Last October, Russel O’Brien received a letter from a New York writer he’d exchanged a few e-mails with but had never met. “Dear Russel,” it began. “Your word, should you choose to accept it, is: fuse.” So O’Brien went out and got fuse tattooed on his back, just below his neck.
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“I like ideas I’m pissed off I didn’t think of,” says O’Brien, the visual arts curator at the Old Town School of Folk Music. He already had six tattoos, and as someone who says he feels a deep connection to the written word for the “sense of liberation” it provides and for “the sensuality of reading, the light dark light dark light dark as my eyes move across the page,” O’Brien had long wanted to have text on his skin. But with two tattoos he regretted already covered over with a large square he calls “hideous,” he was paralyzed by the fear that he’d choose a word or words that wouldn’t appeal to him as he grew older. He’d once considered getting Molly Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness soliloquy in Ulysses tattooed on his back. He now cringes at the thought of such grandiosity. “Oh, God,” he says. “We are what we loathe.”
Jackson’s story, “Skin,” provided an out: if he surrendered himself to a greater good–to someone else’s project–he wouldn’t need to feel connected to the text itself, which, after all, would not be of his choosing but randomly assigned. “Even if it was awful I could choose the placement on my body, and it wouldn’t have to be something I would have to look at,” he says.
Fuse arrived in a letter dated October 19, along with instructions to respect any capitalization or punctuation. The letter also referred O’Brien to a previous communique detailing the complete guidelines, which included the mandate to get the word done in black ink in a classic book font such as Bodoni, Times Roman, or Garamond.
“I hope she’s not a freak,” he jokes, “or this could be another black square.”
