Well whaddyaknow about that. I like Hegspeth even more now than I did; clearly, he’s my kind of guy.

BCE sez:

Seems that Hagspeth was a Rakkasan (the tat in the lower right corner in the regimental crest)

Never met him (to my memory) but it seems we were in a LOT of the same areas around the same time, to include Gitmo

Again: whaddya know about that. Where the post title came from: Skin Art, now sadly defunct. When I lapse into another of my maudlin reminiscences of the bygone days when I was “working for the magazines,” Skin Art was one of said mags.

EXTRANEOUS INSIDE-BASEBALL ADDENDUM: SA, which my boss-lady Chris proudly deemed our best and most praiseworthy publication, was put out by the likewise defunct Art & Ink Publications. Our other titles were my treasured Outlaw Biker ragazine, a labor of love for me and Chris on which I was tasked not just with ad design and layout duties but also cover design/layout now and again, as well as occasional feature articles covering full-custom Harley chops, bobjobs, and sundry uncategorizable oddities; your better class of independent shops and/or wrenches; biker events, runs, and other gatherings; and last but not least, the regular “Leatherballs” column (see the nav-bar link up top for my L-balls archive*). Additionally, we did Tattoos For Men; Tattoos For Women; and the outrageous, calculatedly offensive, disturbingly popular, and habitually pornographic Tabu Tattoo.

Tucked in a closet or under the bed someplace, I still have a big box jam-full of photos that people had sent in hoping to be run in one or the other of our mags, a great many of those pics featuring nekkid or practically nekkid women, in settings and poses that ran the gamut from “quite alluring” to “ unintentionally comical” to “what the fuuuu…?!?” A woefully high percentage of said hopefuls were uglier’n a mud fence, displaying all the sex appeal of a steaming, fresh-dropped hog turd. From the pics, you could see that these unfortunates were hard-bitten, slovenly, hatchet-faced slatterns with reek of cheap booze, BO, and broken dreams practically wafting up off the pic in an eye-tearing, all-hands olfactory assault. In Raymond Chandler’s concise, unforgettable sum-up: too much makeup on too many miles.

On the other hand, though, many of those half-clad aspiring biker-zine models were legitimately smokin’ hot, against every expectation of us office-drones slaving thanklessly away under the A&I lash.

Ahh, but the unsolicited submissions with Tabue Tetoooz Crayola’d illegibly in large, wobbly block print across the front of a ragged, worn-soft Manila envelope—no return address, because what mentally semi-sound person possessed of the smallest smidgeon of taste, discernment, self-respect, and functional eyesight would want the horrible things back, fer gawd’s sake?—were really something else again, I gotta say.

See, our production schedule required each individual staffer to upload one (1) set of the InDesign/Distiller PDF page layouts he’d been assigned to create to the printing company, with all the hi-res photos for said pages in their own separate IMGS folder (all covers were created in Illustrator, don’t know why). The uploading deadline  was each and every Thursday afternoon by 2PM; on weeks the four-issues-yearly (the others were six) OB was due we doubled up, basically, kiting two (2) completed magazines off to the printers—which, surprisingly enough, there were only three of nationwide, by the by. IIRC, the one we used was way out in the untracked wilderness of Ohio or Nebraska or Indiana or some other such Godforsaken backwater.

Biker, as the boss always called it, was pretty much mine and Chris’s baby, with Jeff standing by to lend a hand as needed. Job assignments for the four mainstream, non-emetic tattoo mags were divided between the staff, said assignments written up by Chris in a four-cell table sketched up for that specific purpose, printed via the office inkjet, then distributed to the worker bees on Monday morning. When Tabu week rolled around the impending ordeal (permanently assigned to moi shortly after I started at A&I) of wading through the most recent soul-blighting submissions imbued me with a queasy combination of dread, disgust, and morbid fascination.

The five (5) members of Team A&I being the stout, indomitable sorts we were, the crew never flinched nor faltered underTabu’s unholy menace no matter what. We laughed; we cried; we jokingly mimed puking into the steel wastebaskets beside our desks; the most revolting pics were passed around amongst ourselves for the requisite snickering, mockery, and marveling at—yet somehow, some way, we persevered; we got through our shared travail more or less unscathed. We stood manfully up (okay, okay, two (2) of our number—my comely, smart-alecky, unpretentiously sexy, and staggeringly intelligent platonic GF Joy and of course our bold, fun-loving, über-competent and -professional boss-lady Chris—were of the vaginal/fallopian/uterine persuasion) to the most putrid profanations, perfidies, and provocations the Tabu freaky-deaks could hurl our way, and still we prevailed. Vidi, retchi, vici.

Thinking back on those splendid days, “the magazines” was just about the best job I ever had: tons of fun; engaging; unfailingly interesting; personable, supportive, cheerful co-workers and boss. Sure, it could be trying at times; making deadline every Thursday could be stressful, and A&I’s owner was an avaricious, conniving thief, a lecherous old sleazebag, and a consummate prick on his infrequent trips from his Miami abode to visit the office. Nonetheless, the bottom-line fact is that there was never a dull moment at A&I. I miss it terribly.

* As I like to tell folks, my one and only stab at real-deal, no-shit journalism was/is the “Myrtle Beach Goodbye” article linked under the Leatherballs heading; for that one, I made phone calls and interviewed several players both major and minor behind the tragic cancellation of the H-D Dealers Association’s annual spring rally—all of whom either agreed to be quoted on a strictly anonymous basis or flatly declined to be quoted at all, for reasons I felt were entirely understandable once I’d interviewed them, especially Myrtle Beach’s mayor, city councilmen, and several restaurant/bar/retail shop owners; gathered all the facts, details, and undisclosed motives I could; formed my own original conclusions via a careful, impartial analysis of the information gleaned from two (2) weeks of diligent sleuthing; wrote, re-wrote, and edited my reportage; published the fruits of my labor in OB, and hey presto: JOURNALISM!