The Girl With The Painted Arm

 Pretty soon, I started to think that maybe getting arrested at a psychologist's office wouldn’t really help my case much, so maybe I should sit down and listen to what Dr. Draper had to say…Hmm.  Maybe that’s not the best place to start my story.  If I’m going to jump around in time, let’s move forward about ten years and start there.

Riding the wave between twenty-three and twenty-four, I found myself very tired, very unhappy in my job, not writing, not making art, and spending most of my energy helping this woman in her troubles with her father.  I can’t say that I was in love with her because, at some point, I believe the definition of “love” should include some amount of happiness for me, and there was none.  I was devoted, and I’d made a promise.  As unhappy as I was, she was far more unhappy, so that seemed fair.

“You should do something for yourself.”  She said.  “Take a trip.  Find a girlfriend for the weekend.”  She suggested.

This business of finding a girlfriend for the weekend was something I knew something about.  When the stakes were low, I was charming enough to make up for the fact that I wasn’t very handsome, and there were always women who were just about as lonely as I was and just as leery about making any sort of commitment.  A gentleman doesn’t normally admit to these things, though, so I’m not sure how my friend knew about this.  Maybe she was guessing.  Normally, my minimal requirement was that it be a girl to whom I was properly introduced.  In Mississippi, in the eighties, that wasn’t much of a problem.  I’d been introduced to hundreds of girls, and there would be hundreds more.  

The “take a trip” part held some interest for me.  Comicon was coming up.  My friends from Compuserve were talking about meeting up in Los Angeles and driving to San Diego.  During the trip, I made plans to spend time with Forest Acerkman, former publisher of Famous Monster’s magazine, whom everyone called Uncle Forry.  I’d corresponded with him since I was a little boy, but this would be the first time we’d met in person.  He told me that during the week I would be there, Ray Harryhausen, the world-famous stop-motion animator, would be in town, and they hoped to meet with Ray Bradbury, the author.  If I timed my visit right, I could meet all three, and did.  

Setting aside a whole week for the trip, I got a room at a hotel in Hollywood near the Shrine Auditorium.  The Shrine Auditorium was the host of the Academy Awards for many years and had been used as a set representing a Broadway theater in the 1932 filming of King Kong.   My year had not gone very well at all, but I was making sure that my summer would be full of magic.  I also decided this might be a good time to tour and apply for admission to UCLA and USC, possibly thinking about a career change to something more creative.

My CompuServe friends arranged for two meet-ups.  One, a cookout at the world Famous Black’s Beach.   I’d never been to a nude beach before, and since this was the land of beautiful people, I was curious to see what this might be like.  The beaches around San Diego were famous for their beauty, but they were also famous for their sea lions.  As we walked up on Black’s Beach, I saw it was dotted with bloated, copper-brown bodies I assumed were sunning sea lions.  They were not.  A little further down, there were some actual sea lions.  We decided that the best way to tell which was which was to look for the beach towel.  Older, fatter, naked Californians had them; sea lions did not.  

The next night, we planned to meet at a seaside steak house that had a very proud reputation among the locals.  My friend, whose screen name was “Petals,” sat beside me.  She lived in that area her whole life and suggested I get the beef stroganoff.  Apparently, they cut all their own meats, and the stroganoff was made from the scraps left over from cutting the filets.

These were people I talked to online every day.  Even though it was just text, we were still very comfortable with each other, even though I was the youngest member of the party by at least ten years.  This was in the mid-1980s, and what happened next was something I’d never been exposed to before.

Our waitress was a beautiful girl about my age, dressed in blue jeans and a sleeveless shirt.  Her entire left arm was covered in these intricate and elaborate tattoos, to the point where it looked like she was wearing a shirt covered in paisleys.  In the years to come, really intricate and large “sleeve” tattoos became fairly common, but this was the first time I’d ever seen one.  

I’d known girls who had maybe a small butterfly or a cross tattoo, but this was like a mural compared to a miniature.  On her arm, I recognized “The Wave” by Hokusai.  There was a blackmoor goldfish circling a scarlet, gold, and white ouranda, both swimming in a blue and white porcelain fishbowl.  A golden pheasant with a brilliant red breast sat among bamboo on her deltoid muscle, with its tail feathers trailing down her tricep muscles.  Among all the major themes were cherry blossoms intermingled with bamboo fronds and kanji that I had no idea what they represented.  Whoever this woman was, she understood a lot more about Japanese art than I did, but I understood enough to realize that she wasn’t just picking designs out of a “book of popular tattoos.”  Whatever was going on with her, it meant something.

I imagined the tattoo artist might be a lover or maybe a parent.  I imagined this elaborate dance between the artist, the subject, and her body as the canvas.  In later years, I learned that that quality of work, in that size, in that part of the world, represented about as much money as a new luxury automobile.   I also learned that, even in Southern California, in the mid-eighties, there were only so many people even capable of creating that type of tattoo.  Clearly, there was more going on here than just another waitress.

She stood behind me with her notepad.  “Hi, my name is Julie.”  She said.  “Hi, Julie!” my friends answered.  They were dorks.  Julie read off the dinner and drink specials for the night.  My friend Rabbit, a computer engineer, asked way more questions than would be normal.  In between sentences, she would drop her hand down onto my shoulder, the hand attached to her painted arm.  Her nails were painted ivory crescent moons over a pink nail bed.  She raked them gently over my trapezius muscle and then back to her notepad.  In my world, a French manicure represented good breeding.  I looked around at the other women in the restaurant to see if it was the same here.  

Julie left to enter our drink order.  My friend Petal leaned in.  “She likes you.”  She said and giggled.  Rabbit laughed.  “She just might.”  He said.

I was sitting on the corner of a table for six.  When Julie returned with our drinks, she again stood behind me.  She leaned over my shoulder as she distributed the glasses, then got out her notepad again to take our dinner order.  Even though she was behind me, I knew her hips were just inches from my shoulder.  When she leaned in to pass out the drink glasses, I could feel her hip pressing against my tricep muscles.  Again, she rested the hand attached to her painted arm on my shoulder when she wasn’t writing.  

After she had everyone else’s order, she turned around and faced me, standing between me and Rabbit.  She made that swooping motion with her head that women sometimes do to move their hair from one side of their head to the other.  Her eyelids closed halfway like she was very comfortable in her position.  

“What’s your pleasure, Shakespeare?”  She said.

I’d never mentioned that I wanted to be a writer.  I’d never mentioned anything about myself at all.  I thought about what Petal said about this girl likeing me, but then I thought she probably did this twenty times a night to make her customers more comfortable and maybe get a bigger tip. 

“The Beef Strauganauf,”  I said.

“What temperature?” she said, in a way that made me really very uncomfortable, in an ungentlemanly sort of way.  

“Medium Rare,”  I said.

She leaned in, putting her mouth a few inches from my ear.  “Good Choice.”  She said.

After dinner and a fair amount of abuse from my friends about this woman with the painted left arm, we all turned in our credit cards to pay.  When I got mine back, on the back of the receipt tape was written a phone number, with “Thanks for coming tonight.  Call me!  Jules” with a graphic swirl underneath that reminded me of the cherry limbs painted on her arm.

Upon returning to my hotel, I waited about an hour before I called the number.  I had no idea what time she would be getting off.  “Hey, this is Jules. I’m not here right now, but you already know that.  Leave a message!”

“Hi, Julie, this is Boyd–you know, Shakespeare, from the restaurant.  I was just calling to say ‘hey.’  This is my number at the hotel.  Call me.  I’d love to know more about you.”  

Before lunch the next day, she called back.  She was off that night and wanted to know if she could pick me up and we could get hamburgers; then, she would show me her city.  This could easily end up as one of those stories where I woke up in a bathtub full of ice, with both my kidneys missing, or be driven to an alley where her pimp demanded a thousand dollars, I mean, she did have a tattoo, but I was willing to risk it.

She showed up at about six in a convertible, Karmann Ghia.  This model of Volkswagon had been out of production for many years, and they never made very many of them, so the fact that she drove a sort of boutique car gave me confidence that my initial assessment was right.  Even though she was a waitress, she was an upper-middle-class girl with a fair amount of education.  Probably more than I had.

We ate at In ‘n Out Hamburgers, where she filled me in on all the secret menu items.  We ordered their largest-size cokes to drink with Peppermint Schnaps, which sounds pretty gross but was actually kind of nice.  We drove around the Hollywood hills, and she showed me the neighborhood she grew up in, and we talked, and talked, and talked.

Because she had almond-shaped eyes, I guessed maybe her mother was Asian and her father was military.  That was completely wrong.  Her mother was Columbian, and her father was Jewish.  Her eyes were almond-shaped because her mother’s family was much more native than they were Spanish.  She asked about Mississippi and Eudora Welty and Willam Faulkner.  She wanted to know about Medgar Evers, who was killed here, and Martin Luther King Junior, who was killed in Memphis, which I had to explain to her wasn’t part of Mississippi but probably should be.  She wasn’t a practicing Jew, but her grandmother was, who didn’t much approve of her lifestyle or life choices but still lavished her with gifts, especially good clothes because being poor was worse than being a sinner.

She wanted to be an art teacher.  I wanted to be a writer, she said.  I asked her how she knew that since we hadn’t discussed it.  “I know a lot of things.”  She said and shifted the car’s transmission with a sly smile.  She found a lonely spot in the hills overlooking the city and parked the car.  She put a tape with Joan Baez/Carol King handwritten on the label in the player.  “Let’s get smashed.”  She said, pouring a drink.  “But you’re driving,” I said.  “I’ll be sober by morning she said,” and made my drink to match hers.  “This might be the part where I wake up in a bathtub full of ice with both my kidneys missing,” I thought.

“You make me feel like a natural woman,” began to play.  She settled in close to me and pulled my arm around her.  Since I’d first seen her, I’d been wanting to touch her left arm.  Now I could.  Her flesh was soft and hairless.  I tried to discern if I could actually detect the tattoo scars or if  I just imagined them.  

Once our eyes met, I was transfixed.  They were enormous, with the outside edge sloping into a gentle teardrop.  They were the color of dark chocolate, with lashes and brows that required little augmentation.  When she didn’t smile, the corners of her lips stretched from the center of one eye to the other.  Her bottom lip was pillowy and full.  Her upper lip had a cupid’s bow with sharply peaked arches.  It was the perfect mouth.  

“Diamonds and Rust” began to play.  She turned toward me and reached in with her painted arm.  I could feel her finely polished nails touch my neck.  As fascinated as I was by her painted arm, all I could see was her eyes and her mouth.  All I wanted to see were her eyes and her mouth.

“What do you think, Shakespeare?”  She said.  I could feel her nails move from my neck to my cheek.  “I don’t know what to think,”  I said.  Time stopped, and we kissed.

She wore blue jeans with a sleeveless Oxford cloth shirt.  With an arm like that, I suppose many of her shirts were sleeveless.  Under that, she wore a white “wife-beater” undershirt and a dainty pink bra.  Her breasts were tiny and muscular.  As I moved my hand down her muscular body, I reached her belt buckle and began to disconnect it, and she put her hand on top of mine.  “It’s not time for that.”  She said.  I’d known her for almost twenty-four hours at that point.  It absolutely was not time for that.  Maybe if it was somebody I cared less about, we would have gone ahead, but this girl mesmerized me, and despite her painted arm, she was obviously a lady.  

I was in Los Angeles for two more days.  On Saturday, she drove me down to San Diego, and we walked the storied aisles of Comicon together.  On Sunday, we caught the matinee showing of Batman at Mann’s Chinese Theater, and then I flew home to Mississippi.

I’d been having pretty terrible luck with women.  I was pretty frustrated about it because I felt like I’d been doing the right thing.  I’d been a gentleman.  I put the ladies' interests and needs before my own.  I tried to seek out people with whom I had legitimate common interests and people with whom I had solid social connections,  but it wasn’t working out, and I was getting pretty beat up about it.  I believed pretty firmly that if you did the right thing, the universe would eventually reward you, but it wouldn’t happen right away, and it usually wouldn’t happen in the way you expected.  All that being said, I felt like this business with Jules was so random and so out of the blue and unexpected that there must be some sort of cosmic movement behind her appearance in my life.  

We talked on the phone every day and most nights for about five weeks.  I was sublimely happy, and so, it seemed, was Julie.  One day, I called and got her answering machine.  The same the next day and the next.  On the fourth day, I called and got not Jules but her roommate Lauren, who I barely knew existed.

“Hey!” I said.  “Is Jules around?”

“She’s not here right now.”

“That’s ok, just tell her to call me when she gets back.”

“Um, I don’t know when she’s coming back.”  She said.  “Jules had another episode.  It was a pretty bad one.”

“A what?  What sort of episode?  What happened?”  I was in something of a panic.

“I, I’m not sure what to tell you.  Obviously, she didn’t tell you.  I don’t know if I should be the one to tell you, but, um, well, Julie has schizophrenia.  She quit taking her medicine a few weeks ago.  She hasn’t been to work since that night she saw you.  Apparently, she thought she didn’t need them anymore.  She hadn’t slept for almost a week, and she had an episode, a pretty bad one.  Her dad had her committed, just until they get her medication regulated again.  I’m sorry.  I’m really sorry, but they don’t want anyone talking to her until she gets everything, you know, regulated again.  I know you liked her.  I’m really sorry.”

Schizophrenia.  It had to be schizophrenia.  This was no stranger to me.  My brother, one of the most important people in my life, had his first psychotic break just before I turned twelve.  It got progressively worse.  Eventually, he had to drop out of college, got arrested, became legally committed, and eventually moved home with us, living upstairs with me.

My brother was the only person in the family with talents and interests like mine.  I thought he might become my model until he started caring more about drugs than he did people.  I was convinced the drugs brought on the schizophrenia.  My mother tried to tell me it was the other way around.  

Living with somebody who has schizophrenia isn’t easy.  I learned later that Lauren was being paid by Julie’s father to live with her and watch out for her.  Until she met me, Jules was very cooperative about taking her medicine.  Something about talking to me made her think she didn’t need it anymore.  I had never told her about my brother.  It’s been forty years, and I still don’t know what it was about me that changed things for her.

Living with a person with schizophrenia isn’t easy.  Living with a person with schizophrenia who resisted their medication was unpleasant.  Living with a person with schizophrenia who resisted taking their medication, which you used to idolize, was torture.  I would wake up some days with runes painted on my bedroom door.  Not actual runes, but random symbols and figures that his auditory hallucinations told him to make.  I began sleeping behind a locked door.  

I argued constantly that my brother’s drug use was related to his schizophrenia.  My mother returned to college to get a psychology degree so she would know more about how to treat my brother at home.  She argued that there wasn’t any research linking the two.  Forty years later, fifteen years after her death, there is now quite a bit of research linking the two.  Being right long after it doesn’t matter anymore isn’t much consolation.

Despite his social isolation, my brother still managed to procure enough marijuana to consume it at least twice a day.  I knew what it was like to consume marijuana once a day, every few weeks, and if it did that to me, then I couldn’t possibly be good for somebody who had trouble with reality to do it two or three times a day, every day.  My mother said that his psychologist felt it kept him calm, and sometimes, with schizophrenics, calm was about all you could hope for.  

It was bad enough that I cared a great deal about my brother, and I had serious misgivings about his treatment, but to make matters worse, it was becoming very clear that since his life was much more difficult than mine, my mother was beginning to be much more concerned about his well being than mine.  I argued that sometimes schizophrenic people did sometimes murder their families and presented a thick folder of photo-copied articles about it.  

I was becoming convinced that, should my mother have to choose between what was best for me and what was best for my brother, I wouldn’t stand a chance.  I asked that they send me to boarding school.  No way.  “How would that look?”  She asked.  I asked that they have my brother committed again until such time he became more regulated on his medicine.  “You’d do that to your own brother?”  She asked.  Finally, I demanded that if this doctor said it was okay for him to get stoned all day, every day, then I wanted to talk to this doctor.  She agreed.

His name was D…

I better not.  I don’t think the guy still practices, but what I have to say could definitely be construed as damaging to his professional prospects.  Let’s say his name was Dr. Jacobs.

Again, I made a folder filled with photocopies of all the evidence I had.  At fourteen, I was determined to outwit this supposed psychologist who believed narcotics were fine for schizophrenics because it kept them calm.  

My plan was to be as rational and mature as I could be.  I was right, after all, and I believed I had the evidence to prove it.  Issues of power are important for teenagers.  Everybody else has it, and you have none.  That’s part of why I began spending hours every day lifting weights and eventually experimenting with steroids.  Physical strength is a type of power, and it was about the only one available to me.  If I couldn’t feel secure in my own home, then I would become strong enough that I felt secure anywhere.  In a lot of ways, that worked.  In a lot of other ways, it made me kind of an asshole and not as respectful of adults as I should be.  There’s a reason why teenagers don’t have all that much power, but I wasn’t willing to accept that.

No matter what happened in our meeting, I wasn’t going to show any emotion.  I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.  That was the plan anyway.  Dr. Jacobs did the thing I hated the most in adults.  He dismissed what I was saying and wouldn’t even look at my evidence.  He was a grown man, a PH.D., and an award-winning disk jockey.  I was a puffed-up, over-privileged kid who only knew how to get things by pushing my way through like a bull.  I began to shout.  I stood up.  He asked me to leave.  I wasn’t going to touch him.  I wasn’t going to throw or break anything, but I wasn’t going to leave.  Before I messed up my voice, I could get pretty loud.  I must have been loud enough for the entire office to hear me because pretty soon, both Dr. Draper and Dr. Elkin stepped in.  

“Get him out of here!” Dr. Jacobs shouted.  That’s when I began to consider that my options were either to go and talk with Doug Draper, who was already my psychologist or get arrested.  I chose the former and not the latter.  Fortunately, he didn’t have a client for the next hour, so we talked.  We talked with a level of honesty that I’d never really been willing or able to reveal before.  

I’ve said before that Doug Draper was never able to heal me, but I’ve never regretted the forty-something years he treated me.  The roots of my depression went pretty deep.  Far too deep for any psychologist to wear away.  

I was still Doug’s patient ten years later when I got the message that my would-be girlfriend, the girl with the painted arm, was also schizophrenic and that something about talking to me made her go off her meds.  I called and asked for another session, and he said, “Sure.”

I continued to call Julie every couple of days for the rest of the summer, just to see if she was home yet.  Finally, one day, Lauren said, “Look, I don’t think she wants to talk to you.  She’s trying to get her life back together, and it might not be the right time for her to talk to you.”  

“Oh,”  I said.  “I understand.  Um, look, she has my number.  Tell her if she ever wants to call, that’s where I’ll be.  Maybe we can be friends again.  Um, I’d like that.  I’m really sorry about what happened.”  

“I’ll tell her,”  Lauren said, and that was the last time I ever spoke to either of them.  

I said I understood, but I didn’t.  What I understood was that, twice now, I’d encountered an amazing creature with a fantastic element about them, and schizophrenia took them from me–and there was nothing, nothing at all, I could do about it. 

I never spoke to Julie again.  After writing almost five thousand words about her, it’s clear that, forty years later, I still think of her.

Well, I'll be damned

Here comes your ghost again

But that's not unusual

It's just that the moon is full

We both know what memories can bring

They bring diamonds and rust