A Good and Useful Hurt (4 page)

Mike and Deb went to Founders, a local brewery, two days after he’d tattooed Doc.
He’d asked Becky and Lamar to tag along, but they’d both declined and winked at one another after he’d asked; neither wanted to be a third wheel. Deb was excited; she’d never been to a brewery. They walked from the shop in weather that was turning cold.

“What’s it like?”

“Do you like beer?”

“It’s OK.”

“Have you ever had a Michigan beer?”

“Like one made here? I’ve had Stroh’s before. It was gross.”

“Not like Stroh’s, like Founders or Bell’s or Dark Horse.”

“Then no. But Stroh’s is gross.”

“You’ll like this beer, plus I know a couple of the brewers, so we should be able to get a little tour.”

“Cool.”

“Are you cold?”

“Yeah, no colder than you, though.”

“It’s the lake. She’s a beauty, but she’s a bitch.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Yes, you are.”

“I meant people, not women, you ass factory.”

Mike tensed, and she grabbed his left hand and pulsed it twice. “I’m just fucking with you. Calm down.”

“We’re here.”

“This is it?”

“Could you at least acknowledge that the building looks nice? Jesus.”

Deb grabbed Mike tightly around the arms and said, “It’s lovely fucking architecture, but I’m freezing. Can we just go in?”

Mike strode up the steps ahead of her, pulled open the glass door, and waved her through.

They sat at a table near to both the bar and the door, neutral territory. Deb looked over the chalkboards listing the beer names, strengths, and flavors.

“What’s IPA?”

“Oh, we’re in deep water, then. Deb, what beers do you like?”

“Good ones?”

Their waitress pulled up to the table. “Hey, Mike, how ya been?”

“Good, you guys staying busy?”

“Yeah, always a lot of drunks when the economy’s bad. You?”

“We’re doing OK. Could be better, could be worse.”

“What’ll ya have?”

“I’ll have an Oatmeal Stout, mug 225. I imagine my friend here would be best suited with a sampler.”

“Sounds good. I’ll have those right out.”

Deb watched the waitress leave and then said, “What is mug 225?”

“My mug.”

“What do you mean, ‘My mug’?”

“They have a club here where you can pay a little extra money to have your own glass.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I think it’s kind of cool. Plus you get drink specials and deals on growlers.”

The waitress returned, setting mug 225 in front of Mike. It was filled with a black liquid. In front of Deb she set a wooden rack with six three-ounce glasses in it. The waitress said, “OK, left to right, we have a Pale Ale, our take on a classic, light with a mild finish; Red’s Rye, that’s a hoppy red ale; Centennial IPA, that’s our house IPA; Dirty Bastard, our specialty and a Scotch style ale; Oatmeal Stout, a lighter stout with a mild finish; and our Imperial Stout, a Russian style stout with a 10.5% ABV.”

Deb looked at the drinks and back at the smiling waitress. “Alright, let’s give it a whirl.” The waitress turned and left the table as Deb picked up the glass of Imperial Stout and held it high. “Cheers!”

Mike tapped glasses and drank long from the mug. When he lowered it Deb was smiling, a white foam mustache across her upper lip.

“This is good. Like really good!”

“It’s real beer. ’Bout time you had some.”

“Agreed.”

She finished the drink and then took up another of the glasses, this one filled with a lighter colored liquid. “This is the IPA?”

“Correct.”

“It’s kind of bitter. I like the stout better, but it’s not bad. What’s IPA stand for?”

“India Pale Ale.”

“So it’s from India?”

“Sort of.” Mike drank again from his mug, then continued. “Back before modern preservation, sailors were having issues with beer staying good for long trips.”

“Like to India.”

“Exactly. Alcohol was a known preservative, so they’d have brewers add extra hops to the barrels of beer to pump up the alcohol content. The beer was still a pale ale because it was light in color, but it had the extra hops. Soon enough, IPA.”

“That’s really cool. Do they all have neat stories?”

“I suppose they do, but that’s the one I know best.”

“That’s fun. What one are you having again?”

“The Oatmeal Stout. It’s next to the empty cup on the end.”

She drank. “The Imperial is still the best one. That is good, though. Just not as good.”

“Do you want to see if we can get the brewery tour?”

“Can I finish my beers first?”

“We’re not moving until you do.”

She smiled and he smiled back. There was regret in smiling, but she was pretty and this was fun.

Neither of his brewer friends were working, but Mike knew enough of the staff that getting a brewer’s assistant to walk them through the tunnels of tanks and vats was no problem.
Deb asked questions as they walked, alternating her never-ending queries with sips from a pint glass of Imperial Stout. It was a short tour, and after seeing the old bourbon barrels that were being used to age beer for the following fall, they returned to the bar. Mike set his mug down and said, “You want to do one more?”

“I think I’m good. I feel kind of wobbly.”

“I keep forgetting you’re a rookie.”

“I’ll get better.”

“I don’t doubt that in the least.”

“So what now?”

“I suppose I ought to walk you home.”

“That would be wonderful.”

They strode side by side, and Mike spoke a constant monologue as they crossed through the city. He felt like if he stopped talking she might not speak again, and so he never let the conversation die completely.

“That used to be a museum.”

“What happened to it?”

“Idiots.”

“How do you mean?”

“They built a bigger museum and put about half of the stuff from the old one in it, from what I hear. My trip lasted about five minutes. It’s just a big show-off for the city.”

“Why only five minutes?”

“I sort of got kicked out for, um, expressing my opinion.”

“You’re a museum freak! That’s like the weirdest fetish ever.”

“I used to go in the old one all the time when I was a kid. My dad wasn’t good for a whole lot, but he loved that museum. I don’t think I ever went longer than a couple months when I was younger without popping in there.”

“Did he ever go to the new one?”

“No. Heart got him a couple years before it was done. He was out of our lives by then anyways, went west. He probably would have missed it either way.”

“Is your mom still alive?”

“Yeah, but we aren’t close. She still lives in North Carolina and—”

“You lived in North Carolina?”

“Yeah, but not long enough. No accent.”

“That’s where I’m from!”

“Crazy. My mom lives outside of Charlotte, but my last few years there I lived north of Havelock, by the navy base.”

“No fucking way. I was born in Mount Olive—that’s just a couple of hours away!”

“Small world. Why’d you leave?”

“I just needed to escape. My dad was pretty awful, to be honest. I always thought, growing up, that I was a bad kid. When I got older I realized I just got a bad hand. Why’d you leave?”

“Well, the last straw with my mom didn’t help, but it was mostly just the way my first tattooing job ended. I was apprenticed down there, real old-school. I questioned some things that were happening around the shop and got tossed out on my ass. I deserved it, I knew better than to cop that kind of attitude, but I was young and didn’t care. I moved back here because Michigan had never really done me wrong. Of course, that was before I found out about the museum.”

She laughed and grabbed his arm. Even in the cold he could feel the warmth of her touch through his jacket.

“When did you start piercing?”

“When I was seventeen.”

“In a store?”

“Yep.”

“How?”

“I left home when I was sixteen and moved to Toronto. I have an aunt who lives there, and she’d left North Carolina for basically the same reasons I did. She’s a nurse, and had a ton of old college texts lying around, so I just absorbed as much as I could. She thought it was cool, taught me how to suture, and managed to squash most of my really bad ideas before they got off the ground. Anyways, I just walked in this store to try and find some jewelry for my ears, and there was this chick in there piercing this guy’s navel. She was just butchering him, had no clue whatsoever what she was doing. I said something, and for whatever reason the guy trusted me to do it instead. I got a job on the spot, stayed there for a little over a year, and then switched it up to work somewhere else. The whole thing just worked out so well. A couple of really innovative guys, Tom Brazda and Blair, were working full time in Toronto back then, and I got to work with both of them and find out why they were doing what they were doing. After a while I was burnt on Toronto and tried Detroit. That didn’t work out well, and now I’m here. You’ve got a hell of a reputation, in case you were wondering.”

Mike felt himself blush. Her apartment building saved him the trouble of stammering some kind of reply.

“This is my exit. You have to promise to take me out again. I haven’t done anything like this in a long time.”

“Deal. It’s been a while for me, too.”

Deb turned to face him, grabbed the sleeves of Mike’s jacket, pulled him close, and kissed him hard across the lips. It was a night-ending kiss, but not like one from a sister. It had weight.

She held him like that for a few seconds, then backed away and smiled. “You going to stop by the shop tomorrow?”

“I…yeah, probably.”

“We’re friends. But I’d like to be better friends. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Have a safe walk.”

A part of Mike that he’d thought long dead awoke in his mind. “I’d like that too.”

And all at once, in that moment, Mike thought that maybe everything would be OK, that maybe he could let Sid go. He walked into the wind, and if you had seen him that night you wouldn’t have noticed anything about him besides his smile.

Three days later, Mike was drawing at the table in the back of the store with Lamar
. Lamar was working on some charcoal sketches of a portrait he had later in the week, and Mike had gotten up the gumption to work on a new set of flash, the pre-made designs that tattoo shops decorate their walls with.

He hadn’t drawn a set since back in the early days of his apprenticeship, and it actually felt nice to be working on art for himself instead of someone else. The sheet he was drawing now had a myriad of hearts across it, lined in ink, painted in water-color. He’d been up with his sketchbook almost all night, but he wasn’t tired. Everything felt different since he’d gone out with Deb.

Mike sucked quickly on the paintbrush and then dipped it back onto the palette. Waving yellow across a rose half covered by a heart, he grinned. Why had he forgotten how fun it could be to create art for no one but himself?

While he and Lamar painted and sketched, they could hear Deb working two doors down. She’d told Lamar before Mike had arrived that she was going to be bisecting the penis of a man who’d come up from Illinois. Lamar, to his regret, had asked her exactly what in the hell that meant, and she’d explained it. As unhappy as he had been to learn that less than twenty feet away from him Deb was going to be dividing a man’s penis into two separate, yet still functional halves, he had been more than happy to share the information with Mike.

The sounds coming from the room were worse than expected because, rather than the screaming of a person being killed, the man was carrying on a discussion with Deb about the merits of the works of Stanley Kubrick. After just over an hour of having to listen to Deb explain that the only Kubrick works she thought had true merit were
The Shining
and
2001: A Space Odyssey
, while the man argued vehemently against her, the noise finally stopped. The man left, the stereo washed out the sounds of her cleaning, and then she popped her head into the back area.

Lamar said, “I don’t want to know. Like, none of it.”

Deb faked a scowl. “You guys get lunch yet?”

Mike set down his paintbrush. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, I’m hungry. That was hard work!”

Lamar said, “Girl, you just cut up a dude’s dick! How in the fuck you gonna eat?”

“Well I wasn’t going to get hot dogs, if that makes you feel any better.”

Mike said, “I guess I could eat.”

“There is some seriously messed up shit happening in here,” Lamar said. “Seriously. How could you two even think about food right now? I feel sick just sitting here.”

“What do you want?”

“Did that new Mexican place open yet?”

“Have Becky give them a call.”

Deb stuck her head out of the doorway and screamed, “Becky, call that Mexican joint!”

She called back, “OK!”

Lamar and Mike stared at her as Deb sat at the table. Mike said, “I could’ve done that. I meant walk down there and see if she could call.”

“My way is more efficient.”

“Louder, too.”

“See? It’s better in a couple of different ways.”

Becky screamed from the lobby, “They’re still closed!”

“Well Mexican’s out, then,” Deb said. “Too bad, I wanted some flautas.”

“How about pizza?” Becky screamed from the lobby again.

Deb yelled back, “I’m sick of pizza!”

Mike said, “How about Chinese?”

Lamar interrupted: “So we’re all just gonna yell now?”

Becky called from the front, “How about Chinese?”

Deb yelled back, “That’s what Mike just said!”

“I’ll get the menu!”

Lamar, sitting now with his hands over his ears, finally lowered them. “Done?”

“I think so. You want some Chinese?”

He sighed. “Fine. But y’all seriously don’t need to be yelling.”

“Cool. Is the menu in the filing cabinet?”

Mike said, “Yes.”

“Hey, Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“You want to go see a movie at the UICA? They’re showing
Happiness
. I’ll get the menu.”

Deb left the room. Lamar leaned back in his seat and stared at Mike.

Mike said, “Don’t start.”

“Dude.”

“Don’t start.”

“Dude, for real. Her?”

“We’re just friends.”

“Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re finally doing something, but Mike, she is crazy. Crazy crazy. Crazy.”

“She’s nice. There’s a lot she doesn’t show.”

“She just cut a man’s dick in half. That makes
you
crazy. Don’t even discuss that with me.”

“It’s nothing right now anyways—we’re just friends.”

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“What in the hell is the UICA?”

“I suppose I’ll find out tonight.”