Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring

Author:Justin Spring
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-08-17T06:00:00+00:00

In mid-June, Steward met another young man through Renslow, one who would eventually become his tattooing apprentice—and after that, one of the most celebrated tattoo artists in the United States. Steward initially described Cliff Ingram—later Cliff Raven—in his journals as “a nice clean-cut kid in his twenties, a friend of Bill Tregoz, about whom he inquired”—for Ingram and Tregoz, both of whom were fascinated by leather, tattoos, and motorcycles, had already had a significant sexual involvement, Tregoz having picked Ingram up on his motorcycle one night in Bughouse Square, the well-known homosexual cruising spot on the Near North Side.

Ingram, who had studied art at Indiana University in Bloomington, immediately wanted to get tattooed by Steward, for Steward was by then well-known as Chicago’s most accomplished tattoo artist. “I had fantasies that I would do some dirty pictures for [Phil Sparrow] and he would give me tattoos in exchange,” he later told an interviewer. “I was just a poor little working stiff, you know. I hadn’t done anything about it and at that point I became more acquainted with Chuck and Dom, [and] learned that [Sparrow] was friends of theirs…[and] suddenly life [became] very interesting because I saw the possibility [of becoming a tattoo artist].” Ingram was at that point sexually involved with Renslow even though Renslow maintained a primary sexual relationship with Orejudos; according to Orejudos, “Cliff became part of our family; he and Chuck shared a bedroom, it was like a…it is hard to say like what because it was such an unusual arrangement.”

Steward was glad to be making new friends, for in his isolated life at the tattoo parlor, he had begun to feel increasingly vulnerable. He noted in an early July journal entry that Charlie Costello, a former circus roustabout and hustler, had recently started stealing things out of his shop. After considering the options, Steward decided to give Costello bus fare back to his hometown of New York before Costello simply robbed the cash register outright. Several days after Costello’s departure, however, the Tattoo Joynt was robbed by someone else—and Steward responded by buying his first gun. “I have come more and more to believe that the culprit was Roy Robinson,” Steward wrote. “Whoever did it…knew the set-up well…[luckily he] didn’t wreck my machines nor throw my colors on the floor.”

Along with the constant threat of crime, Steward also had to live with various horrors relating to tattooing, for as his reputation as a tattoo artist grew, so too did visits from extremely troubled people. One day at the shop, “A man about 45 came in, tall and nervous…[and] showed me his chest, on which were half a dozen old pieces…He wanted them all covered…What I could hardly take my eyes off, however, was his tits: one of them was torn off completely, the other dangling by a thread of flesh. The cunt on the [tattoo of the] nude [girl on his chest] had been burned out with a cigarette. In the face of such masochism (and sadism) I turned weak, almost got sick.

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