AD: What lifestyle are you referring to? You mean traveling around and drinking your way across South America?

Postcard to Mom- from Mexico

JS: Well, yeh, sorta… I mean back in the day tattooing was like a real sorta underground thing, nothing like it is today where you got books and even fucking TV shows about it and the whole tattoo thing’s sort of a commonplace, recognized thing that’s in the public eye all the time, celebrities strutting around on stage flaunting all their fancy colorful tattoos and shit like that (laughs)…. It was more like a real lowlife thing then still back when I got into it, and a certain lowlife lifestyle was about the only way you ever really got exposed to it, by being a real lowlife and going out and fucking getting tattooed. Even having a tattoo back then sorta just marked you as being sort of a creepy criminal outsider. So for someone to get tattooed you had to be sort of part of this sort of outlaw segment of society.

It wasn’t like now when you got all these boutique tattoo shops on every street corner and shit. You just didn’t see it at all in polite society. And tattooers were a real secretive bunch too, kinda like criminals. Tattooers used to make a lot of cash, because there weren’t too many of them competing for business. They were kinda like drug dealers or something. It was a completely underground practice back then and those old guys were really paranoid back then too, cuz they really protected their craft from prying eyes and kept it to themselves a lot. You couldn’t just go online or open up a tattoo magazine or walk into a tattoo place and get ahold of tattoo supplies and stuff the way you do now either. They mostly had to make their own equipment. Very mysterious stuff. It was a real secretive, underground craft and somebody could really only get into it through a certain underground sort of lifestyle, by being around it, being exposed to it, ya know? These old time tattoo guys were making pretty good money for a bunch of unschooled, mostly illiterate craftsmen whose only steady customers were criminals and lowlifes and sailors.

So that’s were I first got exposed to tattooing… I was a sailor too, ya know, working on ships and hanging out in whorehouses and sleazy bars in port towns and shit like that all around Latin America for years, and l always got to see alot of tattoos and tattooing going on, people getting tattooed, cuz it was more of a commonplace thing in that particular lifestyle, so I just sorta fell into it…

JS and friend. Veracruz, Mexico 1973

Once again, I’m not gonna talk too much about all that here cuz it’s all covered in massive detail in the other book I’m working on… Don’t wanna kill the impact of that shit or nobody’s wanna read the fucking thing (laughs)…

But I guess what I’m really getting at is how it’s kinda ironic that years later, because of all the tattoo magazine gigs and so on, it was actually the fucking tattooing that wound up finally bringing me back to writing… at least at first…

It’s very weird, it’s like you run long enough and you just end up bumping into your calling right on the very road you took to try and get away from it in the first place…

to be continued