Chapter 4.

Waterloo

The dynamic duo spent the next few weeks dodging bullets around South London in A's BMW lookin' for places to call tattoo home, most landlords suddenly copped a deaf'un when they realized we were gonna open up a tattoo parlour on their lovely premises. This was before the days of Camden high street & a tattoo & piercing cupboard in the back of every hairdressers/clothes shop/public toilet etc...They had a problem with the whole tattoo thing. The mere mention of the T word & doors would slam shut in our incredulous faces. They had visions of hordes of marauding bikers tearing up 'n' down the strip swingin' chains, raping & pillaging while they awaited their ink fix, which would undoubtedly be a swastika on their forehead, blah blah blah. I soon tired of dealing with these fools & let A do the talking. He liked talkin' & he was good at it. He had a little black briefcase & pin stripe (bondage) trousers Which made him look like he knew what he was doing, but looks can be deceptive, ha ha! It must've been hilarious for the property people we approached, I didn't have a clue about planning a shop or even dealing with anyone outside of my rock'n'roll crowd & A* was always stoned & going off on a tangent & doing a strange tap dance when he made a joke, impossible to do business with but very amusing! We'd also spend the days while we were parlour hunting, delivering the stage to the torture garden fetisch nightclub & generally havin' fun with the cash we'd borrowed. It was about this time that I got him to tattoo me, It shoulda set off alarms in my head about the madness of the man, 'cos the outline took 7 hours! Well not exactly 7 hours of tattooing but I was round his gaff that long while he smoked weed, waited for filter coffee to brew, talked on the phone, talked off the phone,talked to himself, ate pasta & insisted I did too! I went round there at 1 p.m. My girlfriend was coming to see me that night at 8. I was late! It should have illustrated to me that my partner in crime & I did things very differently & it would surely cause problems later, No friends in business & all that ha ha.....but my spider senses were on holiday that summer & my head was filled with this idea of the shop & all the perks that would flow with it. How little I knew. We finally signed for a run down old place in Waterloo. Number 85 Lower Marsh, to be precise. A hidden ruby in the dust of back street Waterloo. A little market street with a lot of cool shops. Not far from the site of legendary tattooer George Burchett's place in years gone by. Surely a selling point. It was a wreck, no electricity, damp, rotten wooden walls, no heating & an outside lav with about a hundred years worth of shit blocking it up (I was to find out later) & a fossilized rat hidden in an internal window frame. Never mind, we'd signed. The rent was low, So we got on with the task of transforming the shagged out shellshocked shack into a modern clinical tattoo studio to be proud of, the local competition wasn't very stiff (unlike the rat). I was keen to get going & was enjoying stripping the walls & running round pickin' up plaster board & filler & paint & stuff. It was fun. I was doing something, going somewhere, this was it, I had arrived! A couple of guys were renting the upstairs & we were having downstairs, which made the rent even lower.....everyone's a winner! Trouble started as soon as the refurbishment did, the trouble was, A* had problems reading his watch & many a morning I'd be left sitting in the doorway like a spare tramp who'd been kicked outta Waterloo train station, waiting for him to come & open up, 'cos he had the only set of keys, I'd be phoning, screamin' for him to "Hurry the fuck up & Come & let me in & while yer at it get me some fuckin' keys cut, ya cunt". I'd have to sit in the coffee shop across the road while the husband & wife team who kept me in cappucino laughed at his exploits. Very funny! Some days he wouldn't show at all after promising me "Yeah man, I'll be there in 20 minutes, chill". But I didn't wanna 'chill' I wanted to work. He was weed & I was speed & ya shouldn't mix ya pharmacuticals! He always had a bad back too. Especially around the times we went (late) to get supplies, which left me to do the lifting & carrying while he did his best Ol' man Steptoe impression. 'One day' I thought 'I'll look back on this & laugh'. Ha ha ha. I'm in stitches. By this time A*'s mate S had come on board the good (sinking) ship 'T****'.. He was to be the piercer, S was a strange little geezer hiding under a mountain of dreads, he was a cool, funny character & a good laugh to work with. After weeks of whinging & waiting I finally had a set of keys of my own & me & S would sit in the shop all day painting & scraping, banging & screwin (ooo-er) drinking coffee, fighting over the stereo & dreamin' shop dreams. The building was starting to take shape with all our hard work. A* would drop in every now & then for a progress report, carrying his little black briefcase, he'd been runnin' round doing the 'paperwork' & sorting licenses & stuff. AND he had the stress to prove it! I'd drawn the short straw & spent a whole day shovelling an endless stream of shit outta the back bog drain, I don't think I ever did get to the bottom of it & gave up before I threw up.....but as long as no-one did a solid, we'd be fine! I'd plasterboarded my little section of the shop, curtained it off, stuck up a worksurface (too high), installed my electric dentists chair & postered the walls, the front of the shop had a huge cobweb made of chunky metal welded chains, It had a big glass display cabinet/counter filled with stuff to sell (which we never sold 'cos we never had change to give to customers) artistic pictures of wierd genital piercings on even wierder lookin' people, courtesy of S** & much to A's disgust. We had a great big mirror too, there was a rack for our very limited collection of flash. I'd drawn about 6 sheets specially for the shop! & the back room was kitted out for A & S, their madness seperated only by a thin see through curtain painted with a Mayan pattern! When the dust finally settled we had ourselves quite a nice little studio. It looked clean & clinical but cracks were showing in other ways. S & A* were born on the same day of the same year, but were always fallin' out. A* wanted to be in control, S wanted equal share & I wanted to go down the Intrepid Fox & chase fanny. I was takin' a back seat as far as the business side of things went, I wasn't interested. Neutral. I just wanted to tattoo & drink in the glory of havin' a shop. Not the right attitude for young businessman of the year & probably a big part of the reason why it took about 3 months of work to get the shop up to standard for the inspection, work that should have taken about 3 weeks, but it was always a fun time, the sun was always shining that summer of '95. Times were great in my naive little head & some of the best days of my life were spent in Lower Marsh in our little shop. The last job was to paint the shop sign, which I did. Big black letters, no mistaking 'T****'. I finished it on a saturday afternoon then went to the pub in persuit of my other hobby. I was almost sad when the council official type person gave us the go ahead to open up our shop. Then A* casually announced that it was time to buy my share of the shop, "Well that was always the way it was gonna be right?" he smiled the smile of the wolf before it bites you. "No fuckin' way, I've spent all my money on this place, I've spent three months doing the fucker up, I want this fuckin' place to work, that ain't the way it's gonna be". I stood up for myself for once, sitting on the fence was hurting my bum anyway. I thought he must've been planning this the whole time while I'd been grafting in the shop, I was pissed off & said so. And open we did. Most I can remember of my time at Tribalize was reffereeing the squabbles & explaining to A's customers that he was running a bit late & that he'd be here soon. Lots of times he didn't show up but sometimes he'd work all through the night, you could never tell. S had become the reluctant receptionist & dealt with most of the shit. Well he liked meeting people & he was good with the customers. I was just doing things my way & trying not to get dragged into the madness, although my indifference probably caused more grief than I realized. I'd hide in my middle section & only come out when it was totally nessecary, like when a bunch of female tourists would enter the shop! Every day A would come bouncing in with a crooked smile a new brainstorming idea of what to do with the shop, probably inspired by his morning marijuana meal, full of beans & madness, I'd switch off, safe in the knowledge that it'd never happen & that there'd be a new idea to shrug off tomorrow too. The two of them seemed to be engaged in a power struggle with me in the middle being tugged from one side to the other. I liked them both so I pulled the curtain. One day A* was late or off or missing in action & the whole shop went dead. Power cut. I was up to my elbows in a tattoo at the time. The shop was on a key meter & I'd have to go to the garage & charge it up. Pain in the arse, but no choice. Except A* had decided that the key wasn't safe in the shop & should be with him at all times, 'cos people are always knickin' them electric keys, ain't they? But he was at home 2 miles away & couldn't fetch the key. I was livid, I couldn't believe that we were in the shit like that. I was screaming down the phone "Bring the fuckin' key, we're sittin' in darkness, I'm in the middle of a fuckin' tattoo, your customers are waiting, do it now!" A couple of hours later he strolls in, dopey grin on his face & cracks a joke, does a little tap dance & all is well in tattoo land. It was impossible not to like him, but somtimes it was hard not to whack him around the side of the head with a brick too! After that I stopped makin' excuses for anyone but myself, tellin' any irate customers that we were self unemployed & it was nothing to do with me & eerr I just gotta go out the back, take the helm S. I was useless! I can barely remember anything of my time at T**, but we had a lot of fun too in-between the tattoo traumas. Maybe I blanked that part of my tattoo career outta my head. One thing I remember is a scarey motorcycle club asking us to work at their tattoo show. We'd said yes, but of course 2 nanoseconds later A* had changed his mind 'coz it's no good gettin' involved with that lot, which was true,but once you say yes to the them, it's Yes! I did the show alone after recieving a few 'persuasive' phone calls. I turned up hungover with a cut on my face from a fight I'd had with the misses the night before. The show was good fun & I won A little plaque that proudly displayed 'Best at Show'. It bought me to the attention of one of the bikers & he wanted to get some work off me at the shop. "No probs" says I, eager to be on the right side of these people & started drawing his design. The appointment came & a couple of the bike club lads came too. I was in the middle of the club logo on his chest & he was complaining about the tattoo feelin' like electric shocks! "I can feel that all down me fuckin' arm" He was jumpin' all over the place, I carried on, tryin' to take it easy & gettin' a bit worried, but still he jumped. It was then that I noticed the electric chair was still plugged into the mains. I knew it had a short circuit & always unplugged it once it was positioned for the victim but I'd forgotten to de-plug this time & I was electrocuting the poor sod. They took a breather to snort some speed, I discretely unplugged the chair & when he came back he felt much better, "Must be the speed" I said, "Yeah it's good stuff, want some?" ."No mate, not while I'm working" I said. Another time we were working away in our rooms, the sound of my hornet being drowned by the rest of the staffs choice of 'music'..they were playing their usual techno shit. I was sick to death of that repetitive, repetitive, repetitive mind numbing soulless drivel & deciced to stick on the noisiest tape i could find, the Exploited. They turned up, I turned up, they turned up, so did I.....we were both at full volume, the customers were lookin' at us in disbelief, it was unbearable, our ears were bleeding! but no-one would give in. That about summed it up, we were as bad as each other, too immature for the real world of a pro tattoo studio! when the tapes ended we just laughed. The customers looked distressed, I don't remember getting a tip & they never took up the offer to 'see us again'! It'd got to the point where we'd all agreed to pay A* a fixed rent to cover the shop stuff & more importantly to keep him happy, then we'd work when we wanted & do what we wanted. I wanted to go on holiday. or to the pub or anywhere that I could enjoy the perks without the work. Well it was good times, with the new shop, a new girl, a nice flat & some decent cash coming in. I was flying high. But Adam airlines was about to hit some turbulence, I was gonna go to SanFrancisco. The tickets were bought, everything was ready, Me & my GF went out one night & came back to find the flat door open, thinkin' we'd been burgled I crept inside, nothin' was touched & we laughed that we'd stupidly left the door open, when I came home from work the next day the door was open again, this time I didn't laugh. All the SF money had gone, my passport too. I managed to get it replaced in time & borrow more money for SF, then my GF annouced the night before departure that she couldn't go. Dunno why. I'd already let my friend Tabitha work at my place in the shop while I was 'away' to keep up my rent, We'd given up the flat, now we couldn't go? I didn't know what the fuck to do. I didn't wanna go on my own. Next day I stroll into T**** to their surprise! They clubbed in & gave me some cash to help out after the burglary. It was nice of them & helped me out a lot. I did a bit of work in the back room for a few weeks, We ended up sleepin' on the shop floor & in B & B's or at friends & even upstairs at the Intrepid fox my favourit pub courtesy of the landlord for a while. I worked up a bit of cash. I went to L.A. When I came back I worked back at the shop for a bit, it wasn't happening. A* had taken over the helm of the good ship 'T' & he had an idea to get the piercers in my room & me out the back with him. my only stipulation when we got the shop was that I worked alone. I wasn't confident enough to share space & I couldn't be bothered to argue. I jumped overboard & I said I wasn't coming back. I said "keep it" I didn't want nothing. I had nowhere to live or work. I was happy to be free. I spent time at my mum & dads building up a portfolio of my work, eating properly & doing various arty jobs & a few tattoos on the locals to keep me in cash for a few months. Ironically the first shop I took my portfolio to, were impressed but couldn't offer me a job 'cos Tabitha had been promised the space after I jumped ship at T! But they had my number..............