"God-fucking-damnit!" I lost my grip on the end of a massive guitar cabinet that had the blond idiot on the stupid end. The black box slammed down to the pavement with a crack, missing the toe of my boot by an inch.
"Hold on, I've got a call," Bard growled back, digging some ancient cellphone out of his jeans pocket.
"I swear to god if you injure me because you're chasing pussy I will leave your ass in Queens."
I was silenced by the grizzled old man turning his back on me to speak into the phone, though his voice was so loud and barking the gesture hardly afforded him privacy. I sat down on the cabinet and stuck a cigarette between my lips, contemplating the evening crowd that moved around us as though we were invisible.
"Yeah? Yeah? Right. Are you gonna be there? I don't fucking know, second probably. We always get the shitty middle slot. No, no. Bassy drove the van."
"Fuck you."
"Sorry. Sebastian drove. That better, princess?"
Bard hung up the phone and dug out a cigarette of his own. A police car did a slow drive by, the officer making a point of making eye contact with both of us where we sat, taking up space on the sidewalk. I looked at the van, parked half way up on the curb, and knew that he'd be back in a few minutes to give us shit.
Every weekend I was in some random part of the city hauling heavy gear for Bard's shitty punk band; three guys with pawnshop guitars and a borrowed delivery van that still stunk like rotten produce. Every few days it was a different bar, or sometimes the same one a few nights in a row. Sometimes it wasn't even a bar but a veteran's hall or the basement of a squat tenement where the crust punks had rigged up electricity and had a table set up with free vegan food and a donation jar for the keg. They would play anywhere that invited them, and I would invariably follow.
But why was I here?
Because I wasn't at the tattoo shop.
When my mentor got into one of his moods, he was intolerable. The shop already resembled more of a real undertaker's salon than a tattoo studio. It was cluttered, the walls covered with "funeral coach parking only" signs and any number of memento mori photographs and headstone artworks, piles of bones everywhere and more than a few taxidermy crows. On his bad days, my mentor preferred talking to the mummified corpse he kept in the shop. We would go days without saying more than two words to each other, but I would hear him muttering under his breath and laughing. I would start getting twitchy at some point around Thursday and by the time Bard was getting ready to book another show, I was already backing the van up to our apartment steps to get the crappy gear loaded up.
I was no stranger to the more obscure and deviant subcultures of NYC, but the funeral obsession was not something I pretended to understand. The Undertaker's level of interest in death and the symbolism and ceremony that went with it was far beyond my own morbidity, and I was a morbid mother fucker. I didn't ask a lot of questions, nor did I make a habit of going over to his side of the shop.
The mummy, Apophis as he was named by the Undertaker, was displayed against the wall near his tattooing station, wooden casket open to the air and a faint scent of spices an dust coming from the bandaged corpse itself. Once the health inspectors really started cracking down on our industry, they made Undertaker put the dead guy in a glass case and pack away some of the other curiosities to keep the shop sanitary and up to code. That didn't seem to deter the conversation between the two of them.
The profession must have been a bit different when the old man started his shop. In fact, tattooing was illegal in New York City until 1997, so the work done wasn't regulated in a standard way, but the undertaker was strict in his methods and demanded perfection of work. Somedays he seemed almost human, the kinda guy you could grab a beer with after work and shoot the shit, while other days he barely acknowledged the living.
Still, the shop was the best home I had, and I probably wouldn't have left if my mentor didn't drive me to it.
"Come on you lazy bastard. We gotta get this shit inside before the cop comes back," I said.
Bard grunted and flicked his cigarette into the street. The gig was in dive called Queen Vic's in Woodside. The traffic wasn't as thick as it was in Brooklyn, but I had a feeling the crowd would also be light once the music got going. Not that anyone in their right mind would want to listen to the badly tuned cacophony that was Hand Grenade Helper, but there was a small but loyal following that the band had managed to cultivate. Of course, some of that was a result of Bard's former band, Bleeding Uterus, which supposedly had the drummer from Leftover Crack, but I figured Bard was full of shit.
I hated going into bars in the daylight. I could see every cockroach and piss stain in the place and because I was driving, I couldn't even have a beer to dull my disgust. Once the lights were down and the crowd filtered in and the music drowned out everything else, I could ignore it, but with just the four of us and the bar staff, it was almost intolerable.
"I need a cigarette." The magic words that would get me out of most any situation. I propped open the back door and leaned against the outside wall, far enough from the dumpster that I couldn't see what the rats were fighting over, and stared off across the neighborhood as the sun began to set.
I wasn't that much different than my mentor, I realized. I wasn't talking to corpses, but I was a moody son of a bitch with a growing sense of dread, and I knew something was going to break.
A bunch of young kids in the parking lot struggled with a brand new Marshall half stack, getting it partially out of a hatchback car before they stopped to take a break. They were loud and crude and obnoxious. Probably high as shit. New band t-shirts and new tattoos. Generic and quickly done; of course, I had to judge the artwork, it was a professional hazard. What a bunch of assholes.
"Heh," Bard grunted from the wall beside me.
"Yeah," I agreed, sighing out a stream of smoke through my nose.
"I fucking miss those days, though."
"Shit. Me too, man."