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Eric Doyle
The Perfect Asshole
Interview by Dave Waugh
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Dave Waugh:...this is interview attempt #2 isn’t it?
Eric Doyle: Yeah, yeah...well, the other one was kinda fucked up due to the fact you turned 40 that day…
That was the day? But uh, it was your idea to go to the bar...
I was just looking at a photo of you from that night...
Now just wait there...this is about you, not about me. We don’t want to discuss how stinking drunk you got there. I have a recording of a bunch of things you said but I can’t make anything out...
Yeah well, you only turn forty once.
That is true. And you’re not drunk now correct? I guess that means this will be it then. So...how old are you, where were you born?
I’m 34, and I was born in Chicago. We ping ponged back and forth from there to Lafayette, Louisiana from around age three till about the time I got out of high school.
So was it Louisiana or Chicago where you got your first exposure to tattooing or got your first tattoo?
I saw shitty tattoos in Louisiana growing up, lots of blue fuzzy things that you couldn’t make out. Then, when I was in high school, I got a summer job at a screen printing shop in Chicago and worked with a guy named Scott Fricke (now a tattooer in Chicago ) who was getting tattooed by Guy Aitchison (circa 1990) at Bob Oslon’s shop.
So were you as impressed by early Guy stuff as I was when you first saw it?
Yeah, I didn’t understand what I was looking at and didn’t realize tattoos could look like that…it kind of blew my mind. I ended up getting my first one during my senior year of high school. I was in New Orleans right around the Christmas holiday. I got tattooed at Jacci Gresham’s Art Accent Tattoos on Rampart. My friend and I went up there during business hours and the door was locked. We knocked, and when the door opened a real angry looking guy was like “what the fuck do you want?” We started showing him
money and he told us to go eat and come back in an hour. Never asked for I.D. and a few hours later I had a tattoo.
Wow...that sounds like a fun experience…
Yeah, he was barefoot when he answered the door too. He ended up being a real nice guy though. The tattoo looks great still.
Did you end up getting tattooed pretty frequently after that? At what point did you decide tattooing is what you might want to do?
Before I even got that one I had mentioned to the guys I worked with that were getting tattooed that I thought it would be a good way to pay for college, they all yelled at me saying “It’s a full time job, etc, etc”. So I got my first one late 1990, my second in Chicago the following April, then called an made an appointment with Aitchison for that upcoming summer. So by the summer after high school I had a half sleeve from Guy.
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