Hooray For Whore Houses And Gang Tats–A Populist Uprising Against The Corona Elite

‘Phil’s Tats’ was the name on the cellar door, the dark, secret passageway to one the city’s best-known tattoo parlors, open all through Corona Hysteria, known only through the underground, more popular than ever because of Phil’s willingness to engrave violently subversive designs.  Phil Bentley, the owner, was a man of 78 who had learned his trade from his father Oak who had tattooed sailors on their way to the South Pacific.  Tattoos in those days were simple affairs – hearts, ‘Mother’, outlines of Betty Grable, Stars and Stripes, and The Cross; but Oak was an artist who took his work seriously.  These sailors were unlikely to make it back from Guam, Guadalcanal or the Marianas, so fixing the tattoo right, giving it the expression and meaning they wanted was a matter of pride and personal dignity.  When he was discharged from the Navy, Oak went to work in a tool-and-dye factory, bought a home on the GI bill, raised two children, and in his spare time did tattoos in the back room.  Most of his customers were soldiers who had heard about his designs and workmanship from their Navy brothers, and asked Oak for far more elaborate designs than he had done during the War.  They wanted more color, more depth, more shading, and more realism.

Elaborate tattoos in indigenous societies was common.  The South Pacific Islanders were known for their intricate, powerful, complex designs, and the Maoris were known as the region’s artists. Sailors who had furloughed in New Zealand, saw heavily tattooed Maori men on the streets of Christchurch and Wellington, remembered their design, and shared their likes with their mates back home.  Oak Bentley grew his small business thanks to Maori and Trobriand Islander tattoos, and before long he was well-known far beyond the small town of New Brighton.

He let his son watch his work in the back room, and Phil learned the trade first hand.  Although he found full time work in a local factory, he, like his father, opened up a room in his house on Arch Street, and made a good income tattooing.  He never had the talent of his father, but nevertheless was a good craftsman.  The Polish and Italian immigrants who worked alongside him on the floor proudly showed off his work – fine religious images of saints, popes, and  beautiful women.

Tattoos always had a slightly disreputable image.  Bankers, lawyers, and doctors had no tattoos.  It was a working man’s thing, a macho thing, and a sign of solidarity and class strength.  There were plenty of tattoos on display at Stanley Quarter Park, none in Walnut Hill Park, the Frederick Law Olmstead beauty in the wealthy West End.  At Stanley Quarter working men grilled hotdogs and hamburgers in their wife-beaters, played softball and quoits, and with each movement the luscious breasts and booty of the tattooed girls tattooed and shook, sinuously moved and invited.  Most of these girls were Phil’s.  He designed them, he framed them, and he inked them.

Tattooing lost its currency in the late Fifties and early Sixties.  The new, hip generation wanted nothing to do with ‘bodily mutilation’ and signs of crass bourgeois materialism, and demand for Phil’s product tapered off to nothing.  Still a relatively young man, he worked his way up to floor steward and factory foreman.

Something happened in the late 1990s.  Tattoos returned, and became surprisingly mainstream – small butterflies tattooed on ankles or discreetly on a shoulder or thigh, some calligraphy, a few fanciful sketches – and then exploded, became ubiquitous and public.  Entire arms, legs, and backs were colored in with full murals, recognizable faces, and forest landscapes.  A baroque period had set in, but it was lucrative.  Phil had no interest in such work.  He could not compete with the large shops now everywhere, and moreover he had no interest in such commercial, fanciful designs.

A few years later, tattooing went underground, a time for gang symbols and aggressive, violent and frightening images.  The underground tattoo scene was one of revolt, angry male rebellion, and outrage.  ‘Legitimate’ shops were shut down because of the anti-social nature of their art, but soon thereafter they resumed business underground; and Phil Bentley’s cellar parlor was one of them.  Phil did not necessarily agree with the intent of the images he fixed on the angry men who came in, but never thought it was his business.  Those tattooed would have to enjoy or suffer the consequences of what they had imprinted on their bodies. 

Phil had always been a political conservative, so this morally laissez-faire attitude came naturally, never more so than in the time of Corona.  Everything was shut down – stores, bars, grilles, restaurants, hairdressers, and tattoo parlors.  While he understood the principle of the shutdown, he could not abide its draconian measures.  Why should tattoo parlors be closed? What happened to individual private contracts?  If tattoo artists like him were willing to work, and clients were willing to get tattooed, where was the harm? So, not only did he see an opportunity to earn some income while his factory was shut down, he felt it an obligation to keep his shop open, to defy the police, and serve the righteous indignation of his clients. 

His business operated by word of mouth, and given the underground solidarity of those bitter working class men whose jobs had been taken away by the overreaching, usurping, arrogant politicians in Washington and state capitals, it grew without the authorities ever knowing.  He became a hero of the counter-culture – a movement to ridicule and dismiss the mask-wearing upper class plutocrats who shut the country down and to force them to open it again.  

Not surprisingly hookers were comrades in arms.  The legal prostitutes of Las Vegas refused to be once again victimized by a moralizing, Puritanical society.  Just as the casinos refused to be shut down and had the backing of municipal and state government, the prostitutes demanded their rights.  What happened between a hooker and a john was always private, intimate, and transacted; and it always would be.

Prostitutes everywhere else (Nevada is the only state where prostitution is legal) followed their Las Vegas sisters’ lead and refused to buckle under.  They had always been underground, hounded by the police, dunned by churches, but surviving.  Now their political dander was up, and their customers were proud of their refusal to cave in to the outrageous demands of government.  Hookers in New Brighton saw their income double and triple, as the same men who had visited Phil Bentley’s tattoo parlor came to them.

When the burghers of the town and their elected shills got wind of all this, they vowed to crack down; but these working class men and women would not roll over so easily.  Class animosity if not hatred had built up over the years and had come to a head during Corona.  It was these Ivy League dandies in the state house and their municipal bourgeois lackeys who were the enemy, not the virus.  These were the men and women who were abrogating their civil rights, trampling on the Constitution, and destroying the very republican image of the Founding Fathers.  Word went out to leave Phil Bentley and the Arch Street hookers alone.

It was a political victory as well as a class one. Conservatism came out of the halls of the elite in Washington and the press rooms of Cato, Breitbart, the Federalist, and Fox News, and onto the factory floor, the cellar tattoo parlors, and whore houses. It was a truly popular, populist revolt from the bottom up. 

It was a stiff ‘fuck you’ to those who routinely and sanctimoniously condemn prostitution and endorse freedom of expression only when it suits their own, highly-tailored ideas.  Hookers were trash and johns were retrograde, imbecilic, unwoke males who would never get it.  Offensive, brutally violent, aggressive images, solicited, paid for, and proudly displayed by those men who visited Phil’s were not included in freedom of expression.  Their speech because of the very nature of the speaker and before it even left their lips was dirty, unacceptable, and irresponsible.

The movement to open America is growing despite the pleas and Chicken Little fears of the progressive elites; and while it has been condemned by these elites as ignorant and murderous, it will not be blunted.  Especially in an election year, the voices of hookers and under ground tattoo artists will have to be heard.