This was the only tattoo Josh Lord had ever wanted to remove. He had already been through two sessions, but the offending party was still noticeably dark on his wrist. He would need at least two, likely three more sessions. Ariel Lasevoli, the esthetician who would be doing the laser removal on them today, looked like she was 19, although she must have been a few years older, given her resume. In addition to being an esthetician, Ariel was also an acrobat, and certified personal trainer at Crunch Gym on East 34th street in Manhattan.
“Where are you from?” Buffalo asked her. “New York. Chelsea.” She said, not looking up from Josh’s wrist, which she was shaving so as to avoid the funky burnt hair smell that comes with laser removal if you don’t shave first. “Did you have to get certified to do this?” Buffalo asked as innocently as he could. She was annoyed by the question. “Yeah, I’m an esthetician. And then I tacked on a laser certification on top of that.” Who was this guy getting her to work for free under the guise of writing some piece for Inked? It smelled fishy.
She turned her attention back to Josh. “Do you want to do the whole thing today?” “Yeah. Do you think it’s a bad idea?” Josh seemed perhaps a twinge uneasy for the first time since Buffalo had met him a year and a half earlier, when they had first started this piece on his shoulder. “No,” she said it with a calming authority. “And I’ll avoid the white as much as possible.” Why does white always hurt more than any other color, both when going in, and apparently coming out? Buffalo wondered. Was there some racial metaphor to be drawn from this? “So, what does it feel like?” Buffalo asked Lord, trying not to sound like a complete pussy. “It’s a little different for me than everyone describes. I actually thought it hurt a little bit less than getting a tattoo. Almost everyone else thinks it hurts a little more.” “But it’s in the same ball park of pain?” Buffalo was trying to get scientific about it. He had always found that when you try to define the pain you are feeling in the moment, you diminish it. “Yeah, it’s similar. You’ve done it before. Haven’t you?” Both Buffalo and Ariel answered “No” at the same time. She could tell from one look at him that Buffalo had never had any ink removed. She could also tell that he was uneasy, maybe even nervous. “Oh, right, it’s your first sitting,” Josh said, as if there would need to be more than one. “How many sessions do you think we’ll need to do before you can work your magic and finish this piece?” It had been a year and a half at this point and Buffalo, like everyone else involved, had become worried that it would never be done. Rocky, Buffalo’s editor, had forgotten about the assignment so long ago at this point, that he wasn’t even pissed off anymore that he had wasted his time and connected Buffalo and Josh with nothing to show for it. “I mean, only a couple,” Ariel said, eyeing the tiny tat he no longer wanted on his body. “I’m gonna say two,” was Josh’s feeling. “How long do I have to wait in between sessions?” Buffalo sensed he was not going to like the answer. “I usually recommend five weeks,” Ariel said with a nonchalance that suggested she had no idea how long this process had already been going on. Buffalo gave her a grim nod. She finished shaving Josh’s wrist and handed him the safety glasses. “So, I need to step out, right?” Buffalo remembered something about the laser causing blindness if one accidentally looked at it without wearing the proper goggles, and she only had two pairs. “Yeah, you can’t see anything or…” Josh had started, but Ariel finished his sentence. “Or you won’t see anything.” Buffalo turned around and went to the other side of the room.
The tattoo machine had sounded like a combination of hair clippers and a Harley. But the sound of removal was completely different, more like a snare drum beating out the warm up to a war march. Tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap. Buffalo waited as Josh tried to make polite chit chat, but he could hear the sweat in his voice. This obviously hurt Josh a lot more than he had remembered. Which translated in Buffalo’s mind to proof that removing the ink was a fuck load more painful than putting it in. This was confirmed when it was his turn to sit in her chair about fifteen minutes later, when Josh had had all he cared to endure for one session. In his attempt to diminish the pain by defining it, the closest Buffalo came was the thought that it felt like someone was going into his arm with jagged microscopic pliers and ripping out each drop of ink that had been placed there 15 years before. It hurt all right. No two ways about it. But it was perhaps the most fascinating pain Buffalo had ever experienced. As she lasered off each spec of what was once the small tattoo he had designed and gotten with a friend of his named Jaime, a beautiful red head he had known since high-school, Buffalo’s head was suddenly flooded with memories from the moment he had had the ink put in his arm. He assumed the phenomenon was due to the unique experience of feeling pain in exactly the same micro-spots he had felt a similar (although significantly less intense) pain 15 years prior. At the center of pain, is radiance. His father’s line from his novel Ancient Evenings echoed through Buffalo’s head.
As her laser ripped out his ink, Buffalo could remember the smell of the artist’s breath (if you could call the guy who had done the simple round design they had brought him an artist). Buffalo recalled how he and Jaime had designed the little tattoo together that day, then walked all over the East Village in search of the tattooer she had in mind. It was a rainy day in New York, cold and mean. Buffalo and Jaime had been friends since they were 16. While in college, he once visited Jaime at her school and the two finally consummated what had always been boiling under the surface of their friendship. As he moved inside the smooth wet warmth she had for him, holding her tight and close and staring into her blue oceans of eyes, they both looked down and smiled at the vision of the tattoos each had on their pelvis (the laughing and crying masks of theater for Jaime on her right, the broken bleeding heart for Buffalo on his left) rubbing up against each other as if the pieces were making their own form of sweet love. That Summer they decided to design a piece together that they would both carry with them for the rest of their lives. But they never found the artist Jaime wanted, and ultimately went with some random dude with with a shaved head who happened to be available at that moment, in a shop neither one of them had heard of.
Buffalo went first, of course, chivalrous to a fault as always, and wound up with what was at least a symmetrical tattoo, even if it was not the greatest piece ever known to mankind. (From a distance, it looked like a grey birthmark.) Jaime went next and it quickly became apparent that the dude with the shaved head had unfortunately just gotten lucky with Buffalo’s tattoo. This guy was no artist. Jaime ended up walking out of that shop with the most sloppy tattoo either one of them had ever seen on anyone. Instead of round, it was egg shaped. And the scarring was needless and plentiful. Buffalo had always felt guilty about how that had turned out, even though he knew there was nothing he could have done to alter the outcome, save calling the whole thing off until they found an artist at least one of them knew could do decent work, which neither one was prepared to do. Now they were both stuck with it. Or were they?
Several years after they had gotten those tattoos, a miscommunication on the phone lead to a fall out. Like a very bad friend, Buffalo had confused the day of Jaime’s wedding and missed it entirely. For that, she could never forgive him. This was shortly after his father had died and his mother was not doing well, having to have surgery three weeks after his old man had passed. Buffalo was just kind of fucked up at the time, over-worked, and too fried to prevent such a mistake from happening. He had tried to explain this to Jaime, but she was, understandably, not having it. She hung up on him in a cold rage and they had not spoken since. Now he was getting the last remnant of their time together removed from his body. He could not help but wonder if she had ever done the same. Who says all tattoos are forever?
