It's Gonna Be a Generation Xmas ... or Not

Farewell to the Tiki Lounge

"Is this yours?" a foot-high plastic statuette of the X-Men's Wolverine is held up for me to peruse. I nod mutely and it is carried out to the truck.

"How about these?" Melissa motions toward a set of Godzilla figurines marching across the top of the bookcase. Mothra, Gidjrah, Megalon, the Atomic Monster. I paid for all of them but I don't want to take them with me because they remind me too much of Chris, with his full-sleeve tattoo of Godzilla serving the severed head of Felix the Cat to a bound and gagged Bettie Page. I shake my head. She starts throwing Bettie Page magnets into a box, and I want to protest but I just don't have the energy to explain. I let her pack the magnets even though I never want to see them again. Damn Bettie Page. Damn Bettie and Felix and Ganesh and Elvis and every other super-hip icon in this stupid house. Oooooh, we're just so cool, with our tattoo parlor and our black Volkswagen and our painfully ironic decor. We were the coolest things in Winston-Salem for six glorious months — and that and eighty bucks bought me a U-Haul ride back to Richmond to live with my parents, broke, brokenhearted, and too cool for words.

* * *

Two years ago, I moved in with Chris, when he was a short-order cook and I was a high school teacher at a psychiatric hospital. We met at the modern-day version of the soda shop — an AA meeting. His story was edgy and dramatic — art school at sixteen, time on the road with the rock band GWAR, a year in New York as an animator for a hip gross-out cartoon, a hitchhiking trip down south that left him in a ditch, OD'd in a hospital gown. It was such a good story that I never questioned the inconsistencies and contradictions that popped up each time he retold it. Besides, my own story was less interesting. My stint as a small-time heavy metal flack in hairband-era L.A. had left me with a propensity for other people's prescriptions and a drinking program that edged my freelance journalism work right off my schedule. I came skulking back to Richmond by way of rehab, bloated and broke, looking like a miniature Ozzy Osbourne and doomed to a future of glamorous Friday nights in church basements, making coffee and cleaning ashtrays after the Serenity Prayer.

By the time Chris showed up on my recovery radar, things were looking up. I had gone back to school and gotten my master's degree, lost the beer weight, and found that I had a gift for teaching hard-knock kids. In my English class, I had junior felons reading Shakespeare and runaway girls writing their anger out in epic poems. I might have lost my chance at heavy metal glory, but life was OK. And when I met Chris, it looked like it was getting even better.

Six months ago I had quit my job and moved with him to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, so that he could apprentice as a tattoo artist at the Ink Well. It had seemed like the perfect answer to the eternal artist's dilemma — how to make a living at your art. We thought that the apprenticeship would be our first step on the road to financial independence, artistic freedom, and, eventually, happily ever after. Two weeks ago, casually and coolly, with the Royal Crown Revue's "Hey, Pachuco" playing in the background, he told me to go home. So, for the past two weeks, home has been my childhood room at my parents' house, where I huddled, tearstained and crushed, awaiting my thirtieth birthday ... alone.

I never saw it coming, though by all accounts I should have. Business was great. After tattooing for only six months, Chris was already working by appointment only. Every multi-pierced hipster in town wanted custom work from the hot new artist. Everybody at the coffee shop, the small-town raves, and the Greensboro nightclubs knew who he was, and he ate it up. He started getting into the role. He cut his curly, shoulder-length hair into a slicked-down Caesar, bleached it out, and grew a goatee. He started smoking high-priced imported cigarettes ("They're part of my image"), wearing bowling shirts, and listening to Sinatra. Our living room was always full of twentysomething guys with shaved heads and their barely legal stripper girlfriends, playing Nintendo and eating our food. It was hard not to notice that, in my own house, I no longer fit in. More and more often, I was inventing reasons to retire to the spare room when company showed up — e-mails to return, auctions to monitor, any excuse not to sit on the floor watching my boyfriend bond with kids barely older than my former students over Tomb Raider and Korn. I had become the Cynthia Lennon of the Winston-Salem tattoo scene, a bespectacled, frumpy reminder of life before cool.

I tried, however weakly, to get with the program. I traded my passé round schoolteacher frames for saucy black cat's-eye specs. I thrift-shopped on weekends for just the right touches for our happy hipster home — a fleet of vintage chrome toasters, a Formica dinette, a curvaceous doublewide 1950s stove (though I drew the line at letting him paint flames on the sides). I even helped out at the tattoo parlor as much as I could, making runs to Bojangles' and Burger King for the artists, picking up Vaseline and gloves when supplies were low, and handing out tiny tubes of Bacitracin and care sheets to the satisfied customers. I cannot pretend that I enjoyed my job all of the time. More than once, while waiting in the Taco Bell drive-through lane for half an hour or more — only a few hours south of Richmond, the pace of everything in Winston-Salem is decidedly more Suhth'n — I caught myself thinking, So this is why I got a master's degree? So that I can pick up tostadas for a former biker who, even as we speak, is sketching a Taz on some trailer bride's ass?

Not that I didn't like Bishop, the owner of the shop and Chris's boss. In fact, one of the few things I enjoyed about spending twelve hours a day...