The Clown in Brown
By Mike Malone

In July of 1973, I moved to Honolulu to tattoo. I had purchased Sailor Jerry's shop after his untimely death earlier that year, and worked the busy little shop myself for about a year until I was on the verge of burning out. Then came Lance McLain, who I'd hung out with in San Diego when I tattooed there.

Lance was a sailor with some art classes under his belt and a real stiffy for tattoos. We stayed in touch and every time I wrote, I would urge him to come to Hawaii when his hitch was up. I really had no business teaching anybody to tattoo as I was still wrestling with it myself. I needed help bad and wanted someone who was as excited about tattooing as I was. Lance learned fast and his art talent was a big help. A year or so later, we were joined by Mike Brown, a hippie kid who hung around my shop. Mike was not as talented as Lance but had an eye for perfection found in very few tattooers.

There was plenty of work at China Sea Tattoo for all three of us; the problem was space. The tiny shop was 9'x 18' total space. Two people could tattoo at a time but it was cramped. The three of us made it work and all stayed busy. About a year after that, I made a move that nearly cost me my crew: I agreed to teach Kandi Everett to tattoo. Kandi was a well-trained artist, had a degree, and taught art. Truth is, I would have taught her to tattoo if she had the talent of a tree stump. I was hot to jump her bones and everybody knew it.

I nearly had a mutiny on my hands but Kandi did more to defuse it than I. She was a fast, funny woman who didn't pull any frail female stuff and, to her credit, was tough as nails. She also let me jump her bones, so after a while we became a happy family of lost children. We were tattooing our asses off and having a great time, probably the happiest time of my life.

In '77, I decided to try something that had never been done before. I opened a second shop in Waikiki, the super tourist center of Hawaii. It was risky; the tourists weren't much into tattoos in those days. The military boys hung out in Chinatown where my first shop was. The titty bars were in Chinatown. Chinatown was also loaded with skivie [GOT NO REFERENCE FOR A SPELLING ON THIS] houses and porno joints. And on any given night, the streets swarmed with an army of pavement dollies, all the stuff it takes to keep a red-blooded sailor happy. Still, we had the manpower and Waikiki was clearly where the future of fun was going to be. So I opened a second two-man shop in Waikiki. I took the day shift at the new shop, as it was the slowest shift out of both shops. Basically, I sat and drew my days away while the crew tattooed their guts out.

In the late Seventies, there was only one real supply house for tattoo supplies. (There was another in New Jersey, a ripoff outfit was known to go so far as shipping you a brick instead of your order. They did it so they would have paper work showing you had accepted a shipment from them.) The most problematic thing to get through tattoo suppliers was color. Sailor Jerry had raised us to be self-sufficient; we went direct to the big pigment firms for our colors. These came in the form of super-intense colored powders. There were a lot of secret methods used in repairing these powders for tattooing; each tattooer used his own special ingredients and mixing methods. One thing you could count on when mixing color was that there would be a hell of a mess to clean up after the deed was done.

One evening, after avoiding mixing color for months, I faced up to the task. Kandi and I were living together by this time and we would both got into it together. I'd make her help me, telling her I was teaching her dark tattoo secrets. Really, it was to get someone to help with the awful clean-up involved. That evening, we mixed up five or six different colors. Most were blends of color and white since many of the colors were much too dark to use without blending them with white. That day, I shopped around for bottles to store the color in once it was mixed. I was searching for bottles made of Tupperware-type plastic, but could not find any and had to settle for one-quart bottles made of clear, hard plastic, with wide mouths that were easy to fill. After a long evening of mixing colors and cleaning up the kitchen at home, the mixing was done. We ended up with five or six full quart bottles of ready to use colors.

The next morning I loaded them into my car and headed in to work. (It's important at this point to note that all my adult life, I have tended to wear a uniform. They change from time to time but my then-current uniform was referee shirts. I had a collection of black-and-white referee shirts I wore every day to work. So you see, I was pushing the envelope in a clown direction.) I arrived at the Waikiki shop just a few minutes before noon. I pulled up to the front door of the shop so I would be close while unloading the color. I opened the trunk and gathered up all five or six bottles. My arms were full and I knew I should make two trips but laziness got the best of me. The bottles were not that heavy but they were cumbersome to carry all at once. Still, I managed.

When I got to the door, I was faced with unlocking the door, which I hadn't planned for. The prudent thing would have been to set the bottles down and fish my keys from my pocket. Did I? Of course not. I shifted the bottles around in my arms while I reached for the keys. As I was digging in my pocket, a car horn right behind me honked and startled me. I felt one of the bottles slip from my arms.

It was a full quart of brown tattoo ink that I watched as it fell to the ground. The fall seemed to be in slow motion as it did a 360-degree spin and landed directly on its bottom on the sidewalk. For an instant, I thought I was in the clear, no problem. The car horn honked again as the bottle hit the ground hard. The top, which was screwed on tight, blew off and the brown ink spewed forth like Old Faithful, coating me with beautiful Venetian brown from my crotch to the top of my head.

The horn blared again but this time it was accompanied by peals of laughter and jeers that I could not make out but knew were aimed at me. I sat the bottles down and wiped the thick brown pigment from my eyes and tried to get to my keys while maintaining a little dignity. Still, the horn kept up its insistent honking and the laughing and hooting grew in intensity. It was really getting to me and I could feel my face getting red in embarrassment. Finally, I got my key into the lock. I just wanted to get inside and hide from whoever was enjoying my stupidity.

The horn honked more insistently than before and between honks, I heard my name being called. I turned to face my tormenters and to my surprise - and even greater embarrassment - there in a rental car sat tattoo legend Colonel Bill Todd and his wife Tilly, laughing their asses off. Todd was Bob Shaw's partner in the famous Bert Grimm shop on Long Beach's Pike Amusement Pier and had tattooed for decades there and in Kentucky. Busted being a big fool, I invited them in. They both had plenty to say and after a while, I saw myself for the clown I was.

I had to go home and shower and change clothes before I could start work. Todd said he would watch the shop while I took care of the mess. I hosed the sidewalk off before I left then drove home, quickly cleaned up, and shot back to the shop. When I arrived, Todd was just putting the finishing touches on a belt of roses across a guy's belly, covering up a big name.

He was a real hard-core old time tattooer and if I had to fuck up in front of someone, I can't think of a better man. Colonel Bill Todd is gone now but I know that someplace he still honks and laughs at the clown in brown.

The End
- ROLLO