Sneezy may not be big, but she’s tough as iron and twice as strong, and she beats those drums like she’s got a grudge against them dating back generations. So when I saw her clutching that blowtorch and threatening to weld every one of that woman’s holes shut, I had no doubt we were an eyeblink away from the world’s first hole-less woman.

 

This would have been back in the second half of the 1980s, a period when we were living hand-to-mouth, playing a lot of mid-sized clubs and smaller dives. There were plenty of dives around in those days, after punk begat new wave and new wave morphed into post-punk and hardcore sprouted between the cracks and a whole new scene of indie bands sprang up across the country. The new scene spawned a new, alternative touring circuit with venues appearing like weeds and dying just as quickly, ranging from basements to bars to storefronts to abandoned buildings. The pay wasn’t great, but the times surely were, with a host of brilliant bands reinventing rock on the fly. Husker Du. The Minutemen. The Replacements. Misfits. Sonic Youth. Big Black. Dinosaur. Big Boys. Mudhoney.

 

We played with them all. There was a palpable feeling back then that something earthshaking was taking place, and if the mainstream didn’t sit up and take notice, so much the better; it belonged to the kids.

 

The show that began the dominos tumbling, leading fatefully and inexorably to the blowtorch incident, was at the 9:30 Club in D.C., with Scratch Acid and Antiseen if I remember correctly (which is unlikely). Sneezy hooked up with some young fan and wandered off after the gig, as she was wont to do. The rest of us crashed on the dirty carpet of a third-floor walkup owned by a friend of a friend. I remember the owner treated us to breakfast in a greasy spoon the next morning, something we very much appreciated. Sneezy didn’t join us.

 

In those pre-cellphone days we used to have a standing policy of meeting up at 11 a.m. the next day in front of the club if any of us strayed into strange beds. It was a crappy system but better than nothing. Sneezy was nearly an hour late and we were all huddled inside the Tallywhacker, the rickety secondhand jitney we were using for transport back then, waiting to lace into her when she arrived.

 

This would be November, and it was cold. Remember that fact. It’s important. Cold. Winter. Brr. The heater in the Tallywhacker sounded like it had pneumonia and wheezed out a weak, tepid draft. The girls were surprisingly awake for that hour, energized by a hearty morning meal for a change, and ganged up to give Sneezy a hard time in the back while I, Pinky Tourette, driver extraordinaire, forged ever onward toward our next destination.

 

That night’s gig was in Philly with Die Kreuzen and a bunch of local bands at a one-off space whose name I’ve forgotten, if it ever had one. It was a rundown warehouse with loading docks along one side, making set-up a breeze. The downside: no heat. The club was an icebox, and even with a good-sized, hyperactive crowd it was frigid enough that Dopey’s vocals came out in clouds of vapor. With the exception of Happy, who has an aversion to clothes and habitually sheds them like a puppy shakes off water, the girls played the gig bundled under sweaters, coats, and mangy wool caps.

 

The upside: there were empty rooms on the second floor with all the amenities – assuming you consider cold, dribbling water the only amenity. After the gig and a shared cheesesteak with the other bands, we retired upstairs with sleeping bags and blankets and huddled around an oil drum converted into a wood-burning stove.

 

Sneezy was first up in the morning, dashing into the bathroom to bogart whatever meager hot water had settled in the pipes. Can’t have been much, because she wasn’t in there long. When she hurried out, wrapped in a towel and beelining straight for the stove, Happy let out a shriek that scared the sleep out of the rest of us and probably broke windows in Tampa.

 

Happy is many things but an alarmist isn’t one of them, and her outburst chilled us more than the temperature. My mind flipped through a jillion scenarios in an instant, settling on the likelihood of a stray rat or a cockroach convention in her bedding or some other vermin-related episode. When she pointed across the room we all turned to look at Sneezy, halted dead in her tracks halfway into the room, a towel wrapped around her body under her arms, dripping on the concrete floor. So?

 

Happy told Sneezy to turn around, and with an apprehensive look she complied. That’s when we all jumped up and began babbling simultaneously. Sneezy whirled around, gripped by rising panic, struggling to twist her head to see over her shoulder at what had caused the commotion.

 

Leave it to Doc to have the coolest head, to be the first to recover and stride over and lay her hands on Sneezy’s shoulders. It’s your tattoo, Doc said. We could see the horror deepen on Sneezy’s face as she asked what had happened to it.

 

It’s gone, Doc told her.

 

Silence hung in the air as we waited for her reaction. When it came, it wasn’t what we expected. She burst out laughing and called us assholes and a thesaurus-full of other insults, accusing us of cooking up a stupid gag to get back at her for being late to the van yesterday.

 

Until Doc draped an arm over her shoulder and led her back toward the mirror in the bathroom. Sneezy’s cry must’ve busted any windows left in Tampa.

 

Her tattoo was her pride and joy, and rightfully so. It had taken months of work and one helluva lot of pain, and it was the closest I’ve ever seen to a masterpiece of skin art. And remember, tattoos weren’t as commonplace then as they are now – especially not on women.

 

A few years earlier we had managed to get ourselves booked on a mini-tour of Japan, arranged by our superfan Kazuko in Osaka. We played a handful of gigs in her hometown and in Kyoto and Tokyo, crashing with friendly locals on various tatami mat floors. It turned out that Kazuko had a collection of chanbara, yakuza, sukeban, and bakuto films on videotape, and they literally changed Sneezy’s life. Even without subtitles, she sat rapt for hours staring at the screen while the rest of us explored Akihabara and Shinsaibashi and Yoyogi Park and busked for change and spent whatever we earned buying wildly overpriced vinyl, despite not owning a turntable.

 

Sneezy, meanwhile, stayed glued to the TV and gave herself a crash course in J-cool. She’d long been a devoted disciple at the church of Pam Grier and Tura Satana, and when she discovered the ultracool, fearless femmes fatale of Japanese ‘60s and ‘70s cinema, she fell desperately in love with Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto and especially Meiko Kaji, the most badass vengeance machine on Planet Earth. Enamored of the take-no-shit, ass-kicking girl gangsters and ferocious female street fighters of Japanese genre cinema, Sneezy resolved on the spot to get a tattoo like her new idols.  

 

Her initial suggestion that the entire band get a group tattoo like the dragon serpent stretching across the gang members’ backs in Blind Woman’s Curse elicited a hard no all around. Instead, smitten by the topless killing machine Oyuki in the fourth Lone Wolf and Cub film, flashing her tattooed tits to dazzle men into immobility so she could skewer them like yakitori, Sneezy opted to get a tebori tattoo the same way as Oyuki – from a Horimono master meticulously coloring her skin with hand-held wooden needles.

 

With Kazuko’s help Sneezy tracked down a Horishi near Tennōji Station and got started on an intricately detailed image of a fierce hannya demon with bared fangs and serpentine body, surrounded by lush imagery out of old ukiyo-e woodblock prints. She stayed behind in Osaka when the rest of us headed home, and later flew back several times to continue work on the piece. Each time it grew more elaborate, colorful, and mesmerizing. Tebori was much slower than mechanical needles, but the lushness and gorgeously subtle shading was worth it. Sneezy’s plan was to continue working on her “body suit” and expand it indefinitely.

 

Until it vanished. We did our best to console her and figure out what the hell happened. Best guess was that it had somehow simply washed off. Yeah, I know: makes no sense. We couldn’t come up have a better answer, though. There wasn’t much to work with. One day she was lavishly tattooed. The next, spotless as a boiled egg.

 

Eventually, we calmed her down. Or at least suppressed the panic. Our next gig was at Irving Plaza in New York with Scratch Acid and Live Skull and we figured the best thing we could possibly do was to simply soldier on, help her to work past it. The gig ranks among our worst ever and gained us no fans, including the promoters. Spoiler alert: if your drummer is emotionally fried and mentally absent, it’s pretty hard not to suck.

 

And Sneezy was beyond distressed. She was totally gone, off in her own tsunami of confused thoughts. When she abruptly stopped playing mid-song the set crashed to an ugly and chaotic end. I could tell Doc was furious – this was a hugely important gig for us – and struggling to contain herself due to the circumstances. Sneezy, meanwhile, was wild-eyed with excitement. She knew what had happened, she gushed in a torrent of barely coherent syllables the moment we got offstage. Someone had stolen her tattoo.

 

It was a long and difficult night, let me tell you. Doc took the lead, trying to talk sense into Sneezy. Not an easy job. Sneezy had conjured this whole picture in her head, and she stumbled all over herself trying to paint it for us in words. It seems her one-nighter in D.C. had been with a foxy Japanese vixen. After the gig the two of them headed straight for an apartment about 15 minutes from the club. There they drank and smoked a joint or two and fell hungrily into bed.

 

At some point they untangled themselves long enough for the vixen to take photos of Sneezy’s tattoo. She was obviously enthralled by it and snapped pic after pic from all angles using an antique, boxlike camera while Sneezy struck seductive poses.

 

None of us believed the vixen had stolen the tattoo, of course, but at a certain point you just have to quit fighting the current and go with the flow. Doc led the discussion, calmly asking for details. The answers were disconnected at best. Sneezy didn’t know where the apartment was. A large loft with one brick wall, an open kitchen, expensive furniture. The vixen said it belonged to a friend. They got there by walking from the club and then turned a bunch of corners. Sneezy didn’t get the vixen’s name, just a description: five-and-a-quarter feet tall, round face, curvy bod, koi tattoo on one shoulder and Buddha on the other, dyed white hair in a bob with pink streaks, huge eyes, devilish smile, sexy accent.

 

At Sneezy’s insistence Dopey got on the phone and called every band and promoter and fanzine writer we knew in D.C. to see if they recognized anyone by that description. A few people said yeah, they’d noticed someone like that the past week or two hanging around at shows but didn’t know anything about her. They’d ask around and get back to us.

 

And that, we hoped, was that. How wrong we were. The next night we played City Gardens in Trenton. Not exactly a perfect itinerary, bouncing from Philly up to NYC and right back down to Trenton again. So sue me. I took what I could get in those days.

 

The show was another mess. Sneezy’s head was elsewhere. Afterward Dopey called D.C. again and was told the vixen hadn’t returned. A few other people remembered her from the prior few weeks and a couple of them had even hit on her, to no avail. Nobody knew anything else about her.

 

Total dead end. The tour continued, poorly. Gigs were mediocre at best. Instead of her usual halter top, Sneezy played in bulky turtleneck sweaters. We brainstormed when she wasn’t around, trying to rustle up solutions. Best we could figure was to finance a new tattoo.

 

Then a week or so later we arrived in Austin for a gig at Liberty Lunch and found a message waiting for us. One of our D.C. friends had spotted the vixen in Los Angeles. Dopey called for details and was told a touring band had noticed her at both the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go.

 

The girls raced through the Liberty Lunch gig in record time, with Sneezy powering through the songs faster than ever before or since. Immediately afterward we piled into the van and lit out for L.A. We were already scheduled to play The Roxy a few days later, with a couple of fill-in gigs along the way, but there was no denying Sneezy – we needed to be in L.A. NOW!

 

It took us less than 24 hours to get there, stopping only to stuff food in one end of us and empty it out the other. I drove most of the way, with Bashful pitching in at one point. No way were we letting Sneezy near the wheel, or she’d have blown out the engine ramming her foot through the floorboard.

 

There wasn’t much opportunity for the rest of us to slip away from Sneezy and strategize during the trip across the desert. I guess we all thought the same thing: if by some chance it turned out to be the same vixen, maybe she’d be able to talk sense into Sneezy.

 

We pulled into L.A. early, giving us hours to kill. Swinging by Hollywood Book and Poster and then over to Rhino Records we hung out with local pals and spent money we didn’t have. Although Sneezy was with us she wasn’t really with us, mumbling vague responses when spoken to and otherwise staring out the windows. Once the sky darkened and the neon city buzzed to life, we staked out the Whisky, made ourselves as inconspicuous as possible, and waited. A few of the girls headed inside, others hung around the perimeter, and I circled in the Tallywhacker like a predatory bird. Hairband mania had gripped the Sunset Strip by this time and cotton candy metal acts were all the vogue. The area was crawling with boys in studded black leather, headbands, scarves, makeup, and hairspray. Lots of hairspray. And more than a few tattoos.

 

Bottom line: we found her. I don’t know who, I don’t know how, I don’t know what they did to make her cooperate. All I know is on one of my slow cruises down the Strip, the back door banged open, there was a commotion as bodies piled in, the door slammed shut, and someone said Drive.

 

I drove. Straight for Mustang Tony’s garage. ‘Stang was longtime friend of the band and we always parked in his lot when we hit L.A. I had called him earlier and made arrangements for us to stay there tonight. He didn’t mind if we slept in the Tallywhacker, and told me we were entitled to any beer we found in the fridge.

 

Some young kid we didn’t recognize was waiting in the office. He was clearly relieved to see us and lit out for home the moment we got inside and locked the gate. That left just us on the lot, with a few junkers scattered around under the high arc lights. A tall corrugated metal fence surrounded the property, topped by razor wire.

 

I parked us inside the garage in an empty corner and everyone piled out onto the greasy concrete. Sleepy pulled shut the rolling steel door to the garage. The vixen, the picture of cool, took it more or less in stride. Très nonchalant. On the ride across town I had listened to Sneezy in the back of the Tallywhacker probing carefully, reminiscing to the vixen about the night they spent together in D.C. The vixen didn’t agree or argue, just kept quiet and chewed her gum. Eventually Sneezy got around to mentioning her tattoo and how much the vixen admired it, and then the rage took her and she snapped, accusing the vixen of taking it. For the first time the vixen perked up, basically laughing it off. She didn’t know what the hell Sneezy was talking about. Stealing a tattoo? That was ridiculous.

 

Except the more I listened, the more she sounded too nonchalant. Given the situation, she should have been at least a little freaked out, no matter how goddamn suave she was. When a group effectively hijacks you and someone with unhinged fury in her eyes accuses you of stealing her tattoo, you’re going to react with more than a shrug, no matter how much ice runs in your veins.

 

After a few more minutes of hissed accusations and shrugged denials, Bashful spoke up, asking Sneezy if she was absolutely sure this was the right person. Sneezy snapped back that of course it was, no doubt about it.

 

Well then why, Bashful asked, are her tattoos different?

 

None of the rest of us had noticed until now. It was true. Sneezy had described a koi on one shoulder and Buddha on the other. This vixen fit the description perfectly in every other way – except she had a spiderweb and a skull on her shoulders.

 

Under normal circumstances, we would have realized right then that we had the wrong person and apologized profusely. These, however, weren’t normal circumstances. Instead, that was the moment I started to believe. It wasn’t just me, either. Everything shifted in that instant, as if the room had tilted. It was it in all our faces, even the vixen. Her façade slipped. She suddenly blurted out that she’d never even been in D.C. and yeah, we had the wrong person. But it was too late; she’d let it go on for too long already. We all recognized in that moment that this cool, gum-chewing vixen somehow, in some mystic and mysterious manner, slipped in and out of tattoos like spandex.

 

So I can’t say I was surprised when Sneezy picked up ‘Stang’s blowtorch and uttered her threat, but I was definitely shaken. Because I knew she meant it, to her very core: she would hurt this woman. Badly. An instant later, Doc and Grumpy grabbed the vixen by the arms and made sure she wasn’t going anywhere. It was suddenly real. Up until then, we were all shadowy bit players in some fever dream scenario Sneezy had concocted. Now we had featured roles.

 

The vixen eventually folded. I’m going to leave it at that rather than go into sordid details. Suffice to say she talked, and there was no welding of holes. The vixen, and I wish we’d gotten her name so I didn’t have to keep calling her that, was an agent for overseas clients. Her job was to travel the world scouting for the most stunning, the most outstanding, the most richly detailed and imaginative and beautiful tattoos. Nowadays rock clubs were a prime hunting ground.

 

Although I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the reality of it, I had no doubt it was true. Which left only one loose thread. Under renewed threat of blowtorch, the vixen agreed to take us back to a relatively modest house in Bel Air. “Relatively modest” in this neighborhood meant you could fit a couple dozen Manhattan apartments inside it, with room left over for a stray Starbucks or two. The Tallywhacker was a 911 call waiting to happen in this neighborhood. Luckily there was a wide driveway that circled around back so we could park out of sight.

 

The house belonged to the vixen’s overseas clients; the same as the apartment in D.C. Once inside, she retrieved the camera from a concealed wall safe. Dopey and Doc inspected it, then handed it to me. When Sneezy had said “antique” I pictured a Polaroid. This was way antique – a square wooden unit with an accordion bellows. Had to be 1920s vintage or older. Other than that, nothing special. Just a camera. One would have thought.

 

I handed it to the vixen, who took it reluctantly and stood looking at us helplessly. Some of the color had drained from her face, and all of the brashness. She looked defeated. Sneezy said nothing, just hefted the waiting blowtorch as a reminder.

 

The vixen brought the camera close to her face. She didn’t touch the dials. She didn’t point it at Sneezy. She just… whispered to it. Quietly, soothingly. I’m not ashamed to admit I got a chill, wondering if we’d made a mistake and handed her a weapon we couldn’t imagine.

 

That feeling blossomed into cold, shuddering fear when Sneezy suddenly let out a cry and jerked spasmodically, dropping the unlit blowtorch on the carpet with a dull thud. Rushing to her side, Grumpy and Happy eased her onto the sofa as she twitched and moaned. I was already sprinting for the fireplace to grab a poker to use as a club, when the vixen said it’s done.

 

With the poker in my fist I spun around to see Sneezy breathing heavily and scrambling to lift her sweater. Is it back, she asked, twisting on the sofa.

 

It was. In all its beautiful, meticulous, painstaking glory. The most gorgeous tattoo I ever hope to see. I carefully replaced the poker on its stand by the fireplace.

 

I’m sorry, said the vixen. She looked like she even meant it.

 

That should have been the end of it. Doc said Let’s get outta here and we all, as a group, started heading toward the front door. All but Sneezy.

 

Give me the camera, she said. The vixen’s eyes widened. No, she said. Sneezy picked up the fallen blowtorch, stood, and repeated herself. Give.

 

My inclination was to let it go, to drop it, to get the hell out and put the whole incident behind us as fast as possible. The girls obviously felt otherwise. They had supported Sneezy through this whole ordeal, no matter how unlikely or fucked up, and they weren’t about to stop now. Bashful and Grumpy sidled up on either side of the vixen and Happy snatched away the camera.

 

With the vixen pleading for her not to hurt it – to hurt it? – Sneezy carried the camera to the sterile white kitchen and set it on the island. Selecting a meat tenderizer from a stand of cooking utensils, she said I’m sorry too, and smashed the antique wooden box.

 

The camera shattered like glass, splintering wood across the countertop and onto the floor while the vixen wailed as if her soul had been broken. I could see that Bashful and Grumpy were holding her up now, the only thing keeping her from collapsing in a heap of anguish and tears on the carpet.

 

Then I heard Happy’s voice saying What the fuck is that? I still don’t have an answer to that question. There on the counter, in the ruins of the camera, was a… a thing. Half the size of a football, the color of pale flesh patterned with thick veins. Slimy. Pulsating.

 

The vixen was pleading now. Please leave it alone. I’m so sorry. I take it all back. It’s my fault.

 

Yes, Sneezy agreed, it is, and lit the blowtorch.

 

The thing made no noise as it blackened and crackled into flame. I can’t say for certain that it was alive. I’d prefer to think it wasn’t. Even as it vibrated and shrank from the heat, I’d prefer to think it wasn’t alive.

 

We all whirled around when the vixen screamed. Not like her previous cries – this was different. This was searing physical pain. Grumpy and Bashful had released her and backed away as she twisted and convulsed, falling to her knees. Her arms moved in unnatural directions and I distinctly heard what sounded like bones splintering.

 

Worst of all, her skin was roiling. Across every exposed inch of her body, colors drifted and slithered and stretched and merged. Pictures. Images. Tattoos.

 

Doc shouted at Sneezy to stop what she was doing. Too late. The thing was nothing more than a charred pit, trembling faintly on the countertop. Whatever it had been, it was no more. And whatever it had contained, it had emptied. Downloaded.

 

Into her. Images raced faster across her flesh, overtaking one another in rapid succession. Blood sprayed from her mouth, dripped from her ears. Her fingers jutted in random directions like twigs from a dead branch, the nails blackening, cracking. When she opened her eyes, there was no white, no pupils – just crawling shards of pictures stolen from other bodies, now battling one another for space. When she tried to scream, her tattooed tongue split open and the exposed viscera instantly blossomed with ink.

 

I won’t tell you which of us clubbed her with the poker, hitting her again and again until she lay still while the images continued to squabble for possession of her twisted flesh. We all did it, and none of us did. She killed herself. If not in that moment, then in all the moments leading up to it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

 

We left the unrecognizable pile of shattered bones and mangled meat in the middle of the living room carpet. Needless to say, it never made the news. Whoever found the vixen’s gruesome remains – the owners of the house, presumably; the clients, the collectors – simply made her disappear. Just like she made tattoos disappear.

 

And we returned to the road. Sneezy returned to wearing halter tops, and hitting the drums as hard or harder than ever before. Months later, when the tour ended, she booked a trip to Japan to have more work done on her body suit. Her left shoulder now houses a round-faced Japanese vixen with a sly smile and angel wings.