“There are different degrees of mutilation and some are more pointless than others,” she says, pulling delicately at a silk glove on her left hand, one lavender finger at a time. “Tattoos, now that’s just bullshit. Somebody draws a little skull or a Mickey Mouse on your ass and that’s supposed to make you Johnny Badshit. Whatever.
When I was growin’ up, my grandmother, she had tattoos, but she got hers back in the thirties. Now that was tough. But by the time I was a girl, they were every day. Little old ladies had ‘em. You know what my mama used to say about ‘em? About tattoos? She’d say, ‘Jillian, you don’t put a bumper sticker on a Rolls Royce.’”
As she talks, Jillian punctuates her sentences with drags and demonstrative gestures with her long cigarette. She is the perfect embodiment of casual backwoods elegance, equal parts young Dolly Parton and old Loretta Lynn, like a motorcycle-shop mannequin come to life. Jillian’s boyfriend laughs a little, mouthing the words along with her as she imitates her mother in a voice even shriller than her own. He’s a big tough guy, Tommy is, but as he helps Jillian remove the gloves from her hands, his meaty tattooed fingers move nimbly and lovingly. The empty parts of the glove hang loosely in one of his palms and she winces only a little bit as he negotiates the bunches of silk around the hard ridges underneath. It’s hard to imagine them meeting in any place except this bar, their favorite bar, where Jillian once cracked a bottle over Tommy’s head during a fight about Ronnie Van Zant and he fell in love as hard as other men might have fallen to the floor.
“Now, branding,” she continues, “branding is hardcore. I don’t know if I could do that, have somethin’ burned into my skin. It’s a little degrading, though, ‘cause we’re not cattle, either, you know? That’s kinda the whole point of mutilation, or at least it used to be. To make yourself different, own yourself, not be like the rest of the herd or whatever. This one girl I knew said she had trouble eatin’ meat afterwards ‘cause of how it made her like, relate to the cow, and right then and there, I knew branding wasn’t for me. I couldn’t do nothin’ that made me look at a steak a different way.”
Tommy drops the glove into her lap and lights a cigarette, smiling up at me in anticipation. Jillian smiles too, bashfully, adjusting something on her wrist with her free hand and keeping them both below the table.
“This took me a few years. The actual work was pretty rough. Some parts I thought would hurt real bad and they didn’t hurt at all. Other parts I didn’t think would hurt at all hurt like a bitch. But it was worth it. The whole time that guy was workin’ on my hand, I kept thinkin’, at least this won’t be like no tattoo, you know? At least this won’t be like no stupid piercing. This is unique. This is gonna make me like a work of art.”
“Shut up and show her already,” Tommy said with a big excited grin.
“Oh right, sorry.”
Jillian presents her left hand to me like a brand new invention, like gypsy ware, like jewelry. Her fingers are strung up like violins, her thumb like a bow. Tiny wooden planks run parallel to her bones, making them hard and reliable. From the sides of her fingers protrude tiny pegs with which she tightens or slackens the strings.
“I got the idea when I was breaking up with Tommy once,” she continues, pleased at my silence. “We were havin’ a big fight because he was cheatin’ on me or I was cheatin’ on him or some damn thing. And he says, ‘Jilly, you bitch, you can’t leave me, what am I gonna do without you? I need you!’ And I start rubbin’ my thumb and my finger together, you know, how you do? And I said ‘Look, it’s the world’s tiniest violin playin’ just for you, Tommy.’ And I thought, hey, what a great idea. I don’t think that’s what anybody meant when they were comin’ up with that phrase. I thought it was just somethin’ you said. But when we finally got back together, I told him about it, thinkin’ he was gonna laugh in my face or somethin’. But he was really supportive and sweet about the whole thing and we’ve been together ever since.”
With her non-violin hand, she reaches out and touches Tommy’s face, all a-glow beneath the scraggly growth of beard, the scars, the face tattoos.
“Weird that the insurance company from Tommy’s job covered this kind of procedure,” she added. “I guess socialism’s not so bad, after all.”
“I have to ask you something,” I say, unable to take my eyes off of her hand for more than a moment.
“I don’t like to play them in public,” she says with the sincerest modesty. “Just attracts too much attention. You know, it’s funny. Everybody makes such a big deal out of them and sometimes I totally forget that they’re there. Like I’ll be piss drunk somewhere and I’ll go to grab a shot and Tommy’ll be like ‘Jillian, stop it, you’re gonna break your strings!’ and I’ll be like ‘Tommy, I’m a human being, I ain’t got no strings!’ Haha! Oh man… What are you gonna do, though, right? It makes work tough but we get by.”
The subject changes, regretfully, and Tommy helps her put her glove back on. Someone puts more money in the jukebox and they excuse themselves from our booth. On the floor, they dance wildly together, laughing, grinding, making lewd hand gestures at each other the way old people do when they’re in love and don’t give a damn what people think anymore.
Before we leave, I settle up our tab and she runs off to the bathroom. While she’s gone, Tommy finishes up his beer and slams it down on the Budweiser-slicked tabletop, smiling at me in this weird way.
“Isn’t she wonderful?” he says. “That music she plays? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I don’t know much about music, just the classics like my ol’ man used to play. But, I remember hearing a story back in school and it always stuck with me. It was about this terrible emperor who burned his own city to the ground. And while the city was burnin’ and his guys were runnin’ around, rapin’ and torchin’ everything they saw, you know what he did? He just sat on the roof of this church and played music on his violin.”
“Nero?” I ask.
“Nah, I’ve never heard of a negro violin player,” he says. “I think this was Rome or somethin’. Anyway, sometimes when she plays, I think of that story and I think that’s probably the kind of songs she’d play. Or maybe they’re so pretty that if he coulda’ played like she does, he wouldn’t want to burn that city. Maybe he would have just played the violin and been happy. I know it makes me happy. It makes me not wanna burn things.”
“A real blessing,” I agree, and he smiles wider, a big, weird, happy smile that makes the quarter notes tattooed on his neck bulge and jump and recede.
Jasmine Neosh is a poet, fiction-writer and activist from Chicago, IL. She has been the founding curator of several successful literary institutions, including the DIY arts collective, the West Side School for the Desperate, and Columbia College Chicago’s Silver Tongue Reading Series. Her work has appeared in theNewerYork, Thought Catalog, Metazen, THE2NDHAND, and decomp, among others. More work and information can be found at jasmineneosh.wordpress.com.
Image courtesy Adam Shaylor.