ED MISTER WAS A PICKLE-BARREL chested man who came from a long line of short fingernails, akin to the Prince of Wales and that kind of inbreeding. He was also premature gray, as was most of the family. When she was only eight years, his older sister was so gray that she was given a cigar and hand-shake at a voter rally in Echo Park.    That day they headed out to Alhambra in Uncle Raymon’s swimming pool-sized Oldsmobile, Uncle himself visiting from Europe where he lived with his short fingers and stubby nails, still in the service with, by this time, cloud white hair. He had the peculiar habit of keeping his thumbs covered by his front fingers—not a fist actually, but a device he had discovered to shelter the grenade pin of his horror, wars domestic and abroad. The older relatives sat with Raymond and their own even whiter hair looking like the Frost People, able to look into each other’s scalps and see things like blue birds, hard water, freezing wind. Ed’s hair made him a default leader of sorts for whatever activity he became involved in. Since he lacked the spark of actual charisma, his were the congenital duties that went along with premature graying, like being the first to buy alcohol, first to outgrow girls and the first to have to talk to police.    “So you know these boys from where?” taking the over-grown, salt and peppered adolescent by the elbow. The cops would shake their hips and give the old buddy-buddy wink to one another when capturing the young Ed as if they had finally suckled on to something truly deprived in their law enforcement careers. Their disappointment in discovering the boy wasn’t that old was matched only by the disap-pointment Ed experienced missing out on his adolescence. From a signs-and-symbols standpoint, he went straight from being a prepubescent boy scout to signing VFW petitions all within three years.    Ed reached the rank of Seaman First Class in the Coast Guard by the time he left with his GI bill and blown-out shoulder. “Drunken one-armed push-up contests,” muttered to Jack and Abby one afternoon. With the bill and a cash loan from Richard “Dick” Leak—a USC asshole Ed knew from Venice High, down south in Los Angeles—he was able to secure the down payment on the station . . . Leak had scored most his legitimate capital in auto parts and sand when Ed was in the Guard, so he thought of parking lots and service stations as investments in his future.    Ed had occasional semi-total body failure once or twice a year. Some calcium fault or retro-virus would consume him for two or three days, maybe a week. It would look bad, then he’d rise out of it, as if it were an aberration, a slip on a banana peal internally noted but forgotten. In kind, Ed had sporadic and nubby three millimeter moles rising from his neck. One day Jack would note a long strawberry-colored one like a floppy tire nipple, then the next it would be gone—perhaps a red dot in its place. Where they went Jack wasn’t sure and Ed never talked about them, al-though a few were certain to have fallen into the radiators and engine blocks he’d worked on during the week. Jack imagined the neighborhood ladies in their four-doors driving around with the roasted nubs of Ed’s wart-moles resting in their engines.    Between the red rubbery moles on his neck and arms slalomed the lines con-necting Ed and Jack. They shared the zealotry which said there were no new tattoos. From the second the artist pulled the needle and wiped the dermis, Captain Spermis—maybe clean with alcohol—it was like the Caltrans man marking the pavement with his spray cans. This is where that is buried and that is where this is buried, red and blue paint flares in the hands of the lineman marking along what he already knew was underneath: fists clenched in front of thin belly, elbows to tightened biceps, eyes traveling across . . . Deed done, the marks might as well have been there forever. Who was to say they hadn’t come from birth, other than the general notion that children aren’t born like that and if they are it is only one child who is born marked, his or her three matching numbers more passé than the old skull n’ cross bones, ship, shamrock, reaper or heart.    Although Jack and he liked tattoos, there was a difference between them. Ed was from the blue ink generation, as if all the imagination had gone out of the activity by the time his grandfather, father and he were sat in the chair and needled cobalt-blue and red, the red, beyond iron-oxide, red as the blood of the vanquished put into the body, reversing lots of racial superi-ority claims—we declaim you but we mix with you. London sailors in certain days let the tribesmen put it under their skin with nails and mallets, pit, pit, pitting away, tapping designs in their hide for lost and local loves (mixing again). There were men who put their whole lives into it that way, bloody as slaves and puffy.    With Ed, Jack reckoned there was no consideration for another way. They were just boys, misled by men, going off somewhere else again, eternally . . . Perhaps a yellow or green Japanese ink would have been construed as less than manly by the lot of big chested guys who held tree trunks in their arms and ate them like carrots. They were just trying to be Men and it can be very difficult when one is just trying to be a man, the real virtues with women and all. Well, yes and no. Ed wasn’t that manly—by male-game standards. The only “action” he ever saw was rounding up a lot of protesting naked hippies in dinghies off Point Vandekamp one night, some prototypes for the modern ICBMs ripe to be launched. Under the rockets red glare a little inadvertent spanking here and there had occurred, but it was innocent, really, as Ed was in no way perverted, hardly even kinky, wouldn’t think of dollying a sphincter, morally bound to such activities as he was. “No, really,” he explained desperately to Abby one night of confidences. “You try it yourself self some time, all wet wanting to catch them as they go up the beach. Those rockets whistling over head—you become something you hadn’t planned on!”    Ed got his GI bill, and he got his marks. When he stood in the sun all day they glowed like tiel worms. Jack swore he saw them lit one evening at the beginning of last summer when he was scrubbing the blacktop at the end of the day. “Ed, you,” Jack thought. “I’ve got better colors in mine.” He looked at the reds, yellows, pitch blacks, greens and blues thick on his arms.    Some afternoons Jack had a de’Chirico view of things, all the shadows long, as he would have a moment of pride, a finger licked and motioned like a point made. “Put one down for me!” as Ed walked past him, Jack trying to put his arm next to Ed’s to compare, Ed stopping to see Jack was up to something, maybe thinking too much. “What, Jack? What?” He looked at him incredulously. “Can’t you act normal once.” Jack smiled, and fortunately. The drunken little boy inside him knew the body was not a canvas when it came to impor-tant markings. He had his own ideas about how to decorate. In a daydream, he often found himself with Flipper, the TV star, laid out in his lap like a German shepherd would abid-ing you time to find its ticks. Jack would take a marker along the thick watermelon sides of the popular sea mammal, squeaking black strands parallel to latisimus and dorsal lines, following the muscles.    Standing out on Pump 6, Supreme, Jack laughed. It was so silly to be writing with a big black marker on the dolphin, but he was getting his point across. Ed wiped his brow with a doily looking at the young man there on the island, wondering if Jack was getting to him. “I’ve heard of the goddamn Trickle Down Theory,” he said to himself. “But, bud, you’re the Trickle Down Reality.”    Jack leaned against the pumps, looking at Ed, out with a cig to torch.

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