Most tattoo artists hate the epiphany machine, and for good reason. It’s a cheap perversion of what we do. If Adam Lyons were peddling some kind of magic dance that healed your soul, don’t you think choreographers would hate him? If he ran a magic barbershop, don’t you think barbers would start daydreaming about what they’d do with their scissors if they could get him in their chair? Furthermore, the epiphany machine negates the most important aspect of tattooing: choice. Real tattoos are a kind of marriage vow you make with your current self; you’re saying that who you are is who you will always be and what you want is what you will always want. A lot of marriages go bad, but there’s still something beautiful in marriage. There’s something beautiful in saying: My heart has stopped in exactly this position and will stay in this position until it stops for good. Epiphany tattoos are arranged marriages, except without the consolations of community. They’re like being fixed up by a stranger with another stranger on a blind date that lasts the rest of your life.
But I’ve always loved the epiphany machine because, boy, is it good for business. At the height of the epiphany craze, in the late seventies, before Chapman and AIDS, over eighty percent of my business was epiphany-related. A lot of people came to me asking for tattoos in the epiphany font saying things like LOVES HIS WIFE DEEPLY or DOES NOT MISS HER CAREER or—let me see if I can remember this one verbatim—WOULD ABSOLUTELY PUT HIS FATHER IN A BETTER NURSING HOME IF ONLY HE HAD THE MONEY. Some of them, like that last one, have to be written in a font too small for other people to read them, but I guess other people are not the point. My favorite—and we got some variation on this probably twice a month—was EVEN BETTER IN BED THAN HE THINKS HE IS.
Adam—or, rather, Si Strauss—sent a bunch of lawyers after me to harass me, since tattoos were illegal in New York City at the time. Si and Adam did permanently shut down a couple of other places that did what I do, so I guess I should be grateful to him. I had to move my shop around a lot, but they kept sending henchmen to find me. A henchman and a henchwoman, actually—there was this woman who always wore a fox fur coat, even in May, and her boyfriend, who had a Jew-fro—and they were always finding people with my tattoos and tracing them back to where I was operating. Finally, I moved to Jersey for a while. I thought that would be enough to get them to leave me alone, but then they went after me for copyright infringement, which is pretty rich considering that Adam claims to be taking dictation from God. But I survived.
I want to say that I survived because I’m stubborn, made of harder stuff than Adam or Si. And I do think that’s true, but I’ll never really know because the big reason I was able to survive is that my sister was a lawyer. A brilliant lawyer. She loved me and she hated the machine, and she was fucking brilliant. She argued that my service was completely different from Adam’s. He offered the judgment of a higher authority, while I offered slogans, advertisements for oneself. The beauty of it was that of course Adam was a lying tank of ink, of course he was offering the same thing I was, but he could not say that. The only difference between what Adam offered and what I offered is that if you came to me, you got to choose what was written on your arm, and if you went to him, he got to choose. That’s a pretty big difference, but it’s not one that Adam should be proud of.
Sure, my staff and I mocked the tattoos we were making for people. I bet that prisoners making vanity license plates make fun of them, too. Human vanity is always funny, and if you paid attention either at Friday-night services or in life, you know that all is vanity. But at least my customers made the choices about what they put on their bodies. It wasn’t Adam sitting up there in his rent-controlled, landlord-coddled tower sitting in judgment. I mean, honestly: fuck that.
The only person who ever really took me seriously as a craftsman was my sister. She used to sit watching me work for hours—hours that no lawyer has. She was convinced that I was a great artist. Sometimes that was almost enough to convince me that I was a great artist. In my youth, I used to have artistic pretensions, which is why I have this stupid tattoo on my forearm of my own head as an apple squeezed by a snake. I had dreamed of doing the best tattoos in the world, of just completely altering the way people thought about what could be on their bodies. Any out-of-shape forty-year-old could be my Sistine Chapel. I loved being a rebel who worked in an art form more or less banned by my religion. I wanted to be famous, I wanted to be anonymous, all that stupid stuff. Slowly I came to accept myself as a hack, meaning that I created what people wanted me to create. As though that’s something to be ashamed of.
All of this doesn’t even mention that I did a serious public service for the people who knew my clients. Somebody gets a tattoo saying COMPLETELY OPEN AND HONEST, you know not to trust him. Your husband comes home with a tattoo that says NOT CHEATING ON WIFE, you start to think, Maybe this asshole is cheating on me. On the other hand, if Adam Lyons talks to a guy, decides he’s hiding something, and then gives that guy a HIDES WHAT MATTERS MOST tattoo, what does that tell his wife? Seeing that tattoo every time you make love or soap up your husband in the shower or brush your teeth side by side is going to make you suspicious. No matter how much you try to banish the thought, it’s going to make you think: What is he hiding? But what does it really tell you? It tells you that Adam Lyons made a judgment, a judgment that could be right or could be wrong. In other words, it tells you jack shit.
And yes, it’s true that when Adam gave some guy a HIDES WHAT MATTERS MOST tattoo, that guy might come to me. That particular one is tricky grammatically. A CLOSED OFF tattoo, you can just add a NOT in front, but with a HIDES WHAT MATTERS MOST tattoo, you have to do something like HIDES WHAT MATTERS MOST FROM EVERYONE WHO IS NOT IMPORTANT, or something else that sounds stilted and is not going to fit on everyone’s forearm. You can get a tattoo or a bunch of tattoos over it, but aesthetically that’s going to make you wince every time you look in the mirror, and you can usually make out the original tattoo underneath anyway. You can tattoo a black bar of redaction over it, but that looks suspicious. So you interpret the tattoo to make it go away. You just say that FROM EVERYONE WHO IS NOT IMPORTANT is implicit in HIDES WHAT MATTERS MOST. Now you’re in the realm of trying to read something so that it says what you want it to say, which I guess is the realm everyone has been in since the invention of writing.
What I’m saying is that once you’ve made the mistake of seeing Adam Lyons, there’s really nothing I can do for you as a tattoo artist. Your tattoo can truly be erased only by the worm that will one day eat it, or by the fire that will one day turn it into ash.