Danny "Wacky" Benavidez

There is always more there than the tattoo

The Wipe Down is a collection of conversations with tattoo artists from across the industry, getting into their lives beyond what we normally see through their work. The conversations can go anywhere, and that's the point, since knowing the artist changes the way you look at what they create. There's always more there than the tattoo.

There's a poster hanging inside Addictive Arts Tattoo in Barstow with Danny "Wacky" Benavidez staring out through his black glasses, tattoo machine in hand, looking like he's running for office in some alternate universe where the only campaign promise is written across the top in big red letters: GET A TATTOO. Across the bottom, just in case there was any confusion about who should do it: BY WACKY.

Then there's the checkerboard floor running through most of the shop and the walls are packed with artwork, pieces of Wacky's personality, and a few feet away from all of it is the actual Wacky in a white T-shirt and black work apron tattooing a guy named Seth, who has made himself remarkably comfortable on the table considering an interview has now broken out around him.

Wacky wasn't stopping for me, which turned out to be much better than sitting him down somewhere and firing questions across a table. He kept working and we talked around the tattoo session, with Seth stretched out on his side and looking increasingly like a man who might have his mail forwarded there.

At some point it became obvious that Seth was getting more than a tattoo appointment for his money, since conversations in tattoo shops have a habit of turning into therapy and this poor bastard was lying in the middle of ours. Credit, where it's due, he let the whole thing roll without complaint as Wacky tattooed and talked about years of work, family, old friends, the world he grew up around and parts of his life that carry considerably more weight than anything hanging on the walls.

Wacky has been tattooing for more than thirty years, and during the interview he was shading a piece on Seth that had already been outlined during an earlier session. At one point I asked him when he made the switch from the coil machines to rotary. I can't remember exactly when he said he changed over, so I'm not going to pretend I do, but I remember what he said about the difference. The newer rotary machines are much easier on him physically, especially during longer sessions, and he doesn't have the same problems with his hand numbing or cramping, which allows him to tattoo much longer.

Looking through his work, I had him figured for a black-and-gray guy, so I asked what he actually preferred tattooing...... "Color." I looked at him. "Really, Wacky?" Yep. Color.

Wacky said a lot of people think he's mainly about black and gray, but he actually prefers color, and once he said it, his portfolio made me question why I had boxed him into black and gray in the first place. The color had been sitting there the whole time. I just wasn't giving it the same attention.

That exchange fits him better than it seemed to at first, since people have probably been making assumptions about him for most of his life. Wacky doesn't talk about his past like it belongs to another guy, and a look through what he has posted over the years backs that up better than anything I could write for him. Old photographs of his camaradas are still there, including people from a part of his life that came with plenty of trouble, and Wacky has never gone back through his history with an eraser trying to make the pictures fit the man he is today.

In one post he wrote about the memories keeping him at peace, sending love to the camaradas still "walking the earth" and letting the ones who are gone know he would always be there for them. Another old photograph came with a much harder description of those years, talking about how playing in the dirt with your friends could turn into trouble you never could have pictured as a kid, going "from 1 yard to the next," thinking about the people you love from a phone call or text and possibly ending up on the run. Wacky knows exactly what came with that world, but knowing the cost never required him to pretend the people inside it meant nothing.

Wacky wanted something different for his kids, and he told me with a lot of pride that they never got involved in the same street world he knew growing up. He wasn't trashing his past when he said it either, and that's important with Wacky, since the guys in those old photographs didn't suddenly become people he was ashamed to know once he became a husband, raised his children and built a career. Those are still his camaradas, including the ones who aren't here anymore, and he can be proud that his children took another road without pretending his own road was filled with people who meant nothing to him.

His wife deserves more than being used as a bridge between his past and his kids, especially after I saw something Wacky posted about her. There's an old picture of her smiling in a sombrero, and underneath it Wacky wrote, "Because you've rescued me from me.. more times then I can count!!!" Now what am I supposed to add to that? I could dress it up, start writing about love and loyalty and everything a marriage survives after enough years together, except those words already told me what I needed to know about where this woman stands with Wacky. He didn't say she changed him, fixed him or saved him from where he came from.

He said she rescued him from himself, and read that wording again before moving past it, since Wacky could have said a hundred easier things about the woman he loves and chose something far more personal. "Because you've rescued me from me.. more times then I can count!!!" Those are Wacky's words exactly as he wrote them, and they're staying that way. Whatever happened between those two people over the years belongs to them, so I'm not going digging around inside their marriage trying to explain what "rescued" means. The fact that Wacky chose that word is enough for me.

This is a guy who has no problem showing where he came from, still posts photographs of his camaradas and remembers the ones who are gone, yet when he wanted to say something publicly about his wife, he gave her credit for getting him through battles with himself. You can do whatever you want with that sentence; I know what it made me think about.

It also tells me why trying to write Wacky as the guy who walked away from his past would be bullshit. He didn't. His old friends are still his old friends, and the people he lost still get mentioned by name and shown in photographs.

He has written directly to his camaradas who are still "walking the earth" and to those who aren't, and some of his posts go straight back into years when trouble was part of everyday life. He remembers playing in the dirt with guys as kids before any of them could have known where life was going to take them, and he remembers what came later without cleaning any of it up. His father was part of that world, Wacky followed into it, and years later he could look at his own children and be proud that they didn't.

His wife belongs right in the middle of that history too, although I'm not going to assign her some convenient role in Wacky's story that he never gave her himself. He already gave us the words that matter: she rescued him from himself more times than he can count.

His children got another direction, his camaradas never became disposable memories, and the woman beside him received credit from Wacky that most men would have a difficult time putting into words publicly. That tells me far more about Danny Benavidez than trying to divide his life into whatever happened before and whatever came after.