My Tattoos Tell A Story

(This is very long, very drawn out, and it probably sucks worse than anything else you've read today. Enjoy!)

When I was about seventeen, I fell in love for the first time. Not Love-love, of course, but that stupid seventeen-year-old love, the one where you're sure that the person you're with is the person you're going to spend forever and ever and ever with. You feel this way even though you don't know her favorite color or what she wants to be when she grows up or her best subject in school. It is the completely brainless, mostly innocent brand of "love" that we all experienced when we were that age.

Her name was Tausha and she was almost a year younger than me - sixteen when we met, the Liesl to my Rolfe. She was very pretty, tall and thin with long brown hair and a cute face. We worked together at the same McDonald's franchisee that eventually put me through college, rarely crossing paths because she usually worked the morning shift with her mother and I came on later in the day. Somehow, the opening manager, Kristin, decided that we should go out on a date.

I still remember that first date. She was way overdressed in a very nice skirt, I brought my twelve-year-old sister, and we went to the mall, where I proceeded to "accidentally" bump my arm into her's every so often in an "I like you" display that was probably better suited to one of my sister's classmates than a high school junior. Casanova I was not.

As you might have guessed by now, it didn't work out. We dated for some totally inconsequential amount of time (I've always called it seven weeks, but it might have been less) before she decided I wasn't the guy for her and ended it. Almost immediately, she took up with one of the guys we worked with, an assistant manager named Doug who I had considered a friend. It turned out they had been fucking around behind my back for a couple of weeks before we broke up: one Sunday, for instance, I sat at home and read the second half of "The Stand" (the unabridged version) while waiting for her call. In the meantime, she was over at Doug's house doing God knows what.

Learning about these indiscretions did not put me in a good frame of mind. I seem to remember threatening to take his head off with the Louisville Slugger my brother had bought me when I was twelve. I still carried the bat in my car. False bravado. I wasn't a bad ass. I was seventeen and embarassed. Besides, Doug was a black belt in karate - he probably could have taken that Darryl Strawberry model and rammed it down my throat sideways.

Time passed. Tausha moved away, then moved back, started working at McDonald's again, started dating me again (for about twelve hours), told me she had cheated on me not only with Doug but with another guy she knew, started fucking a kid we worked with (no, that wasn't awkward...not at all) - and I still wanted her. Pride? What pride? I was a man obsessed, not so much with the person (my mother still refers to her as "the airhead", an assessment that might not have been too far off the mark) as with the idea of her. I wanted a girlfriend, she was the only girl in recent memory who had shown any interest in me, and I didn't want to let that go without a fight.

Looking back, I do not like the person I was at that time in my life.

Tausha eventually moved with her new boyfriend all the way up to Penobscot, Maine. After a few weeks, she called the police up there and told them that he had threatened her, or hit her, or something along those lines. In the end, it was probably just a lie or ill-advised cry for attention. I ended up getting in my car at eleven o'clock at night, tearing ass up I-95 at 80 MPH and rolling into Penobscot at three in the morning, armor fully shined and ready to rescue the damsel in distress.

Once there, unfortunately, I had no idea what to do. The police obviously hadn't taken the threats seriously, since they weren't at the house - and since I didn't know exactly what house it was, I didn't know where to find them. This was not one of my finer ideas.

I found a pay phone and called the police to see if they had any useful information. They were no help. For lack of a better option, I began wandering up and down the street, totally lost. Finally, I spied a house with a light on and two people sitting in the kitchen. Come to find out they had just arrived home from work and were settling in after a long day. I went up to the door, explained my situation, and - believe it or not - they pointed out the correct house. Good thing I'm not a crazed stalker or axe murderer or something. Come to think of it, good thing they weren't crazy.

I knocked on the door. The boyfriend answered. He was surprised to see me. I quietly exulted in his confusion and budding anger. He went to get Tausha. I sat on the steps and waited.

Half an hour later, we were in my car, heading south. I was exhausted but content; victory was mine! Tausha hadn't wanted to leave but was told by her boyfriend's father that since I had come all the way up there after her, she was leaving with me. To my addled brain, that was good enough.

For awhile, anyway. It was later in the day that I finally realized we were done, that I neither had nor wanted a chance with her. What happened, you ask, to drive this point home? Simple, really: she didn't thank me for driving all that way to pick her up in her hour of need. Somehow, that's all it took to make me realize that she didn't care about me and that I was, in fact, an idiot. It had only taken a year, but I could finally begin to like myself again, at least a little.

Somewhere along in there, I decided it would be a good idea to get a tattoo.

A coworker who had experienced a real relationship, real love and real heartbreak had had something done on her ankle in the aftermath of that bad breakup, and I was fascinated by the idea. Not my ankle, specifically, but the thought of it. A permanent reminder of a dark time in my life. Yeah, that's it. That's what I want. Awesome.

Being eighteen by this point but still just as stupid, I eschewed any research and just went with a place that somebody recommended: Mystic Dragon in Dover. My friend Jason went with me and helped me pick out the perfect design to show how I was feeling at the time:


One hour and $125 later, that sweet tat was on my left bicep. It sits high enough that I can hide it easily with a T-shirt (my mother-in-law knew me for four years before she found out about it), which is good because I absolutely hate it. Everything about it. I hate the design - a heart wrapped in barbed wire? Really? That was the best I could do? I hate the symbolism - not Tausha (I try not to hate people; it's one of the lessons I learned from Buck O'Neil), but the reminder of how mindlessly immature I was back then. It's nice to have a tattoo that means something, but come on - commemoration of a seven-week relationship? Fuck that.

For years, it was embarassing when people found out I had a tattoo, mainly because I've never seemed like the tattoo type and then I had to lift up my sleeve and show off that piece of crap. It's amazing how quickly someone can lose all respect for you.

Partly for that reason, I talked about getting another tattoo done for years. Unfortunately, it was never that easy. While I was in college, my money always went to other things (and besides, I wanted any new ink to mean something). My first job out of college paid $100 a week, which eventually turned into about $250 a week when it became a full-time gig in 2004. By that time, of course, my wife, Vicki, and I were planning on getting married, which meant that every spare cent was now going to bills or savings. We talked about tattoos from time to time, but never with any seriousness. It was always a hypothetical.

Shortly after we got married in September 2004, Vicki and I decided to have a baby. After several unsuccessful months and a few rounds of Clomid (horrible, horrible drug that fucked mercilessly with her hormones; she could be having a normal conversation with someone, then be in tears before anyone knew what happened), we went to a fertility doctor. His recommendation, after telling us all the ways they were going to help, all the methods they were going to consider? Start considering gastric bypass surgery, because Vicki's BMI was too high to go on any further and he doubted she could lose a substantial amount of weight through dieting and exercise alone.

We left the office, Vicki in tears and me in shock, cursing the name of the kindly Dr. Glatstein (who really didn't seem like a bad guy, but who also didn't fully prepare us for the severity of our situation) and vowing to prove that fucker wrong and do everything we could to make a baby on our own terms. Fuck him. On the way home, we stopped at a red light and Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" came on the radio:

If I lay here,
If I just lay here,
Would you lie with me and
Just forget the world?

Never before has a song so perfectly summed up what I was feeling at the exact moment I was feeling it. It was like my life had its own personal soundtrack for a few minutes. This might sound strange, but I could actually picture it as a movie scene: our car, sitting there at a red light...Vicki's head resting on my shoulder, tears streaming down her face...the light changing to green, cars honking behind us, as we just lost touch with the world for a few moments...the camera pulling back, showing the light changing from green back to yellow, people leaning out their car windows and yelling while our's doesn't move an inch...

And...scene.

We started the Atkins Diet by the end of the week. Vicki was a woman obsessed - her goal was to be pregnant by the time her cousin got married in September 2007 (this was all happening around September 2006, so she was counting on getting knocked up with about six months).

Before we knew it, the pounds were melting off. I lost 25 (who cares if I've experienced periodic chest and gastrointestinal pain since; it couldn't possibly be related to the fact that I ingested enough fat to take down a horse, could it?), Vicki lost 30 and we were both feeling pretty good.

Then one day in November, Vicki wasn't feeling particularly great. Her mother casually suggested, over lunch, that she might be pregnant, which of course got her all excited and sent her charging off to the drug store after work for a pregnancy test. She came home, went into the bathroom - and did the test wrong.

Bear in mind, this is a woman who has wanted to be pregnant since she was twenty-years-old and had probably taken upwards of fifty pregnancy tests. She generally knows what she's doing in these situations. This time, however, she didn't get enough urine on the little strip (I know: too much information) and it didn't work right. So she did what any rational person who had irrationally purchased only one pregnancy test would do: she peed on it a little more and hoped for the best.

Picture it: Nashua, 2006. November. I was sitting on the couch in our living room, probably typing something on the computer, when I heard a strangled cry from the bathroom: "Bri?!" She was half-crying, clearly trying to control herself. "You have to go get another test. I did this one wrong and it says positive. You have to go get another test. Go. Now."

And so I did. I went down the street to Walgreen's, picked up a box of two tests (see that logic? Self-taught, never had lessons) and returned as quickly as possible. Vicki went back into the bathroom, managed to do one correctly, and shortly confirmed the good news: she was with child. We were going to be parents. Not willing to accept the good news blindly, I made her take the second test as well. Then two more that I went out and bought. They all said the same thing: Hello, Mommy and Daddy.

Don't ask me to remember the next few months, because I don't. Somehow there was a lot of blogging involved, a lot of doctor's visits, a lot of stress. That's almost all I've got for memories. My brain was and is fried. At one point, the ladies I work with (men were outnumbered something like 19-2 in my program at one point; this year, we added a new guy! 18-3, baby!) threw us a surprise shower (well, it was supposed to be a surprise for me - Vicki knew about it in advance but accidentally allowed it to be leaked during a phone call with our friend Colleen; nobody knew that I knew, though) and I tried to thank everyone for everything they had done - the outpouring of gifts was just mind-blowing - but no words came out. I had planned to be eloquent and kind; instead I sounded like I had been drinking. Maybe I should've been. (That's it! The Pregnancy Drinking Game! If your significant other asks for a foot rub, drink twice. If she cries when you say hello, drink once. I'm probably going to hell.)

Joey was born about a month later, in mid-July. By that time, I had decided that I would take the plunge and commemorate his birth by finally getting another tattoo. We had looked around the Internet a bit and found a design we both liked, a nice-looking Celtic cross design with some open space in the middle for his initials and date of birth.

When Joey was two weeks old, Vicki and her mother took him to New York for a family gathering. I stayed home and went with my friend Allison to her go-to place: Precision Body Arts in Nashua. The artist, Nick, took the picture I had found and redrew it, putting the information I wanted in the middle on banners. It looked great. It still looks great, in my opinion:



If you ever go to Precision, I highly recommend Nick. He doesn't talk much, but his work is excellent.

Unlike my first tattoo, this is one I'm all too proud to show off. It's on my Facebook. It's on my Ballhype page. I'm surprised I hadn't put it somewhere on my blog already. Part of the infatuation is that it's new - it was done near the end of July - but there is also the fact that the symbolism behind this is so much more powerful than the barbed wire heart. For starters, those initials and numbers represent one of the two or three greatest days of my life, the day I finally got to meet the little guy who had been kicking the shit out of my wife's internal organs for nine months. It was one of those days where everything else melted away into the background and became unimportant. I didn't care about blogging. I didn't care about the Red Sox. Nothing else mattered besides this new addition to our family and I'm proud of the fact that we figured out a classy way to represent his arrival.

Also important: the cross itself. Despite holding a degree in religious studies, I am what some would call a lapsed Catholic. I made my First Communion in third grade (a year late) but was never confirmed and had to jump through hoops before being allowed to marry in the church. I don't know as much as I should about world religion (or any one religion, for that matter - although I can speak at length about Jewish baseball players). Two things I do believe in, however, are God and karma. I believe that there is a Supreme Maker who put on a hard hat and designed all of this in the beginning, then turned us loose to see what we would do. Is he involved in our everyday lives? Can't say. At the very least, though, I think he's there, watching over us and loving us unconditionally in spite of our faults. That's comforting, I think.

And karma...maybe I watch too much My Name Is Earl (previous seasons, of course; the current season is a humorless disappointment), but I've come to believe that things happen for a reason. Less than a year before Tausha unceremoniously dumped me twice, mainly because she had never really liked me and only started dating me because she didn't want to be alone, I had briefly dated a girl named Amber and unceremoniously dumped her, mainly because I had never really liked her in that way and only started dating her because I didn't want to be alone. What goes around, comes around. Everything happens for a reason.

More recently and maybe more to the point: I work closely with one kid in particular. A lot of my coworkers are intimidated by him and don't feel they could work well with him. Is it some sort of fate, some sort of karma, that I happened to begin working that job at almost the same time this child arrived? Where would he be without me? Where would I be without him? Things like that can be explained away easily by coincidence, I suppose. Sometimes, I just think there's too much coincidence to be coincidence.

The final piece of importance on the cross are the Celtic knots (forgive me if that's not the official name for them; it just seems to make sense). I'm not as up-to-date on my Irish history as I should be, but that piece of my heritage is still very important to me. With all the Moynahans, McMahons, and Sheridans in my family, it has to be.

So the cross was a good choice. I'm proud to have it and will show just about anyone at a moment's notice, assuming I'm wearing a short-sleeve shirt. I can't wait until Joey is old enough to care. I hope he realizes that it is a physical representation of how important he is to me.

After the Joey tattoo, I wasn't planning on getting another for quite awhile - probably not until we had another baby. Considering Vicki took three months off and only got paid for about two, our financial situation didn't really allow for unnecessary expenditures. Fortunately, my brother is working on a mid-life crisis at the moment and decided to have some work of his own done.

When Tim was in high school, he had major back surgery to correct a curvature of his spine caused by scoliosis. I can still remember the days after the surgery, watching him hobble around with a little pair of grabbers that he used for picking stuff up off the floor. He couldn't bend over at all. It was during the winter, and I also vividly recall going across the street to get the mail - I was about eight - and not being able to get back because the road was practically a solid sheet of ice and I just knew that I would be hit by a car if I tried crossing. No idea how long I was over there, with him yelling at me from the doorway to just suck it up and cross already, but I'm willing to bet it was hours. Alright, it was probably five minutes.

Anyway, the surgery left Tim with two metal rods supporting the spine and a lengthy scar down the middle of his back. A few years ago, he had a small dagger tattooed on his right shoulder blade, with the blade pointing toward the scar. I thought it was cool because it fit my main criteria for getting inked: it meant something to him personally. If you haven't figured it out already, that's really the most important thing for me.

Not long after I got the cross done, Tim decided he wanted to add another one himself, this time on the left shoulder. He went to Tattoo Junkies in Portsmouth, where the artist, Erik, worked to create a custom piece of Brian Boru, who I believe was the last great king of Ireland or something like that. Tim was a little worried for a while, with some excess peeling and whatnot, but I think it turned nicely in the end. Very well done. So well done, in fact, that he decided to have Erik work on something else: another custom design of "O'Manachain", the name from which most versions of Moynahan (Monaghan, Monahan, etc.) are derived. He had it done on his right shoulder, incorporating the dagger, in October.

I wasn't 100% in love with the design, but when my family got together for my birthday in late October, Tim mentioned that if I was interested, he would pay for me to get the same one. A fraternal bond, if you will. Largely for that reason, I decided to go for it, adding tattoo number three last weekend:



Again, the celebration of Irish ancestry is pretty cool (I think that's the family crest that was incorporated into the "O" and the "M"), but the deciding factor was definitely the family connection. Although my brother and I have been close for a long time, we're still eight years apart, which means there is a substantial generation gap between us. Even now, three weeks past my 28th birthday, he still considers me his little brother (or, as he likes to say, his "little" brother - ironic because I'm three inches taller and 100 pounds heavier than him). This shared tattoo, in a strange way, somehow helps narrow that distance. There are only two people in the world with that exact tattoo (well, almost exact: his "anachain" lettering is blue), and we're brothers.

And that's the story of my tattoos.