions taste to my uncultured tongue like reclamations of our own flesh. Celebrations of ownership. I have a notion that we’re all sort of wandering souls at a car lot before we are born, crammed into cars of skin and bone without really having the opportunity to consider the machinery, or the aesthetics. And unlike actual cars, we can’t really trade in – we’re jammed behind the steering wheel of that particular beast for as long as we are alive. Sometimes car accidents mangle the machine, and yet we live.
And the cars, as they’re given to us, say nothing necessarily about the souls that we actually are. Similarly to road rage, however, other drivers only see the cars, the outside machinery. And trapped behind the wheel, behind the glow of the dash, we are forever isolated, forever alone. We rarely are afforded even the chance of having another soul ride shotgun – only really through penetrative acts, only briefly. Those penetrative acts of physical companionship govern so much of what we do, as though another soul could ever enter the cold comforts of our cars. If only.
The celebrants at this festival get it, and the majority of them have been customizing their cars for a long time. I am beholden to it, drawn to it, somewhat in awe of it – how I will spill as many words as I can conjure in the driver’s seat of my beat-up jalopy and fail, really, to capture the wonders of the visual. The colorful, tapestried aesthetics of vibrant ink and reactive flesh, and the story told through the mosaic of needle and skin – the story of a vibrant interior transforming the car, the butterfly emerging from the cocoon. The notion of it takes me to a bliss that I imagine is different from the man who was hanging from the hooks. But we’re all trying to get home, really.
I don’t have any tattoos. Permanence frightens me more than the limits of the interior of my car, and I was born with a kind of chronic decision fatigue that often borders on paralysis. I don’t trust myself – I don’t trust my taste, I don’t trust my instincts, I don’t trust my ideas. As the driver of this machine, I don’t trust the map, am often not sure I have one, and sometimes am unsure of where I’m travelling from, much less where I’m going. I suppose that bewildering fog is what I trust in, conversely, more than anything. The hooks in my mind that offer to take me home, to a hearth that is liminal, abject – to a melting clock of Dali proportions that I trust as much as I trust anything at all.
I suppose this is what I was writing about in 2015 and 2016, when I began writing short fiction in earnest, and when I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Rhonda Parrish, who is as graceful an editor, collaborator, and human being as I have ever known.
She generously published several stories I wrote – Is This Seat Taken?, Eli (the Hideous Horse Boy), and Miss ‘Lil Toe Head – all, I suspect, about the skin where I live, and the measurable distance from the interior to the exterior.
Some things jump out upon reflection, some ten years on – first, how little has changed. So much of that writing was the perspective of an American experiencing the rightward culture shock of the cruelty of a Donald Trump presidency, which promised to wrest control from the body starting with the promised elimination of Roe v Wade – the prospect of it, the reality of it. And as I write this, we are – somehow – entering our second round, which promises the same callous belligerency of the first.
As I type, our bonehead in chief has issued an executive order that there are only 2 genders – and you are the one assigned at conception.
So, what he is literalizing in ink is that we are all conceived phenotypically female, and therefore all are women. So much for two genders. And as I am positive that is not what he intended, the visuals of a blowhard trying to wrest control from the slippery, oiled flesh of nature herself brings me some kind of glee. We have to take it when we find it. (Similarly to my lack of tattoos, I do not believe I am trans, but it is a perspective that resonates with me deeply from the driver’s seat of my car – taking ownership and control of the automobile, in a profound act of – what’s the word? – freedom. Something this country used to pretend to champion).
I could get carried away here, thinking about the rejoinders of “Daddy’s home!” that have erupted from right wing circles, as the stern patriarch returns to enforce a colorless, personality-less discipline. I find it interesting how Daddy, in this context, is a man who inherited everything he has from his own Daddy, and has therefore been play-acting a person – a man – and pretending accomplishments his entire life. How can he stand to be in the skin where he lives? Where any notions of authenticity melt away from the slightest intrusion of sunshine?
And as one suspects he cannot stand to live there – easily elucidated from the mortician’s tan spray painted on, and the plastic coif of hair preserved in a cauldron of formaldehyde before being applied to his head each day – one can find a surprising speck of sympathy for him.
I do not know how to feel at home in my own skin either, Mr. President. You don’t need to pretend – and you don’t need to be a dick about it.
We tell ourselves stories, I think, to navigate this space. I literally was telling stories ten years ago – about the transformative potential of the flesh, about the frustration of finding so much solace in the flesh of others while being unable to find any in our own (you would think we have more than enough skin coating our skeletons, and yet we always seem to crave more from others, collisions with the other cars, contact, color, ink).
And yet, ten years on, I find a distrust in stories themselves, and am aware of a sort of writer’s block that is different than any I’ve felt before. I suspect, in 2025, we are all inundated with more stories per second, per screen, than we were ever built to absorb. The original memetic or historical or parabolic function stories served maybe has been somewhat stripped in our zeal for entertainment, and one wonders what stories our president tells about himself – what stories he picked up along the way – that made him comfortable in his skin, in the driver’s seat where he is the main character, and good guys are Good and bad guys are Bad, and nuance melts away.
The gunman at Comet Pizza was telling a story, too, some ten years ago. All gunmen are. And I’m afraid, maybe, that the stories we tell – even the best of them – allow for the imagined authenticity of any story – even the worst of them. And I suppose I am not sure how to – or if I should – tell a story about that.
In the swirling fog of this confusion, I know only one thing with any certainty at all – that my legs are killing me. I worked on my feet all morning, and I’ve been on my feet since arriving – I am a special education teacher, and I find I’m best when propelled by a kind of enthusiastic energy that has me fluttering around the classroom, not dissimilar from the spinning man above me – I try, though I do not always succeed, and today I burned myself down to the ground. And in the pounding ache of my own musculature, I suppose I can taste a little scrap of solace.
The machine I drive may not be one I asked for or intended, but I’ve found a way to make it useful. Service, I suppose, is the story I want to tell, whether or not I elucidate it with the written word. Sometimes it is best written in the acidic ache of your tired limbs, and rewarded in the explosively delicious reprieve of a shrink-wrapped, over-processed caprese sandwich, while you watch a man penetrated by steel.
Sometimes it’s a story best written in small spaces of peace marinated in overtures of quiet pain.
All the cold metal hooks that promise to take us home.
