TROY DENNING: 7th and 23rd?
JEB MAYKUT: 7th and 23rd.
BEN BAILEY: You guys are in the Cash Cab.
It's a TV game show that takes place right here, in my taxi.
So what are your names?
JEB MAYKUT: I'm Jeb.
TROY DENNING: Troy.
BEN BAILEY: Often stolen for its platinum, what
smog-reducing car component can be
ruined by leaded gasoline?
JEB MAYKUT: Fuel injector?
TROY DENNING: Catalytic converter.
JEB MAYKUT: Catalytic converter.
BEN BAILEY: Oh, that is correct.
And we're here.
So you just won--
JEB MAYKUT: Troy is one of the smartest people I've ever met
in my entire life.
When we were in "Cash Cab" together, he blew my mind.
BEN BAILEY: Namibia is right.
That's good for another $100.
JEB MAYKUT: How did you do that?
How did you do that?
That's insane.
And he got us, I think $1,500, we won in "Cash Cab." I think
we only missed like one question or something.
He always said to me, "I've forgotten more than you'll
ever know." And that's definitely true.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
He has all his smarts only from himself.
He didn't finish school.
He didn't go to college.
But if you talk to him, he's one of the most well-read,
well-versed in movies, culture, Japanese culture,
American culture.
That's the thing with Troy.
He is one of the most self-made people I've ever
known
TROY DENNING: Don't fucking film me
falling, mother fucker.
I mean, I always thought school was just kind of this
system of preparing you for a nine-to-five work week.
And I always thought that I was better
at educating myself.
The irony is that the only place where I could go to cut
school and hide from the truant officers that were
looking for me all the time was the library.
And I would end up being in the library all day long just
reading and looking at books and stuff like that.
And so they're looking for kids getting into trouble.
And I was actually geeking out the whole time, trying to
broaden my mind.
I grew up in a city called Hayward, California, just
south of Oakland.
A lot of blue collar, white families, a lot of Mexican
families with livestock running around and stuff like
that, even though it was somewhat inner-city.
All in all, I had a really enjoyable childhood.
I wanted to be a cartoonist from the time I was a child.
You know the TV Guide where it's like, draw the turtle,
the pirate, and the bear?
My parents thought I was the most talented kid in the
world, because I could draw that stuff really well.
There we go.
So let's blow that up.
And then, we roll with that.
My father was a truck driver.
So he would come back with these giant reams of copy
paper, like from the old IBM computers, giant rolls.
And me and my friends would just lie there.
And we'd draw these giant-- just start at one end, and
just the whole roll would just be barbarians and monsters and
aliens killing each other and stuff like that.
Dude, I got straight As until sixth grade.
And then I got Fs, until I got rebellious.
-Obviously, the English punk bands, you were into that.
TROY DENNING: Yeah.
-What was their--
TROY DENNING: I was always drawn to that kind of stuff,
not just because I like the music.
But to me, it was always that it was so alien and
so foreign to me.
And it was nothing like anything I grew up around.
When I first started getting into punk rock music, all my
cholo friends, all my home boys that I grew up with--
they were like, we have no idea what you're doing.
And I was like, I don't either.
It was almost like that movie, "The Jerk" where he first
hears the white music.
And he's like, ugh.
It was like I saw the shit.
And I was like, that's for me.
[PUNK ROCK MUSIC]
When I started going to hard-core shows and stuff like
that, I started going into the city.
San Francisco was just like 15 miles away.
Friday night, we'd head out to the city, sleep at the train
stations, until Sunday night when we had to come home.
We'd just spend the whole weekend just cruising around,
checking shit out, experiencing this world that
was so different from what I grew up with.
My friends were all getting tattooed at this place in
Hayward called East Bay Tattoo, Phil Simms' old shop.
The flash that was on the wall and everything was just so
dirty and violent.
And the imagery was so cool.
It was like, women with their legs spread, with the devil
licking them out and cholos, girls with fucking shotguns
and all this cool stuff that I'd never seen before.
It blew my mind that people would actually get that
tattooed on them.
I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
I remember coming across this book.
Just this was sitting on the counter.
And I was like, whoa, that looks really cool.
I really credit this publication in particular for
being a huge landmark in my interest in tattooing--
South Pacific, Polynesian-style tattooing,
crazy Japanese warrior tattoos like I'd never seen anything
at this time.
Yakuza, pirates, British punk rock, so it brought together
all these different worlds that I thought were awesome at
that time and just fascinating to me.
Artists that came from like a very hands-on, blue collar
approach to making art, it's always
appealed to me, as well.
CHRIS O'DONNELL: Troy, he's definitely lived an
interesting life.
I think that helps him with his perspective on tattooing
and-- you know, create a life for ourselves.
He had a bunch of different jobs.
He was a construction worker.
He worked in like a gold mine kind of thing in the desert.
He was a bouncer at a strip club.
TROY DENNING: So my friend worked at this club.
And he goes, hey man.
There's no fights.
It's cool.
And he goes, we'll make $300 a night.
And I was like, yeah.
My first night there, I was checking IDs.
And then, when I had to use the restroom, I realized why
it was $300 a night.
Because there's like fucking naked dudes everywhere.
You had to make a beeline right for the staff bathroom.
And it's the craziest shit going on.
That allowed me to get a little breathing room and
start focusing on buying my tattoo equipment.
I became friends with Aaron Cain and this guy Schmoe Dog,
who was very influential on me at that time.
They took me aside.
And they said, listen, if you're really serious, this is
what you need to buy, which not being a tattooer working
at a shop at that time, was a pretty big deal.
This was like the first color tattoo I ever did in my
apartment in this crappy neighborhoods in the San
Francisco mission.
And his poor guy, he was my roommate's boyfriend.
He sat for like three days straight, while I tried to
learn tattoo color tattoos on his chest.
I mean, you can see all the bruising and everything.
I was so intent on doing it and getting a photo of it and
showing people that I was just like, shut up.
You've got to do it, man.
You've got to do it, no choice.
You can tell your friend to just, hey, don't show anybody
this until we're done.
But they don't listen to you.
They immediately run out and show everybody at the bar and
run around.
And this local guy, Ed Nolte, owned a
shop on Valencia Street.
And he goes, hey, man, you're tattooing right in the
neighborhood.
You've got to work here.
I'm like, all right, cool.
When I first started tattooing, I'd wake up in cold
sweats with the idea of being halfway into a project and
then kind of painting myself into a corner and not knowing
how to get out of it.
What do I do now?
I don't know.
Nothing is working.
And I'd wake up in the middle of the night, stressed on what
I had to do the next day.
So at least I'm over that part.
Right on Valencia and 16th Street right there, it was a
fucking dirty block.
There'd be people pissing on the sidewalk, shitting on the
sidewalk, junkies nodding out in doorways.
I remember these guys would--
we'd look over.
There'd be a guy passed out on the sidewalk.
My boss at the time would just throw them down the stairs.
And that was the way the world was at that time.
It was a different place.
Kids now don't realize how when you first entered this
business in the late '80s early '90s, like I did, it was
still rough people.
You definitely couldn't come in and just be like a
pretentious artist and say, I'm only doing this.
I'm only doing this.
Because you'd get your ass kicked, and you'd get thrown
on the street.
I went from there to Everlasting Tattoo.
I was friends with Aaron.
They needed somebody.
I was just like, fuck it.
I'm going to make a professional resume, like a
straight-up, square-style resume and send it to him.
And then, I used him as a reference.
And he thought that was so funny that he
hired me right away.
He was like, dude, you're in.
You're exactly what we need.
So I'm like, all right, cool.
Aaron Cain was very influential
on my tattoo career.
He was the kind of person that was always creating something.
Everything he touched had his stamp on it.
And he was always keeping busy and always very impressive to
me, as a person and as an artist.
Myself, I was really searching for a style.
I didn't really know what I liked.
I did a lot of that early California style, kind of Rat
Fink, Big Daddy Roth style.
I had a lot of people want this kind of stuff from me,
back in the day.
When he would flex his bicep, the butt would go bump bump
bump and pulsate.
That was like, my formative years.
I wasn't prepared to be as busy as I was when I first
started tattooing.
I thought I was going to be more of a real hustle, a lot
of waiting around.
But the minute I started working at Everlasting
Tattoos, the runoff was crazy.
It was good for kind of forging my work ethic and
making me know what it's like to be stressed out, to hustle,
and to have to get shit done.
Because that's part of tattooing also.
I was there for five years, maybe.
And then, before I moved to New York, I did a stint with
Grime at Prime Urge, which was a really great time for me.
-Why did you leave Everlasting to go to Primal Urge?
TROY DENNING: It was just time.
When you work with somebody that knew you before you were
a tattoo artist and before you actually had clientele and
when you were just kind of a scrub, you kind of stay that
way to them.
So it's like you've got to keep it moving.
You've got to leave home.
Ready babe?
The biggest mistake I made in tattooing was to equate lapsed
time with progress.
That's the biggest mistake you can make.
Because when I first started tattooing, I was like, all
I've got to do is just do this for a couple years.
And I'll be good.
It's like, that's bullshit.
Because you just end up doing the same thing.
If you want to be good, you have to sit down and actually
study shit and make a real effort to learn something and
really understand it and not just think, oh,
it'll come in time.
Because that's bullshit.
We're creatures of habit.
We just end up doing what is comfortable and falling into
the comfort zone.
There we go, babe.
Check it out.
It's like everything else.
It's like learning a martial arts technique or a
skateboarding move.
You know what I mean?
It's like, those days, you've got to just sit.
And it's like, I'm not going home until I've got this.
And then, I'll refine it, refine it, refine
it, make it my own.
[MUSIC PLAYING]