He finally wound up down by the tattoo parlor on the Coast Highway and a brilliant idea came to him. He suddenly realized why certain people had tattooes all over them. It was because they were fuckups and they knew they were fuckups. He could suddenly see how guys in jails could get into sitting around carving on themselves. They knew they were assholes and they defaced themselves for it. It made perfect sense. He might have gotten into that himself, a little ink, a penknife, but then he figured he probably wouldn't have the guts to go through with it and it would be disastrous to try and fail. No, he would get one from the shop. He would climb into that chair and it would be all over except for the buzzing of the needle. He'd seen how it worked. You just picked the one you wanted and gave the man your money. He checked his pockets to see how much he had. It would be nice to get a large one, preferably a very stupid one to boot, the larger and stupider, the better. A member of the fuckup club for life and there would be no hiding it.
--from Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source, a favorite surfer mystery and coming-of-age story that I have been rereading about once every year or two since it was published in 1984. By the way, Nunn's character Ike Tucker is awfully drunk when the passage starts, and he has been bitterly disappointed in love and friendship, mostly through his own immature actions.
Note, however, how Nunn's passage catches part of the history of tattooing and tattoos that many younger people today just don't know about: the stigma that has accompanied inkwork from the earliest days of Polynesian discovery to bad biker or rocker stereotypes of yesteryear, even to today (and into tomorrow). On a literary note, eventually I'll script an entry regarding Herman Melville's use of tattooing in his novels, drawing upon Prof. Mitch Breitwieser's lectures back in '82 or '83 about Typee (in which marking skin is a sign of the exotic Other, of deformation to a New Englander) and Moby Dick (in which marking skin is a sign of the exotic Other, but also of Mystery, resonant symbolism, and even of Yankee practicality), supplemented by my own favorite passages involving Queequeg, Ishmael, and epic ink. I wonder what Joseph Conrad has done with tattooing in his tales of the South Seas.
Nunn's tale of Ike Tucker and the mystery of his sister's disappearance, his first novel incidentally, and his other novels are well worth reading and rereading. The Dogs of Winter may be my favorite, but then I reread Ike's story, and I'm drawn right back in. I even taught Tapping the Source in a Reading & Comp class ten years ago. (I had to warn the class on day one about two graphic scenes, both "integral to the story," as directors usually say when attempting to persuade actresses to display skin for the cameras. These scenes really are integral, I swear.)
(As a side note, in Emilio Estevez's directing debut Wisdom, his hapless main character is reading Tapping the Source just before he falls asleep and has the horrible dream which makes up the entire movie. I've been waiting a long time to share that trivial piece of film history.)
