So, yeah, my shin looks like shit. It’s just illegible and amorphous trial and error. I’m a terrible drawer and worse tattoo artist, but I was immersed. Flash, books, machines, defamed orange peels everywhere. I even talked to Mark about opening up something together in New York. Then I remembered that I wasn’t rich. I did get a bit better at drawing flash and designed an addition—praying hands, falling flower petals—to the memorial portrait Mark did of my beautiful dog Jack. By then Mark and I had forged a friendship and collaboration that transcended and too often provided an excuse for another tattoo. It became clear I was far more suited to document Mark’s art than to practice it. I would eventually direct a short pilot, this sort of quasi-documentary, which weaves in “reenactments” from Mark’s storied time as an artist and a liver.

In no small part this deeper connection with Mark goes back to Bobby Pastorelli, who died of an overdose in 2004 after years, presumably, of being straight. When it happened, I had just gotten back in touch with him—actually, we reconnected while I was in Mark’s chair celebrating the completion of my second film as director, I Love Your Work, with a tattoo of the Greek mythical figure Daedalus (but in a suit on a barstool under an old streetlamp). Bobby called Mark, and Mark put me on the phone with him. I had lost touch with Bobby after a horrific tragedy had befallen him a few years prior. I say befallen because that’s how I choose to think about it. The truth is mired in mystery and speculation, and presumably led to his OD after years of refusing even a beer. When I heard he died, I went straight to Mark’s shop, and eventually we both got matching tattoos to commemorate our mutual friend; they were based on a piece of super-old flash I found in this great Taschen book—heads of angels flanking Christ on the cross. Mark drew up the heads, and his mentor, Mike Brown—who was guesting at Mark’s shop, Shamrock—did the tattoos. Exquisite detail. Bobby’s tiny initials tangled in the hair of the angels.

The second video from my record The Goldberg Sisters solidifies the connection I have with Mark. It’s for the song “The Room,” the title of which I took from Hubert “Cubby” Selby Jr.’s book of the same name. Bobby had introduced me to Cubby back in the ’90s, right before making Scotch and Milk. (Cubby, alongside Bobby, plays a barfly sage whose improvised dialogue would elicit tears each time I’d edit his scene.) I based the song on Bobby’s death. And to complete this trinity of cool and meta reflection I asked Mark to play “the guy” from the song in the video—to, in effect, play Bobby. The 16mm film is pretty dark and drips pretty heavily with an acrid nostalgia. I’m not entirely sure how healthy the whole thing is, but on some level it must have been cathartic.

Thinking back, it would have been hard to imagine as I stood there in second grade, weeping and screaming at that poor girl whose pencil was stuck in my triceps, that the tip she left behind would only be that of an iceberg.