HUMOR: Two Hamburgers, Please
Is that really a tattoo? Did Drew really wet himself getting inked? Did Drew and Ellen call mom from California to ask permission to emblazon "V"s on their forearms for all eternity? Read on.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
As church bells chimed and the people of my hometown in Pennsylvania wept in utter joy at the announcement that I had written my 100th column for the FXBG Advance, there was one prevailing question on the minds of many readers.
Some readers did wonder if this literary achievement now elevated me to the standing of such Reading heavyweights as John Updike and Wallace Stevens. Though I will admit that Stevens and I have both mined the underwater world of dolphins to good effect, I feel that my writings on the sexual interests of dolphins are less obtuse than the drivel in “The Comedian as the Letter C”:
An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,
Berries of villages, a barber’s eye,
An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,
Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung
On porpoises, instead of apricots,
And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,
Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.
Other readers have wondered, not without merit, that if I, as a man of such talents, had only stuck with the violin after elementary school and continued to perform with the Reading Symphony Orchestra would I have become such a musical inspiration to my homegirl Taylor Swift that she never would have left Reading for Nashville. Thereby changing the course of pop music by detouring through open-mic night at Bowl-A-Rama instead of The Bluebird Cafe.
But the question generated by my 100th column more than any other was: “Did you really get a tattoo?” As Teri Hatcher once said on “Seinfeld”: “It is real and it is spectacular.” And allowed me a new personal mantra, too: “No Henna for Heroes.”
The tattoo, on the inside of my right wrist, is a picture of a hand holding up two fingers and was inspired by the Shel Silverstein poem “Sign” which reads:
This means victory,
This means peace,
It also means
Two hamburgers please.
Had I read bedtime poems to my young daughter that included “gelatines” and “jupes” instead of hamburgers I am confident I would not be tattooed today, and she and I would be working through a rather lengthy estrangement in my one-bedroom apartment that my ex-wife would describe as a ‘hovel’ to her second husband.
My daughter and I have a long history with the “Sign” poem, and though it may not enhance my legacy as a loving father and Virginia’s #1 humorist, I will do a deep dive deep into its origins which were, in essence, some nights I didn’t feel like reading to my kids. Specifically, my daughter who could be a pain in the ass as a negotiator of bedtime stories.
My son, when young, was content with one Nate the Great or Curious George book and was often off to Sleepy Land before I was finished. The girl, my future partner in ink, was less agreeable. (And just so there is no confusion, my wife read to the kids as much as I did, but my daughter has always played me like the fiddle I gave up after sixth grade.) Not reading a story or poem at night to my daughter would betray my English major street cred, so on the nights I was disinterested in the venture, I would promise her one Shel Silverstein poem, and fortunately, “Sign” was clever, short, and made her laugh.
So, when my 16-year-old daughter presented her desire to get a tattoo to our household’s Chief Financial Officer, she was smart enough to enlist me so I literally had skin in the game. If it became a Daddy-Daughter joint venture it added a bond that would surely convince her twice-tattooed mother. The proposal was that we both get the Shel Silverstein illustration from “Sign” on our inner wrists, and it met with CFO approval mostly because my wife thought I’d never go through with it because I am a wuss.
I was also very aware of a cautionary tale in my background. My father, as a young man, dated a woman who would become his first wife. Their courtship was not without trials, and when he got her pregnant well before wedlock, it led to quite possibly the greatest act of self-preservation in modern human history. My father hitchhiked all the way from Allentown, Pennsylvania, to California where he found a pay phone and called his father to let him know that his girlfriend was pregnant. He reasoned that it was best to have the entire country between him and his father when he broke that unwanted bit of news.
My father ultimately returned to Pennsylvania after giving my grandfather a few months to process the information and married his girlfriend, and he memorialized the sanctity of their union by getting her name tattooed on his right bicep. The marriage dissolved before the ink on his arm was dry which led to a rather unsightly effort to cover up the first wife’s name when he met my mother. The best way to describe this tattoo remodel would be as a prehistoric cat-like creature that was birthed out of some combination of 1960s tattoo technology and the limitations of a cub reporter’s income. I have to believe that vodka also served its purpose on that night.
Having lived with my father’s failed tattoo at every visit to the pool or beach, I was well aware of the pitfalls of getting a permanent memento to an era that one day I might not view as warmly. But as Lynyrd Skynyrd pumped from the sound system in Jack Brown’s Tattoo Revival and drowned out the faint buzz of the needle, I felt a warmth in the knowledge that I would never divorce Shel Silverstein, victory, peace, or two hamburgers. My daughter, however, believed that the warmth I was feeling was attributable to the fact that I peed myself while on the table, but the tattoo artist assured her it was only sweat. I tipped him extra.
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