I get off the greyhound bus in Cleveland, take the train home, shower, and walk to Cleveland Ink a few blocks from my house. On the way, I'm more nervous about how much it's going to hurt rather than whether I'm going to regret it. So I know it's a good decision.
Making a statement that is going to stick around for the rest of your life is a scary, scary thing. It's not something I'm used to. Most everything we talk about -- the things we believe in -- doesn't last very long in the public sphere. Facebook updates are obsolete in a matter of days, if not hours. I sometimes forget what I'm talking about halfway through talking about it. It makes me wonder if the conversation I'm having with you at the bar means anything, if I'm really opening up and getting to know you, or whether I just enjoy having your company.
I wait inside Cleveland Ink for a minute before my friend Dustin shows up. He gets a few things together and suggests going to Gypsy Bean for coffee before starting. He's moving to Gordon Square in a week, so we talk about the neighborhood, the art scene in Cleveland, and the girls in the art scene. This and that.
Wanting to be liked, I grew up speaking in generalities, masking how I truly felt until I could somehow figure out how you felt. I had to learn how to make statements. I wouldn't have outright told you I loved Pearl Jam when I was 14, but if you had told me they were your favorite band, I would have told you the truth. The older I got, and the more I saw how boring agreeable people were and how bored I was being agreeable, I began experimenting with self expression. I took my guitar outside of my bedroom. It was time to make a statement.
We get back to Cleveland Ink, Dustin makes a few suggestions about my design, we make a few last minute adjustments, and he sticks the stencil to my arm. I lay on my back, talk to Dustin about how capitalism injected shmoozing into the life of the artist, and feel the needle for the first time. It's not the worst thing in the world. But it's not pleasant either.
After playing music in Columbus for a while, I began to get a distaste for the bands in the scene. They all seemed to act as if they were famous. On stage they dressed the part, in their disheveled glam apparel, and spoke with that cockiness that comes with a slight drug addiction. The music was something of an afterthought, an accessory, like the neon green wristband you need to get into the bar. They weren't there for the music, they were there for their own glory.
Near the end of my experiment with being a career musician, I would play in a pink wig and hot pants. At one show I singed my arm hair and snorted it on stage, then let a coke head in the audience do it on my other arm. I wanted to have the opposite of the normal musician look. I didn't know what statement I was trying to make, I just knew I didn't want to say what the other musicians were saying.
A guy Dustin knows stops by. We realize we know some of the same people and talk about things I already don't remember. I do enjoy the conversation though. It takes my mind off of the needle. Later, Dustin and I realize we've had similar crushes on the same girls. I instantly feel closer to the guy, even as he's permanently staining my skin. An older lady from down the street stops by and tells us how she can't stop getting tattoos ever since the shop moved in a block from her house. She seems a little loopy, but nice, and looking at every single one of her butterfly tattoos is better than concentrating on the needle. All in all, it's a good time.
When I first starting playing music professionally, it was out of an odd feeling that if I didn't at least attempt to be a successful musician, if I just kept to my room making up little songs, I would be a failure. I would somehow be wasting my talent. So when college began to lose its luster, and I realized I was paying way too much money not to care about being there, I dropped out and tried something else.
After a couple years of playing shows, burning my arm hair, and wearing hot pants in public, something seemed amiss. I stopped enjoying music. Writing music turned from a calming, almost religious experience, to a chore. If music was to be my business, writing had to be my job.
When I was six, my Nana gave my Mom and Dad a piano so I could play. After plowing through the preliminary lessons, the "chop sticks", the finger exercises, I began to love it. There's a very simple joy that comes from making pretty noises. She got me a violin when I was in middle school from an auction. She thought it might be worth something. It wasn't, but it still played. When she passed away, I booked my first show two weeks later at the Nines in Ithaca, New York. When a plastic grocery bag floated by me on the day of the show, I took it as Nana saying good luck.
Nana was always good at helping me explore the things I was interested in. When she learned I liked to draw at 4, she let me use her old paper doll stencils to draw people. When I was 8 and learned how to juggle, she bought me some cheap plastic juggling rings and clubs. I would think most grandmothers wouldn't want to feed their grandchild's ambition of joining the circus (by 11 I could ride a unicycle. I honestly thought it would impress girls), but for Nana, it was about helping me explore the things I liked, whether it would produce a marketable skill in the future or a clown.
Don't worry about booking shows, don't worry about what girls or boys will think, just do it for the sake of doing it. Don't introduce yourself to people for the sake of 'networking' or finding someone to fuck, do it because making friends is fun. Because having people in your life makes life worth living. If there is one thing I am thankful for learning, one statement I'm not afraid to make, it's that. Thank you, Nana.
Thank you for helping me grow up with vitiligo, when I had a lot of anxiety about who I was. When I felt strange, different from everyone. Thank you for helping me discover things about myself that I could like, I could be proud of. Things that would later help me relate to the world around me.
After three hours of work and one short potty break, Dustin is done. I tip him, pay at the front, and walk over to the Save-A-Lot for lotion and off-brand honey nut cheerios. I stop by my friend Myles' house on the way home and eat a few bowls of cereal and sample the champagne he's serving for New Year's Eve to calm my nerves.
After a couple hours, I take off the bandage and show him the work. A mockingbird and the letters JGT.
Jamie Griggs Tevis.
Nana. A woman who married an atheist and sang in the church choir.
“Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
