© 2011 asotir.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
1
THERE’S a tattoo parlor I know of, out west in San Pedro. It’s down on the waterfront in the dirty, nasty butt of the city.
In the front window, cards are neatly arranged on white linen to show the designs of tattoos you might get there. On one card, in red and black lines, might be the drawing of a spider. Next to it would be a drawing of a skull. Next to that, a flag design. Then a snake. Then a rose.
The cards always draw the eyes of people passing by. One time a young girl stopped and stared at the designs through the shop window, her eyes big with fascination. She was maybe twelve years old. She was dressed in shabby hand-me-downs, like most of the poor souls who went abroad in that part of the city in the day.
Her hand reached out to the window, helplessly drawn to one design.
‘Elizabeth! Get away from there! You know what I told you about those things!’
The girl looked back over her shoulder.
Her shoulders sagged. She trudged to her mother across the street. The girl and her mother exchanged words. The mother cuffed the girl’s head, viciously, took her by the arm and hauled her away.
San Pedro used to be a boomtown, once upon a time. During the war – the War, that is – it was going day and night. But when the corporations decided to betray America and use foreign slave labor instead of paying union rates, and when the eggheads and bean counters came up with the idea of shipping container, the docks of San Pedro turned into nothing but a big open lot for robots, and the soul of the city perished; what didn’t die turned foul and rotten.
The rottenest parts of the city fruit were where the rich maggots went to play. Down along the waterfront, where the warehouses and factories were abandoned, and the pawnbrokers and thrift stores and storefront missions took over the places grocers and tobacconists and drugstores used to lease, a new type of establishment cropped up, here and there: the exclusive dress shop specializing in fetish gear, the underground sex club, smoke shoppes, cigar clubs, and other purveyors of vice and depravity. The clients didn’t live in San Pedro, of course. They were well to do – only the well to do can afford the worst vices in any culture or age – and they lived out of town in the hills and up and down the coast in the smart little beachfront enclaves. They flocked into the city quietly in the dead of night, and they engaged in their depravities and were gone before the sun began to smelt the rotten air of San Pedro into a soup of haze and brown gas that eats away granite and other noble stones.
The little girl didn’t know the kind of despair and hopelessness her mother knew only too well. The little girl was full of innocence and even hope. She was pretty. She figured one day she’d grow up to be a famous performer in the movies, up the coast. She didn’t know, the way her mother did, that there was no getting out of the dirty butt end of the city, and that the only kind of famous performer she was doomed to be, was the kind featured in the private clubs that had only small, discreet signs over their dark doors.
The neon sign in the storefront window buzzed and flickered behind the departing girl and her mother, enticing all eyes. Its letters read:
TRAXX
Below the sign, one card stood apart from all the others on the clean white linen. It showed a round design in black lines. It looked like a beetle.
