The Old Man at the Service Station- Part 2: The Rock and the Pebble

We rode around a lot that summer, Jack and me. One day we stopped at an old Service Station. The place looked like it hadn’t changed since the 1950’s. Well, the pumps were new but that’s about it. The sign looked like the original one that was put there when the place first opened, and it showed its age. The dirty red hoses stretched across the ground by the gas pumps and would ding a bell every time a car passed over them. Even the Air pump was one of the old fashioned kind that you don’t see anymore. Our bikes dinged the bell and a skinny Old Man came out from the shade on the side of the building to pump the gas. But he let us pump our own gas, said he didn’t want to spill any on our tanks. After we filled up we pulled our bikes up to the side of the building in the shade and joined the Old Man where he sat, out of the glaring sun waiting for customers. Jack asked the old man what he was having and he said he was fine. So he went inside and came out with a couple of sodas for himself and me.

The old man’s weathered face and faded tattoos told the story of a hard life. But this first impression was contradicted by his smile and warm tone of voice when he spoke. I don’t remember how long we were there that day but we were there for a while. The old man told us stories about his life and about the Korean War. He knew how to tell a story! At times we were laughing so hard we had to stop him just so we could breath. Even the sad stories he told had just the right amount of humor to keep us smiling.

We finally left and he waved us goodbye with a smile on his face. We would visit the Old Man every few days after that. And while we were there me and Jack would take turns pumping gas for the Old Man. More than once when we pulled up to the picnic bench the Old Man would come out with three sodas and say, “Drinks are on me today fellas!” We always insisted on paying him but he always refused. One day he finally confided to us, “In all honesty I don’t even pay for’em, I just take’em out of the fridge!” We all laughed and settled back for more stories.

One day we went to the station and the kid who works inside met us by the bench. “Where’s the Old Man?” I asked. “I’m sorry guys,” the kid said, “he passed away day before yesterday.” Tears welled up in my eyes, Jack just looked up at the sky, and you can tell he was fighting back the tears. “He was a good man,” the kid said, “everybody loved him. He always had a smile on his face and he would go out of his way if you needed him. Hey, you guys want sodas? He told me when I visited him in the hospital the other day, he said, (imitating the old mans voice with a smile),“Make sure you give those two fellas on the motorcycles sodas on the hot days.” We accepted the Old Mans gift, and talked with the kid for while. Jack said to us in the course of conversation, “Ain’t that something? You could know person your whole life and really not give two fucks about him. Then you meet someone for a short time and he touches your heart like… like I don’t know what…”

Modern Day Christmas Koan

What makes this Christmas tree so beautiful?

The Sound of One Hand

I’m sure everyone is familiar with “The Sound of One Hand Clapping”. This is probably the most famous Zen Koan there is. I’ll review it here but if you haven’t read it yet I would advise you to do so. You’ll find it in; Zen Flesh Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki.

It starts with a young Zen student who insists that his teacher should give him a Koan to study. The teacher tells him he’s not ready but the student is convinced that he is. So the teacher simply asked him, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Every day for one year the young student would give the teacher his answer to Koan and the teacher would tell him he’s wrong and send him back to figure it out again and again. This kid listened to every sound imaginable to find the “sound” he was looking for. That is one full year of thinking of nothing else but this Koan, listening to every sound in his world. Then after one year of this, when there were no more sounds to listen to, he realized what the answer was. The answer he gave the teacher was “The sound of no sound.” The weird thing about this Koan is that people who read it today try to figure out what the sound of one hand clapping is, even though the answer is given at the end of the Koan!

This Koan that we read today is not for us to search for the sound of one hand clapping, that would be stupid since the answer is already given within. It’s to realize what the kid went through to find the answer. And the only real way to understand the sound of no sound is to endure what he endured, to experience every single sound there is until there are no more sounds to hear, then you can realize the sound of no sound.

The Rock and the Pebble: The day I met Iron Jack Vane

The Rock and the Pebble: The day I met Iron Jack Vane
I rode into the 7-11 on my Harley Davidson motorcycle. My bike was loud! I changed the pipes to really short ones that a lot people call Daisy Cutters. I saw a really nice bike parked in one of the stalls so I pulled up next to it. There was room for me to park in the same stall, as if the person who parked there was waiting for someone to arrive. As I got off my bike I noticed the one I parked next to was a Vincent Black Shadow, clean, shiny and brand new like it just rolled out of the showroom. The obvious owner was sitting on the curb watching me.
“Nice bike!” he said.
“I was just about to tell you the same thing!” I said as I pulled my crappy plastic helmet off my head and hung it on the handlebars.
He just nodded as I went inside the store. I bought a soda and went back outside. As I approached the bikes the stranger asked me if I would sit for a while.

I sat down and we started talking. He told me his name was Jack and that he was a Reverend. He didn’t look like a reverend. He wore slicked back dark hair, he was tall, skinny, but not wimpy skinny. He had round eyeglasses that he wore at the bottom of his nose and he would peek over them when he spoke. He handed me his business card. It was a simple white card with black printing. It had some vintage style ornament and a black border. It said Reverend “Iron Jack” Vane, Illusions, Tattooing and Magic. That was all, no address, no phone number, not even a web site.
“How is anybody supposed to find you?” I asked.
“I’m the one who finds the people who need me.” He said.

“Show me some magic.” I said to him. He showed me a few coin tricks using sleight of hand. He was good. Then I asked him to show me an illusion.
“Ah… illusions,” his face got a serious expression. “Illusions are all around us, that soda, this store, your motorcycle, my motorcycle, all illusions.
I laughed.

He went on talking about illusions and during the course of our conversation he picked up a rock and a pebble and put them on the curb between us. Then he asked, “Can you see a difference?”
“Yeah”, I said, “one is bigger.”
He just made a face and shook his head. I knew what he wanted me to say but I wasn’t going to say it. “I’ll tell you what,” I said, “how about I take the rock and you take the pebble and we both hit each other on the head with them, you can go first!”
“Well,” he replied, “it would seem that with that experiment you would prove your point! But,” he continued, “… hop on your bike.” He put the rock and the pebble in his pocket, hopped on his bike and I followed him. In Rocky Point there are a lot of rocks and I don’t just mean small regular rocks lying around, I mean big rocks. Some the size of a house! I followed him around the winding hill roads of Rocky Point when we stopped and parked next to a big rock. This was one of the smaller ones, about the size of a small car. He pulled the rock from his pocket pointed at the huge rock and said, “Ok, you go first!”
I laughed and said, “Well, it would seem with this experiment that you proved your point!”

We rode back to my house and played cards and drank a few shots of Absinthe. We played dealers choice that turned out to be alternating bouts of Texas Hold’em and Five Card Draw. I even threw in a couple rounds of Ace to Five Lowball Triple Draw, which I found to my dismay he was very good at! He placed the rock and the pebble on the kitchen table, sort of on display so we could see it while we played cards, drank and bullshitted. Nothing more was said about them though, they were just there in the background. Later on we found Cool Hand Luke on the television and before long I was snoring on the couch and he passed out on the chair.

I woke up to him shaking me, “Get up!” he said, lets go riding.”
“It’s too fuckin’ early!” I said.
“The early bird catches the worm!”
“Then it’s safe to say that the late worm don’t get caught!”
“Good!” He said laughing, “you’re learning already.”
I gave in and got up. I yawned, stretched, got washed up and met him outside the house.
“Where’re we going?” I asked.
“Life is the journey to death, are you in a hurry to get there too?”
"Na, not really!”
“Then don’t worry about where we’re going, it’s all about the journey not the destination.”
“Can’t argue with that one.” I mumbled as I started my bike.

We rode for a while and ended up at Cedar Beach. We got off our bikes and walked across the rocky sand to the shoreline. Cedar beach isn’t an ocean beach; its shoreline is the Long Island Sound, so there are no waves, just calm water. People like to bring their little kids to its safe shoreline.
"Yesterday you asked me you show you magic. Well, here it is.”
“What? What do you mean?” I asked.
“This is real magic.” Jack said, “right here, in the grass that grows, in the birds that chirp. See the small waves going in and out?” he said pointing at the shore.
“Yeah.”
“That’s magic. It’s the things we take for granted, the things we try to explain with science. Science is really an excuse for things that are magic. The rock we saw yesterday, that rock was put there by a moving glacier thousands of years ago. That’s magic.”
I nodded in agreement.
“Look up. What do you see?”
“I see the sky.”
“The sky? That’s what they all say, as if we have a roof over our heads! What you’re really looking at is infinity, my friend. Sky is just a word that stops us from seeing past the illusion of the sky. That’s what illusion is, deception. There is no sky, what you see keeps on going, on and on and on, forever. That’s magic!”
I looked at the sky. Realizing that it was really infinity I was seeing. It made me feel small, like a speck in the universe. I looked around at the water, at the beach. I saw the kids playing and laughing. I saw the vastness of everything. I more than saw, I felt it.

“They’re both the same.” I said quietly.
“What was that?” Jack asked.
“There both the same.” I said louder as I turned toward him.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Jack asked.
“The rocks, the rock and the pebble, they’re both the same.” I could have said that yesterday but they would have only been words. But now it was different, now I realized that they were they same, I could feel it. It was more than just mere words now, as I said it.”
A smirk grew across Jack’s face.
“Welcome to Satori my friend, you will never see anything the same way again."

Don't Buy My Book!

In my book, The Broken Buddha, There’s a poem I wrote that sums up everything within the book. So it’s safe to say that if you read the poem there is really no reason to read the book. So I’m going to put the poem here for everyone to read. I don’t care if it ruins book sales or not.

                The Moon in the River

            The river flows but no matter how strong the
            current it cannot wash away the reflection of
            the Moon.

            The Moon slowly crosses the river. It crosses
            rocks and rapids unhindered by the moving
            water beneath it. Yet the water is the creator
            of its very existence.

            It is born on one side of the river and follows
            its path, to its death on the other. But the
            Moon itself still exists, as does its reflection in
            other rivers, lakes and seas. Being born and
            dying ten-thousand-times, over and over, night
            after night.

                                                     erick alayon

We're in this together

I’ve been receiving emails from people asking about a new tattoo instruction book called Basic Fundamentals Of Modern Tattoo by C.R. Jordan. Unfortunately I haven’t read this book yet but from what I can tell from Amazon’s “search-inside” feature it looks like a winner! It seems very informative and it is very well done.

I also received an email telling about some bickering and personal insults between fans of this book and mine. I haven’t looked at the posts myself and I don’t intend to, I’m not worried about it. We can’t control what people say and do on the Internet and to do so would be taking away people’s freedom of speech. The majority of people take these petty things for what they are. It’s cool that both Mr. Jordan and myself have a following out there that’s willing to fight for us. But lets not forget that we’re in this together, we both belong to the same club. The I-don’t-give-a-fuck-what-anybody-says-club. That’s why we wrote books that help people learn to tattoo. We are well aware that we have created enemies in the tattoo world because of our books so lets not create enemies amongst ourselves. I appreciate my people sticking up for me but it’s not really necessary. If somebody wants to talk shit, let them. We know that for every one who hates us for it, there is someone who loves us for it. And love outweighs hate.

I started tattooing in 1988 and have been tattooing professionally since 1990. I wrote my first book The Art and Science of Modern Tattooing, in 2001 and started selling them from micro print runs of 100 copies. I did this knowing full well I was hanging my ass out there for the self-appointed tattoo police. But I wasn’t alone, there was Joe Benante who wrote Tattooing the Right Way and Huck Spaulding’s well-known classic, Tattooing A to Z. And now we are lucky to have C.R. Jordan’s, Basic Fundamentals Of Modern Tattoo. I would urge apprentices to try to get ALL of these books. With tattooing being such a hush-hush business, any book that shares information is helpful, even the “out of date” classics from a historical perspective, if anything else. But even these old historical books have useful information about tattoo machines and procedures. Remember the tattoo machine and the basic procedures haven’t changed since these books were written. Techniques of cleanliness have, but these are very easy to notice and change to modern standards.

One person might say one book sucks and the other one is better, but books are like movies in which they can’t please everyone. Get them all, read them keep the ones you love on your nightstand and put the ones you dislike on the shelf. I can guarantee you’ll be referring back to ALL of them throughout your career.

erick alayon

Tattooed Freaks

People look at us like we were freaks or dirtbags who are going to rob them. Some people are shocked to learn that I own my own home and have four kids and two cats. I have had a few people tell me they thought I lived in a basement apartment somewhere. But most of the people I have met in the tattoo world, the "freaks" as we are called are the most real people in the world. You don't have to be afraid to be yourself, no matter how weird you are. No one will judge you as being to weird or different. It's the weirdness and differences that attract us to one another. Yeah, we might bust each other’s chops sometimes, but always in a joking way. It's the 'normal" people who tend to judge harshly, ignorant of how horribly nasty they are being to the person they are judging. Ignorant, not in the way of not knowing but in the way of not caring. But I guess as long as they go to church and ask the nameless god to erase their sins it's ok to go through life treating people like shit.