7 Tattoos:memoir in Flesh

Mornings I stand before the mirror and stare at myself for an hour at a time. I turn in profile. I wring the fat on my wrist. I tilt from side to side, checking my love handles. Every woman I've ever gone with has mistaken this custom for some charming vanity, but it's really self-disgust, disgust at the self that is my body. The tattoo? The tattoo changes nothing. No, the tattoo is a beautiful addition to my hideous body, that squat, hairy, clay-colored body that aches and trembles and sweats and shits and stinks. The tattoo is something new for me to feel unworthy of. But I wouldn't call it a mistake. Or else, the very fact that there is a mistake is what makes it so successful. My tattoo may be the first mistake I've ever made that I can't take back. Because up till now I've taken back everything. I was a loving child and I turned my back on my mother and father. I renounced jobs and apartments. I loved people and reneged on them. I got married and divorced so fast it was like something out of The Time Machine: Whoops, there goes the Industrial Revolution, there goes the wife! Even drugs and booze, the two great loyalties of my life -- I turned my back on them, too, and if you look at me today, you won't see a sign of those abusive love affairs on my entire body. It could be a Mormon who's telling you this. Or at least a lifelong vegetarian. But isn't this how it's supposed to be for us Americans? For what is the American dream if not the expectation that every shady episode of your life can be erased? Horse-thief uncles, illegitimate kids, old rap sheets -- all you have to do is change your zip code and they're history. At the very worst, you hire a media consultant and get him to apply a little spin. You can be driven from the White House in disgrace on national television, but if you wait five years, Time magazine will hail you as an elder statesman. I don't know what America Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in, but it wasn't the America of Richard Nixon and Oprah Winfrey. Because if Hester Prynne were walking around today with a scarlet A on her dress, people would think it stood for Armani.Trachtenberg, Peter is the author of '7 Tattoos:memoir in Flesh' with ISBN 9780517701720 and ISBN 0517701723.