The Tattoo Artist Read Online Free PDF Page A

disapproval, though disapproval may be too neutral a term— disenchantment, really. When Philip was a boy, and Mr. Ehrenreich a young father, they had evidently been infatuated with each other to the exclusion of Philip’s mother. But when the boy reached surly, carping adolescence, and the father became the object of the boy’s tirades, Mr. Ehrenreich turned on his son as only a spurned lover can.
    He sent the shy gangly boy off to Europe to be indoctrinated as he had been indoctrinated—German gymnasium, officer’s commission, Swiss bank apprenticeship—fully expecting that when the young man returned, he would readily emulate his father, from his choice of claret down to the side on which he parted his hair.
    Philip came back an anarchist, an avant-garde painter, an absinthe drinker with hair to his shoulders, and the scrimmage was on.
    All this was to say that the money for the Breuer chairs, the Oceanic mask collection, the gilt-framed Gauguin, came from Philip’s mother, a nervous, frail soul badgered into bitterness by her austere, acerbic husband. The money was part of her private inheritance, untouched and untouchable by Mr. Ehrenreich according to their old-world Jewish wedding contract. In the end, it hardly mattered. When the stock market plummeted, and Philip’s father abdicated his life, her assets dwindled down to a single diamond necklace, three diamond brooches, and two gold wedding rings, which Mrs. Ehrenreich tied together with a black thread so that the larger one wouldn’t accidentally slip off her skeletal finger and diminish her estate by a sixth.
    With the biannual sale of a piece of jewelry, and a frugal lifestyle, there were just enough means for her to scrape by, but nothing left over for her son.
    It was one thing to have theorized, over a glass of port, the good riddance of wealth, to have debated, over brandy, the end of capitalism, to have known, as I knew, that having in abundance what others are in need of is wrong, and it’s quite another to find oneself suddenly putting it all into practice.
    As devastated as Philip was by his father’s suicide, he also made a point to celebrate the end of capitalism. As soon as an acceptable period of mourning had passed, he threw an “end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it” bash. The gala’s centerpiece was a four-foot-high pound cake that Philip had baked himself, then sculpted and frosted to look like the Chrysler Building. Wielding a Mexican revolutionary’s machete that he had picked up at auction years before, he ceremoniously cut the skyscraper down to size, serving slices of gargoyles and office suites on paper plates to our anarchist comrades. Then, raising a glass overflowing with Russian vodka, Philip proposed a toast, “to the upcoming revolution,” “to the dream made real,” “to the end of opulence and greed.”
    I ate my cake and drank my vodka, but I forwent the toasts. You see, I had already known the other side of opulence, and I had no desire to go back there. In Philip’s Marxist utopia, we all drank from the same glass. In mine, we all drank from the same crystal.
    By my calculations, even if we sold the furniture and Philip’s mask collection, we’d buy ourselves a year at most. Breuer chairs and Oceanic masks were suddenly out of vogue, as were the paintings of avant-garde artists.
    I went back to the East Side to find work as a waist maker, but there wasn’t any work, not even piecemeal labor. I banged on the gated storefronts of the Chinese sweatshops, but when they saw my American skin, they shooed me away.
    For a time, I earned a pittance carving ice slugs for an ice-man on Rivington Street. The slugs sold three for a penny, and were used to feed the old tenements’ coin heaters. When the gas man came to collect, all the evidence had melted. It didn’t take long, though, for people to start carving their own.
    I took in sewing. Even our bedraggled bohemian friends had to make their eccentric wardrobes last as