SHE CAME UP TO me in the hall that day. I was just getting some stuff out of my locker, heading out for a smoke, and all of a sudden I turn around and there’s Mrs. Maretto standing there. “I’ve got a wild idea,” she says. “My husband’s out of town on a business trip and I don’t have anything to do tonight. How about taking me to that tattoo parlor over at Little Paradise Beach?”
I didn’t know what was going on. The whole thing seemed so crazy to me I just burst out laughing. “You kidding?” I say. One thing about Mrs. Maretto, though. She wasn’t what you could call a joker. I don’t think I ever saw her smile.
“I thought it might be interesting,” she says. She was thinking she could maybe film a report, like, you know, an expose or whatever you call it, on the tattoo business. She said, “Why don’t we just take a drive on over and check it out, anyway? We wouldn’t bring a camera or nothing. Just kind of scope out the scene.” Plus, she loves skee ball. And maybe I’d win her one of those stuffed dogs.
I said I didn’t know. I mean, if she wasn’t a hot-shit TV reporter, I’d sure think this person wanted to get me to ball her. But she’s married, and old. Real pretty, but what does she want with me?
She drove. I’m sitting there in the passenger seat, listening to that Aerosmith tape of hers again. She’s chewing gum and pounding on her steering wheel. It was the same scene all over again. The music. The boner. Only this time she drives to the beach. She parks the car and we head over to the boardwalk, her and me. I’m thinking, what am I fucking doing here? It’s perfect. It’s just what you always dreamed would happen, but when it does you’re scared shitless.
We play a couple rounds of skee ball. She buys some cotton candy, which we share. Jesus, we even had our picture took in one of those machines you sit in and make faces, three for a dollar. The thing is like a phone booth, real tight, so she ends up on my lap. In one of the pictures she puts her two fingers behind my head, to make like the devil sign you know? And then all of a sudden she’s kissing me. Right when the flash goes off.
“I love these type of places,” she says. “They always make you feel so crazy. Like you’re sixteen again.”
Which in my case I am.
After that, you knew we were both thinking about the same thing, but nobody’s saying nothing. She buys some fried dough. I try to get these darts to hit a poster of David Lee Roth or Van Halen for her, but my head’s so messed up I don’t come close.
“I bet you don’t think I’d really get a tattoo,” she says. “I bet you’d dare me.”
Shit, at this point I just wanted to be out of there, I was so freaked. “They’ve got this kind of tattoo that washes off after a few days,” I say. “You could get one of them.”
No, she says. She’s talking about a real one. Like Motley Crüe, but more feminine.
“It hurts,” I tell her. “They tell you it don’t, but they’re lying.”
She says she had an operation one time and they told her she had a high pain tolerance. She’s kind of laughing, like she’s drunk. Only she’s not.
We head over to the tattoo parlor, down by the beach. There’s no other customers, so this dame comes right up to us and says, “Can I help you?” Mrs. Maretto says, “I want this rose over here.”
“Fine,” says the chick. “That’s a very popular one with the ladies. Twenty-five bucks.”
“You wait out here,” she tells me. So I do. Though I got to tell you, I wanted to just run. But I didn’t. I mean, where was I going to go?
After twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five, she comes out. She’s not in such a light mood anymore, and you can tell it hurt. She pays her money. “Well,” she says, “I did it all right.”
“Far out,” I say. Knowing that’s what she wanted me to say. We start walking again, toward the beach.
“So,” she says, “don’t you want to see it?”
“I guess,” I say.
“OK then,” she says, and we step off the boardwalk to this place on the sand where nobody’s at, just some old closed-down arcade and a couple of kids making out way down the sand. It’s like I’m dreaming.
She unbuttons her shirt. She’s got this little pink lace bra on. She don’t have much chest on her. She’s like a little kid, practically.
She pushes the bra down, so one tit’s mostly showing. Then I see it. A rose, like she picked out. “Well,” she says, “don’t you want to fuck me?”