My Strange Tattoo Apprenticeship with San Francisco’s Last Remaining Weirdo

Maybe you shouldn’t take tattoo lessons from people you meet at bars

As you’re reading this story, you may ask yourself, “What kind of idiot would subject themselves to laboring for an untrustworthy old drunk man named Party Bob in exchange for vague promises of tattoo apprenticeship?” Well…I am that idiot. In order to understand why I did what I did, you have to know a bit about Party Bob, one of the few remaining San Francisco weirdos.

Party Bob was like a drug-addled Ernest Hemingway. He joined the French Foreign Legion as a young man and traveled the world. He was also an artist, his medium of choice being paint on canvas. His subjects were usually dinosaurs and warplanes. When I first met him, he was living off of money he had won after taking the SFPD to court for a wrongful arrest. As it happens, we shared the same pot dealer (Weefy), and that’s how we first sparked up a friendship.

I was drinking one day with Party Bob at Flanahan’s Pub in the Outer Sunset. He would hold court over the other afternoon barflies, and he always had the best stories. At some point, he started talking about how he used to be a professional tattoo artist in the ’80s, to which I replied something like, “Wowee, Party Bob. Can you teach me how to use a tattoo gun? I’ve always wanted to be a tattoo artist!”

Party Bob shot me this scary look and said, “The first thing about tattooing is that you don’t ever call it a gun; it’s a tool.” Then he went outside to vomit by a bus stop. When he came back, I was invited over to his house.

Once we were there, he showed me the desolation that was his backyard. “Listen, dude. I’ll teach you the art of tattoo, and in exchange for this, you will help me landscape my backyard. I want to make it beautiful for my wife. We start next Monday at 8:00 a.m. sharp.”

“Sounds good to me, Party Bob.”

The deal was sealed with a crack of a 40-ounce beer. Then we listened to Willy Nelson music and smoked reefer out of an old pot-roast bone. Around 2:00 a.m., his wife, Kathy, poked her head out the bedroom window.

“Goddamnit, Robert! I have work tomorrow! You’re sleeping on the couch tonight, asshole!”

That night I took a long walk home. I was excited to have a mentor figure take me under his wing. I would be a tattoo artist in no time. I was wrong.

On the following Monday, I was knocking at his door at 8:00 a.m. as instructed. After a few minutes, Party Bob opened the door in a bathrobe.

“Jesus, what the fuck are you doing here?!”

“You told me to be here at 8:00 a.m.!”

“Aww, shit…”

He invited me inside and started his morning routine of drinking a pot of coffee and cracking a beer. Then we watched that movie Jarhead for an hour and a half. The film finished, and he told me to come back next Monday, at 11:00 a.m. this time.

And so I did.

“All right, my Irish friend, you see all this crabgrass? I want it all torn out. Then you’re going to dig a hole 15 inches deep and 8 feet across. I’ve got all these paver stones I found at the dump that I’m going to put out here to make a patio area.”

I asked him how many weeks he thought it would take. He made a vague gesture with his hand and threw me a pair of gloves and a shovel.

“Less talky, more worky,” he said. Then he went inside.

So my tutelage began. It was almost like being trained by a master in a kung fu film. Party Bob had all these phrases he would say, like, “There’s art; then there’s fart.” And the very Zen saying of “If you think saying ‘fuck’ is funny, fuck yourself and save your money.” What any of it meant I do not know.

It was labor intensive, and while I worked, he would sit on his stoop with his orange cat, Hemingway, watching me toil. His form of encouragement was talking about how Irish people are born hole diggers and cackling to himself, then making references to building the railroads.

“Hey, mick. Don’t steal my ladder when you’re done! Ha ha ha.”

Three weeks later, his backyard patio was completed. It looked great, I must say. We even planted clover between the paver stones.

“Hey, this looks pretty good, dude. I think you’re ready for tattoo school.”

The next week, Party Bob’s wife was out of town, so he converted the living room into an improvised tattoo studio. We went over maintaining “The Machine” and sterilizing the tattoo needles.

“OK, you’re going to design a tattoo, then transfer it to your body with a transfer paper, a ballpoint pen and some vaseline. Now take off your shirt.”

Once I took off my shirt, he shaved my chest with a straight razor, and when that was finished, he grabbed my pectoral and said, “Let’s ink that titty.”

“Is this the usual way people tattoo-apprentice?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

At this point, I want to inform the reader that this is not the way to become a tattoo artist. There are all kinds of steps you should take, like building a portfolio and getting a tattoo shop to take you on as an apprentice, then getting certain licenses. Digging holes and building a patio are not involved.

The design I came up with was my family crest. I think it had to do with all the Irish slurs he threw at me. I should have known to go for something less complicated, like a skull or an anchor. Nope, I had to go for a complicated heraldic design.

Once the tattoo design was transferred to my chest, he went to his bedroom and started throwing things around till he found a mahogany box. He brought it out and opened to reveal an old tattoo machine that looked like it had come from the Old West.

“The samurai’s sword is his soul, as is the tattoo machine for the tattoo artist. You must respect it, and it will respect you. You must treat it like a beautiful lady.”

He turned on the machine, and instantly it started sparking and kicking like an electric mule. He called it an old whore and started rubber-banding the wires together like he was trying to hot-wire a car.

“Should it be sparking like that, Party Bob?”

He muttered and cursed at the machine.

“Here’s 10 bucks. Go to the liquor store and buy a six-pack, and by the time you get back, I’ll have this mother fucker working.”

I came back with a pack of Blue Moon, which, I thought, was totally reasonable.

“What is this fucking shit? There’s fucking microbes growing it! Go trade this garbage for some normal beer.”

“Like what?”

“Pabst Blue Ribbon, stupid!”

I came back with the correct beer, and we went back to the task at hand. Robert put on black medical gloves with a slap.

The needle broke the flesh, and blood was spilled with the electric buzz of the tattoo machine. There would be no going back. After 20 minutes, Robert noticed that his hand was starting to shake, which, I now know, is a symptom of delirium tremens.

“Listen, I’m tired. Come back next week.”

The weeks passed, and a pattern started to emerge: Party Bob teetering between a state of “drunk” and “too drunk.” I had begun to suspect that I had bet on the wrong horse. After four weeks, the tattoo was barely half finished. I asked him what his timeline was for finishing it.

“We’ll do the final push next Monday—cross my heart and hope to die.”

That Monday I showed up and was greeted by Party Bob’s wife. She told me Party Bob had gone to France to party with his French buddies.

“Did he say when he’d be back?” I asked.

“Nope. He wanted me to give you this note.”

It read as follows:

My Irish Friend,

I’m sorry. I cannot finish your tattoo. Perhaps one day you’ll forgive me. I had to flee the States because “the man” was up my ass, and I have to lay low in the south of France for a while. If there’s a lesson in all of this, maybe it’s that you shouldn’t take tattoo lessons from people you meet at bars. Thank you for the patio.

Sincerely,

Party Bob

A month later, I was drinking at Flanahan’s Pub when Old Patrick came in and asked if I had heard the news about Party Bob.

“Yeah, he went to France to flee the man.”

“What? He didn’t go to France. He went to Big Sur to trim pot and fell off a cliff and died. The funeral is next week.” Then Old Patrick slurped down a pickled egg.

Of course I went to his funeral. The attendance was massive. Party Bob was a very well-liked man despite his numerous flaws. One of his old friends from high school got up to speak about him.

“Party Bob, wow. We had some lively times, man. I have, like, three tattoos he started working on that he never finished. That was just Party Bob. At one point, I said to him, ‘Goddamnit, Party Bob. When are you going to finish these tattoos? I’m walking around like an asshole! Well, he just smiled.’”

At the wake (at Flanahan’s), I discovered at least 10 other friends of Party Bob who had these awful half-finished tattoos—which, in a way, made me feel better. Since then I’ve thought of getting it covered up with a panther or something, but a part of me wants to keep it as a reminder that I will never be tricked into manual labor again.