Tattoos, Brain Tumors, Manhattan

My father and my girlfriend

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash

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Well, we discovered my father has both a lung tumor which has grown by 10%, and a new (tiny) brain tumor, which means it has spread. My mom told me this as she and I walked their dogs yesterday. She said it casually, as if she were digressing on some boring, everyday subject.

This makes sense on both ends since the past couple months he’s been coughing more and more, and has been tired and napping on and off most days. Sometimes he struggles to sleep; he wakes in the night and is up for hours. Lately he’s been taking Trazodone which helps. I remember “the old days” last year when he was biliously sick and I ran around like a madman filling prescriptions, getting groceries, walking the dogs, injecting liquid food into his stomach “peg tube,” helping him dress and undress, taking him to last-second ER trips, etc. This, now, is much more mellow. Thankfully.

The oncologist is worried about doing immunotherapy again, or chemo, because that’s what originally gave Dad the Myasthenia Gravis, which more or less prevented him from swallowing, seeing, speaking coherently. So now the doctor is talking about “clinical trials.” Aka: experimental solutions. Dad—77—is too old for lung or brain surgery. Actually he already DID brain surgery for the initial cancer found there, in his cerebellum in 2021. At this point my father has done brain surgery, immunotherapy, a dozen blood transfusions. His body, aged and old, has been through a lot. It’s bizarre, really: June of last year he was still playing pickleball, walking the dogs every morning with my mom around State Street in downtown Santa Barbara. He stood tall, erect, all his 6’0 frame, and smiled often. A month later, in mid July, he was sick and exhausted, sleeping and coughing constantly. He’d had his cough for over a year. Stubborn man that he is—where do you think EYE get it from?—he had refused to go see a doctor because he “felt fine.” Yes: This is a lesson for me.

I feel as “ready” as I think I can be. Ready, that is, for my precious father to die. I don’t imagine it’ll happen tomorrow, or even in three months. But I struggle to believe he has another two years, say. But hey: Who knows, right? It’s not up to me. Or my father, even. It’s up to “God,” if you will, or, if you like (I do), Nature.

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The other day, in bed with my girlfriend, she ran her fingers down my arm and, as she had several times before, asked about my many tattoos. It’s strange—usually, historically, I’ve always been very open and even eager to discuss my ink. But for some reason with her—my new great love—I felt embarrassed and resistant. I don’t know why. My tattoos are relics of my past. The last time I got work done on me was 2009, when I was 26 and still drinking. A year later I got sober. I never got another tattoo. My first tattoos go back more than 20 years, to when I was still in high school. Back to my wild, lurid, anarchic, insane teenage years. The first tattoo I ever got was of a punker punching a cop against a brick wall and pointing a gun at the observer. (On my upper right arm.) Yes, I am being serious. I was 18, punk-rock (I even dressed the part, with bondage pants, studded leather motorcycle jacket, “chaos spiked” hair like an electrocuted troll doll) and angry as shit. I felt emotionally abandoned by my narcissistic mother and my emotionally vacant father. What can I say?

So I told my girlfriend about my Jim Morrison tattoo, on my lower arm, Jimbo early in The Doors, when he was thin and sexy and handsome, wearing his leather jacket, fro-like long hair, leather pants, beaded necklace, a sinuous Los Angeles lover of the night world of rock-n-roll. He was, I’d believed, “punk before punk.” Nineteen-sixties anarchy. Madness. Psychological revolution. Pot-smokers but not hippies. Dark. Mean. Cruel. Good.

The story is this. In 2006—when I was 23—I took an Amtrak train three days across the country to New York City. It was my first time. Bright lights, Big City, as Jay McInerny wrote. I was mesmerized by the city lights, the constant thrum of distressing, thrilling chaos, the rumble of taxis and sirens and cars and people everywhere. Everything seemed to be colliding. I loved that, back then. I felt alive and alone and on fire; I was reading a lot of Jack Kerouac.

Deciding I wanted to get ink done, I walked into a random tattoo parlor in Times Square. I don’t even remember where exactly. I told the guy I wanted some work done. He asked what. I said I didn’t know. He told me to figure it out and come back. So I wandered out of the parlor and stumbled around aimlessly, romantically, like, I felt, Kerouac in On the Road. (Oh to be young with a strong imagination!) I ended up walking into a bookstore. Eventually I located the rock-n-roll biography section. Scanning the books, I found The Doors. I picked it up. Skimmed the pages. I’d always cherished this band, their music, this era of my mother’s wildness. (She once partied with The Stones in LA and was in the recording room for The 19th Nervous Breakdown.) I scanned around me. No one paid attention. Spying the thick glossy black-n-white photo I wanted, I coughed loudly and tore the page out of the book. I left.

Two hours later Jimbo was inked across my right arm.

More later.

Michael Mohr