It’s a smooth Friday night in May, and the World Tattoo Gallery is rocking. Hundreds of people dressed in everything from evening clothes to almost nothing at all are crammed into the third-floor gallery in an old warehouse at 13th and Wabash, flaunting their hipness or hoping a little of Tony Fitzpatrick’s might rub off on them. The party is a celebration of the gallery’s one-year anniversary and the opening of its spring show. The crowd spills into the room across the hall, used occasionally for poetry readings, once for an Elvis impersonators’ contest, and as the dance floor at openings. Tonight, men and women seven deep ogle a New Orleans stripper, here billed as a “performance artist.”
In his off-time he began hanging around south-side gyms and clubs like LaJolla and Windy City, sketching the fighters there. “One day somebody’s sparring partner didn’t show up,” Fitzpatrick remembers, “and they looked at me and said, ‘Hey kid, why don’t you throw those gloves on and move around the ring?’ I held my own. I had some power, I could hit, I could take a punch.” Over the next two years, Fitzpatrick fought in 21 “barely professional” bouts, mostly against unskilled club fighters. He racked up a deceiving 18-3 record–deceiving because most of the fights weren’t sanctioned, weights weren’t verified, and sometimes Fitzpatrick, a middle heavyweight, fought guys more than 35 pounds heavier than him.
“Of course my father would never tell Tony that directly,” says Joe Hasiewicz Jr. “Tony would bring a new piece of artwork over, and my father would tell him, ‘You don’t know how to paint yet, you still have a ways to go.’”
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Fitzpatrick had grown tired of his directionless life-style; in the fall of 1980 he enrolled in acting classes at the College of DuPage. He lost interest before the end of the term and found himself back where he’d started. Then a few months later he signed up for a couple of classes at the Art Institute, but quit after a run-in with an instructor. He now says of the Art Institute, “The first time I walked into that place, I thought I was on another planet. I think I met one friend there.”
He had no money, just a box of pencils and a sketchbook. He walked more than five miles to a truck stop, sat down in the restaurant, and began drawing the diesel engine of a truck stationed outside. A waitress gave him five bucks for the sketch.
The bar across the street served as a constant reminder of the life Fitzpatrick was trying to escape. “I knew,” he says, that “one day working in the bar would be in my rearview mirror forever.
