“Every fucking convention I go to,” says Ben Lewis, “all the guys go sit in some bar and drink all night, and I’m back at the hotel beating their wives at Scrabble.” The weekend of August 2, at the international Tattoo the Earth convention in Rosemont, the wife of the owner of Fat Cat Tattoos in Brooklyn sought out Lewis, who’s better known as Ben Wahhh, owner of Lakeview’s Deluxe Tattoo. “I found out this woman plays against world champion Richie Lund–and he’s a supergenius,” says Ben. “She plays on-line on her computer every night from midnight to three in the morning. Supposedly when she got to Chicago she was like, ‘Where is that guy? We have to play a game.’”
“I’m definitely into what’s called ‘dark-side’ art,” he says, but his favorite kind of tattoo is anything that doesn’t involve any arguing–anything that makes the client happy. At the convention, people he’d inked more than five years earlier kept popping up to say hello. “Hey, remember this?” said one guy with a sandy mullet and matching mustache, pulling up the back of his girlfriend’s tank top. He pointed at a small tattoo of a flower with a name underneath. “You did this a long time ago!”
In college he’d met a tattoo artist named Nick Wiggins. Wiggins, who has a bleached-blond pompadour, works wearing sunglasses and is widely known for inking up his girlfriends as dark and as fast as possible. He liked Ben’s drawings and had tried to convince him to rethink his career goals. By the time he quit school, Ben was having problems with his girlfriend and was sick of his day job as a graphic designer, so with nothing to lose he moved to Champaign to apprentice at Wiggins’s shop and deliver pizzas for money. But according to Ben, Wiggins was a “hothead” with an “unglamorous past,” and had no business taking on a protege. “I’d go over to Nick’s house and find neo-Nazis passed out on the couch,” says Ben. “And I’m Jewish….One time this redneck idiot hanging out over there showed Nick how to load a gun, then demonstrated the safety by pointing the thing at my head and pulling the trigger. I was like, ‘I’m outta here.’” Eight months into his training, Ben moved back home.
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Oslon had a drug problem dating back to his teens, and he wasn’t shy about it. “He’d show up once every couple of weeks, take some money out of the safe for heroin, and leave,” says Ben. “We never saw him otherwise.” Oslon’s employees tried to help–at one point they put him on an allowance of $200 per week; if he wanted more he’d have to work for it. This was supposed to give him an incentive to stay sober. “He was flattered at first,” says Ben, “but he had a heart of gold and veins of iron,” and just couldn’t quit. “He’d go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and shoot up right afterward with someone he met in the program.” Oslon’s relationship with his employees soured when they realized he was lying to them. Once he made up a sob story about needing money to buy back-to-school clothes for his son. When he threatened to fire one of his employees–whom Ben had hired–for withholding funds, it was the last straw. Ben privately asked the staff, “If I open a shop, will you guys follow?” Everyone said yes.
Before heading to bed some nights he plays pool on the table in his basement. Though it’s the biggest object down there, it’s not the center of attention. Piled around the perimeter of the room are bones: ribs on skulls on femurs on hips on antlers, from deer, cows, moose, and goats. On a small table there’s a heap of deer bones strung together with rotting viscera, and the sweet smell of death permeates the musty air. (The carcass remnants came in the mail from a friend who knows Ben likes that sort of thing.) Photos of lifelike wax figures decorate the wall: a flayed man leaning back on an arm, a face ripped open to show muscles and nerves, a woman’s abdomen with an almost full-grown fetus inside.
