Casey Moore’s. One of those Scottsdale joints where the beer is cold and the desperation is just a little bit better dressed. I was at the bar, minding my own goddamn business, throwing down my usual poison, when she sat down next to me.
Young. Twenties. Covered in tattoos like a goddamn roadmap of bad decisions. Good looking, though, in that broken, beautiful way. There were other empty stools, plenty of them. But she picked the one right next to the aging wolf. Body language. A quiet, unspoken invitation to the dance. So, naturally, I obliged.
“You know,” I said, leaning in just enough to let her smell the cheap whiskey and the quiet confidence, “I don’t have a single tattoo. Always been jealous. Could never find anything that meant enough to carve into my own goddamn skin. What’s the story with yours?” I pointed at one on her arm, a dark swirl of ink and maybe regret.
And then the floodgates opened.
“Well,” she said, her voice quiet, almost matter-of-fact, “this one is for my uncle. My mom’s brother.” She took a sip of her drink. “I found him. When I was a kid. Walked outside, and he was just… floating. Face down in the pool.” She remembered telling her mom, the paramedics, the quiet, ugly, and completely incomprehensible finality of a body being pulled from the water. A beautiful, sun-drenched memory of death. That was the first exhibit.
She didn’t pause, didn’t wait for a reaction. Just pulled up her shirt a little, revealing another piece of artwork etched onto her ribs, something intricate, almost medical-looking. “This one,” she said, her voice still flat, “is for my sister.”
Her sister. Playing in the pool. Jumped in, hit her head on the bottom. Knocked her out cold. Came back up, facedown, a thin red ribbon trailing behind her in the blue water. Her mom screaming, pulling the limp, bluish body out. Paramedics, police, a helicopter ride to some fancy hospital in California. They saved her life. But only about 80% of it. She pulled out her phone then, a quiet, modern interruption to the horror show, and showed me a picture. A woman in a wheelchair, her eyes vacant, a beautiful, living ghost trapped in a broken machine.
“She’s why I do what I do,” the girl told me. A nurse’s aide for special needs people. Home care. Friendship. All the quiet, gentle, and completely bullshit democratic thingies that don’t pay enough to keep the lights on but make you feel like you’re one of the good guys. Her sister, the beautiful, broken doll in the wheelchair, was her inspiration.
And then she saw me looking. At her chest. She had three little diamond studs, marching in a straight line down her sternum. She unbuttoned her shirt another notch, no bra underneath, a quiet, deliberate offering. “These?” she said. “From the accident.”
Seventeen years old. Playing in the street on a sunny afternoon with her friends. A twenty-year-old kid, probably high or stupid or both, driving twenty miles an hour. Didn’t see her. Didn’t hit her and send her flying. No. Sucked her under the car. Dragged her. For two goddamn blocks. A beautiful, screaming, and completely unbelievable symphony of tearing flesh and grinding bone. She pulled out the phone again. Pictures. Her belly, split open like a gutted fish, held together with staples and hope, left open for months so the ruined landscape inside could try to heal. Discussing the pictures? Christ, no. Disgusting pictures. Beautiful, ugly, and completely honest photographs of her own near-death.
She scrolled through the gallery of her own destruction, searching for the next exhibit. She found it on her other arm. A portrait. A child. The best looking tattoo of the bunch, artistically speaking.
“My son,” she said.
Got pregnant at twenty. Had the baby. Living with her mom. A long, intense conversation one afternoon, yelling, crying, the usual beautiful music of a broken family. And then, the quiet. The sudden, chilling realization. “Where’s Charlie?” They ran outside. And there he was. Floating. Midway between the bottom and the top of the pool. Dead on arrival. She didn’t show much emotion telling that one. Just went back to her phone, showed me a picture of the boy in his little coffin. A handsome kid, even with the faint blue tinge to his skin.
And that was it. The tour was over. A beautiful, ugly, and completely devastating collection of tragedies, all etched onto the skin of a twenty-two-year-old girl. I was in my forties then, back in the Scottsdale meat grinder days.
And what did I do, after hearing this litany of horrors, this quiet, casual recitation of a life that had been one goddamn train wreck after another?
I took her home and fucked her, of course.
The attraction was the tattoos, sure. And maybe the fact that she was short, and yeah, maybe I have a thing for midgets. But mostly? It was the beautiful, ugly, and completely honest spectacle of it all. A woman who had been through that much hell and was still standing, still breathing, still willing to climb onto a strange man in the dark. That’s a certain kind of power. A beautiful, desperate, and completely intoxicating kind of survival.
We had an incredible time, in that purely physical, animal way. Hours. Sessions. But then, one day, she was telling me about a bad day she had with her grandmother. And I asked how old the grandmother was. “Oh, she’s fifty,” the girl said.
Fifty. My goddamn age. The grandmother was my age. I didn’t even ask how old her mother was. The math was too depressing.
I kept seeing her, but we never went out in public. It was just the quiet, honest transaction of two broken animals finding a little bit of warmth in the dark. It worked, for a while.
Eventually, I ended it. I found someone else, something that looked a little more like a real relationship, or at least a better lie. She moved on, too.
But it’s a good story, isn’t it? A beautiful, ugly, and completely honest snapshot of the quiet, beautiful, and completely fucked-up degeneration of it all. A girl whose life is a museum of tragedy, and a man whose first instinct is to see if she’ll still spread her legs.
We’re all just beautiful, broken animals, aren’t we? Just trying to get through the goddamn night.
