step three – hose the tranny blood off the stairs

telling the story behind today’s title got me in some trouble at work once…

…because the word “tranny” is triggering for some folks.

you shouldn’t forget the trailblazers. the pioneers. the motherfuckers who kicked down the doors of the room you’re now in. the problem is a lot of the newer generation think things have just always been a certain way, and they haven’t. shit, i can remember my mom recounting the first day that women were allowed to wear PANTS to the university of texas, as before it was only dresses or skirts allowed for female students.

and all the current LGBT folks should remember the people that were called “tranny” back when were the forefathers to your “T” people today. it was just the term at the time. if you were born one gender, but lived your life as another, that was the “trans” of the generation. 2023 standards can not, and should not, be applied to 1983 unless you can tell me how time travel works. period.

regardless, the story comes from my buddy herald’s first attempt at tattooing in hawaii. ever a lover of traditional americana, he decided to start off at some shop on hotel street, the infamous area on the big island where sailor jerry collins birthed modern american traditional tattooing back when. what we forget is, “back when”, is what i lovingly refer to as the “BSW era of tattooing”, due to the majority of clientele being bikers, sailors, and whores (oh my!).

so the neighborhood where it all began, in the modern era, is, shall we say, pre-gentrified. un-renovated. the term “ghetto” and “shitty” have also been loosely tossed about.

apparently the shop he was at was a shop you entered through the alley. we don’t think anything of that as the bar we used to frequent after we’d shut down his shop for the night in san marcos you also entered through the alley, so we just went out the back door of the shop once we’d locked it all up, walk twenty yards down the alley, and into the bar for cigars and whiskey and ribs (oh my!). at least that was my late night snack.

but i digress.

the hawaiian shop, as many do, had steps for opening the shop. and due to the after dark activities in the alley that served as the shop entrance (in daylight hours) step three was the title today; to literally wash the blood of the lady boy whores who inevitably got into fights in the alley and thus would end up bleeding on the steps that led to the doorway of the shop. so where the fuck did this come from?

budnik finally seems to be getting better after an entire year of battling a spot on his lower abs near his hind leg. but now it’s bleeding more often, albeit when i’m doing a “treatment” on it, but it means the final step in clean up is not just throw the old bandage or clorhexadine soaked gloves away, it’s hose the budnik blood off the back porch, which of course reminded my (slightly) off mind about step three…