I accidentally placed the patch over my first tattoo. It is a spider smaller than a dime, on my lower back. I got it in a seedy parlor along St. Mark's Place when I was freshly 18. The man who gave it to me had permanent prosthetic fangs and still (obviously?) managed to seduce the maudlin friend of mine who took me to get the tattoo.
I meant it to symbolize storytelling and personal agency, the ability to create one's life path through choice. Later that summer, when my grandmother saw it as I was emerging from the swimming pool at our annual family reunion at a Methodist church camp in Hinton, Oklahoma, she yelped and slapped me, thinking it was real and that I was under siege.
Now, it's more like a faded black blob, and on that first night with the patch covering the spider, I dreamed that the nicotine ate through it like acid, leaving that space red but unmarked by ink. I admit to being mildly disappointed when I woke to find that neither the pain nor the erasure were real.
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Maybe your spider can help. There are people past and present who engineered your addiction and have already accounted for your death through their product. They are counting your money and probably laughing at you. You were a fly in their web when you were smoking. I'm sure you know these things and have heard it before. Well, fuck them and get your own spider out there spin your own web. When you see a cigarette imagine a creepy, sleezy, fat guy wearing a suit offering you one from an open van door like a piece of candy. "C'mon, you love these things! Just a little closer; that's it."
ReplyDeletei love that tattoo.
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