Peter Trachtenberg

I show Hanky Panky the design that I adapted from a photo in a book of Dayak art, and he has me take off my shirt and he sketches the design on my collarbone with a grease pencil. Then he calls over an assistant to shave my chest. Now, under other circumstances, this could be kind of a turn-on. But in Hanky Panky’s tattoo parlor it justs reminds me of the shaving I had to undergo before some surgery I once had in the groin region. That one, much to my initial disappointment, had been performed by a male nurse, although actually I did see the wisdom of having a man for the job at around the time he began to whisk the razor around my balls. “Hey, be careful. Please!” I begged. And my male nurse answered, “Don’t worry, buddy. I’ll handle ‘em like they were my own.”

But inside the warehouse there are rows of pews. And every pew is filled with junkies. There are black junkies and Anglo junkies and Latino junkies. There are twelve-year-old boys sniffling from their first training-wheel habits and stooped veterans with hands like waterlogged sponges, those hands that everyone calls “New York mittens.” There are fashion models with the faces of drowsy angels who’ve been chauffeured down from townhouses in the East Sixties and who’ll powder their tracks with Lancome before the next day’s photo shoot. There are cadaverous, crookbacked junkies who’ve crawled from beneath rain-soaked packing crates in Tompkins Square Park and whose bodies are gruesome exempla of their disease: every vein collapsed, every limb cratered, eyes jaundiced, teeth rotten, dicks gone flaccid as the peeled shrimp in a fishmonger’s window—the kind of junkies you always look at and think, At least I’m not that bad.

Here are the benefits of being alone and celibate:

You can read all night and no one will nag you to turn off the light.

You can go to Borneo on the spur of the moment without anyone wanting to know when you’ll be back.

You can prepare meals so disgusting you’d be ashamed to eat them in company: Grill a slice of bologna till it curls up at the edges; fill the cup with baked beans; then top with a slice of Kraft American cheese and broil till melted. Serve with dill pickle and sliced tomato.

You can fart to your heart’s content without having to say “Excuse me,” though you may grow so accustomed to this that you find yourself doing it in public places—on the line at your savings bank, for instance – and getting nasty looks from strangers.

… On bad nights you can scoop up your cats and cuddle them shamelessly, even kissing them on the nose, though they usually dislike this and will try to shove you away with their paws. If worse comes to worst, you can press your face against their bodies and weep copiously into their fur.