Failure, TVs, and Tattoos

Daily writing prompt

What tattoo do you want and where would you put it?

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In the mid-fifties, my dad rented a semi-truck and hired two guys to load it with all the stock in his Ben Franklin store. He’d broken his lease, and he didn’t want the building owner to confiscate all the merchandise in lieu of unpaid rent.

He did this in the middle of the night.

It was astonishing and bitter, the whole episode, although I was quite young at the time and measured unhappiness with very tiny spoons. My mother was already morose, from the death of her beloved sister and the move from her hometown in western Michigan to Detroit’s roughed-out and unpaved suburbs. It was a grim time.

He had convinced her that, after working days at Sears selling washing machines and spending nights playing in dance hall bands, he had enough of a stake to buy his own store. This was several years after he’d built a house from the basement up in her hometown two blocks from her childhood home, often telling the story about how he used a team of horses to dig the basement. He knew how to do all that stuff. He was a guy who made his own skis from a tree he cut down in his parents’ backyard because it was the Depression. Everything he did and knew how to do was because of the Depression.

The triumph of buying his own store in Detroit lasted just a year or so. He couldn’t make enough money, the location was wrong, he’d picked the wrong neighborhood, bought the wrong stock. He never said moving was a mistake, but he wore failure like a raincoat.

So he moved the store in the middle of the night to a new location, signed another lease, prayed the first landlord wouldn’t sue him, and started selling Muntz TVs out of the back of his car to feed us all while the new location took root. He knocked on doors with his TV thing. “Hello, I’m Roy. Could I interest you in a new TV? We got a great deal goin’ on right now.” I can hear his pitch like I was standing right next to him.

He was never home until real late at night, like ten or eleven, and then he’d eat supper from a plate balanced on his lap while he read the paper. Sometimes he came home later when we were all sleeping. He was always gone in the morning. Always.

So, if I were to get a tattoo, which I wouldn’t for a hundred reasons, but if I did, I’d make it a 50’s looking guy with a long overcoat and a fedora standing on the front porch of an old, dilapidated house carrying a new television with a long cord trailing loose. He might be holding the TV with one arm while ringing the doorbell or looking up at someone in the window and yelling “Hey, I got a deal for you!”

The tattoo would be tiny and fine and fit on the back of my hand so I could look at it when I get weak in the knees about one thing or another. I could sell a Muntz TV if I had to. I think.