Tattoos

I just don't get tattoos.
I realize some perfectly respectable people have them.
For instance, former U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz has a Princeton tiger on his backside. The Dixie Chicks have little chicken tracks on their feet - one for every #1 single.
You see, it's because of my upbringing.
My parents were definitely not skin art fans. I don't recall ever having a conversation with them on the subject, but somehow they communicated to me that a tattoo was a sign of sleaze and ignorance - something nice people just didn't do.
My first encounter with tattoos was when the carnival came to town. Our little county seat community of 2,500 recalls its history for a week every summer with an Old Settlers celebration. The true centerpiece of the celebration is the annual Old Settlers meeting at the city park shelter house where all of the old-timers congregate to argue over whose pioneer ancestors arrived first and whose forebears had the most distinguished service records in America's wars. At least I think that's what they do at those meetings. I never went.
For those of us who grew up in the '50s and later, Old Settlers meant carnival rides, games and shows arrayed on three sides of the courthouse square.
My earliest recollection of Old Settlers is a fuzzy memory of my parents and me picking our way down the crowded street, stepping over huge black electrical cables and red wooden junction boxes, and watching the people who paid to be spun and looped and flung around on the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel and the Scrambler and the Octopus.
For me, the Ferris Wheel was the entry-level big kid ride. You soared up into the black night sky, your senses filled with the smell of cotton candy, the sound of calliope music and the flash and glitter of a million colorful flickering lightbulbs. At the top of the arc, you could look straight into the second-floor windows of the big limestone courthouse and peer down on the roofs of several of the courthouse square business buildings.
My mother, who still had a bit of the thrill-seeker in her, introduced me to the Tilt-a-Whirl, a basket-shaped car that spun on a circular track, part of a larger platform that undulated and rotated. Most of the time it was pretty tame, but once or twice in each ride, the rotational forces would combine to spin the basket so fast and hard that it smashed you against the back of your seat with a startling force that could get a young boy's adrenaline flowing. The Octopus was the next step up. it afforded the same kind of high G-force spin, but this time you were 15-20 feet off the ground and preoccupied with thoughts of sheared bolts and airborne disaster.
But the most intimidating ride of all, the only one that could actually put you upside down (!!!!), was the Bullet. It consisted of a 20-foot-long steel arm that spun on a central axis. At each end of the arm was a bullet-shaped capsule that could seat four people - two-by-two sitting back-to-back.
As the arm turned, the capsules could rotate from side to side, keeping the occupants right-side up as they soared up and then swung earthward or inverting them through the dizzying loops. Watching the inversions was great fun because the process generated a shower of loose change, combs, cigarettes and anything else that fell out of the riders' pockets as they hung upside-down from their seatbelts, screaming.
All the while, the contraption made a creepy ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ sound as it spun relentlessly.
So what does this have to do with tattoos?
Well, the guys who ran these machines of delight and terror - the guys in whose greasy hands we placed our lives - were invariably decorated with the most lurid tattooed images we kids had ever seen in our short, sheltered lives.
These carnies were something completely outside of our experience. They had greasy hair, wore dirty shirts with rolled-up short sleeves and exuded an exotic danger that spoke of unimaginable depravity and debauchery. They made the roughest dead-end kids in our school look like preppies and they scared the hell out of us. We'd hand them our ride tickets and do our best to avoid eye contact as they strapped us in.
This, then, was who got tattooed - scary, dirty, greasy drifters from the distant edges of society who would never, in a million years, move in the same social circles as us or our parents.
So, image my consternation, some years ago when tattooing started to catch on among my friends and associates.
In the latter days of our marriage, my first wife spoke wistfully about getting some kind of flower tattooed on her back.
A woman friend whose judgment I'd always respected, took her teenage daughter to a tattoo parlor and both came home with calf decorations.
While few people go the whole hog "Illustrated Man" route, it's hard to gaze out on a crowded beach or swimming pool without seeing a dozen tattoos at a glance.
Enough of my friends and acquaintances have gotten them that I have to keep my horrified impressions to myself. Instead I just smile and nod and mumble some vague affirmation, like, "Cool," or "That's a good one."
Even if I didn't have this knee-jerk disdain for tattoos hardwired into my nervous system, I could never get tattooed.
I can't think of a single symbol or sentiment I'd want to carry on my hide for the rest of my life. I've seen my perspectives and tastes and attitudes change so many times in my life, that I know it would just be a matter of time before I looked at my decorated body part and wondered, "What the hell was I thinking?"
Plus, I'm not eager to earn the disdain of other people out there who share my attitude about skin art.
So I guess I'll leave the tattoing to the Maoris and the Dennis Rodmans and the Bruce Willises and the Britney Spearses.
As far as I'm concerned, there is only one kind of tattoo that commands my respect: the involuntary ones you can still see from time to time on the wrists of Nazi concentration camp survivors.