By: Dalton M. Bright
On August 20, 2021, in a gray stone building on Commercial Street in Hanceville, Alabama, people pack in like tourists. Beside a countertop holding cookies and chips, a tarot reader analyzes a set of cards. She sits across from another woman at a circular table covered in a black tablecloth. In a town like Hanceville, Sunday School is usually what brings this many people into a building together.
In the store there are retro action figures, local art pieces, horror movies and handmade jewelry. An ornate crucifix from New Orleans hangs on the wall beside an oryx skull with horns nearly piercing the ceiling. People waltz through the aisles, scanning through all the oddities.
The scene is captured on video and posted onto The Hanging Lady Facebook page. The caption above the video reads “hanging out with the weirdos.”
The last post made on The Hanging Lady Facebook page is an antique sepia image of four people wearing handmade Halloween costumes. The caption of the post reads: “We will not be participating in the Hanceville Fall Festival as the churches have deemed that there will be no costumes depicting ‘demons,’ ‘devils’ or ‘scary' masks. Look for updates as to when we will be open at our new location at Dodge City Tattoo Company near the end of the year.”
Dodge City is a town off of Interstate 65, just 10 miles east of Hanceville. Occupying a total of 3.4 square miles, the town was incorporated in 1993 and has an estimated population of 548. The town’s official website claims that “many conveniences of a big city can be found in this small community that will have you whistling the theme to ‘The Andy Griffith Show.’”
Across from Dodge City Petro, the largest service station on Interstate 65, sits a strip of three storefronts, two of which are vacant. On the far right side of the lot is Dodge City Tattoo Company. A glass door opens and a muted chime comes from a speaker box above. Inside, the smell of incense wafts up from behind the glass counter.
In the far end of the room, a three-tiered shelf stands butted-up against the doorway to the adjacent tattooing room. String lights are slung over the top and around the corners. Books are stacked on the bottom of the shelf, their spines reading things like “magick,” “art and tattooing” and “Edgar Allan Poe.”
On the rack above, there are sealed vials of owl pellets that sit beside a display stand holding antique casket keys. The keys are priced at $20. Taxidermied animals, tarot card decks, wood carved fetishes and aged baby dolls fill in the open spaces.
John Riendeau walks through the doorway. From his front belt loop to his back pocket hangs a chain, so he carries a jangle with him. He stretches out his hand, says “how’s it going, man” and sits in an upholstered chair across from the shelf. To the left of the chair is iron sign that reads “funeral parking only.”
He adjusts the hem of a black denim vest affixed with patches. On his left shoulder is a patch with the word “coroner” embroidered in yellow font. On top of his head sits a black velvet dress hat the same shade as his denim vest.
Riendeau has all the markings of a tattoo shop and oddity shop owner. His knuckles are inked and so are the tops of his fists. From his earlobes hang silver hoops, similar to the ones in his left eyebrow and left nostril. He scratches his beard and speaks with a subdued cadence, taking time to survey his thoughts before he speaks them.
“Sometimes people will come in here and have a whole different take on the name,” Riendeau says. “I named [the Hanging Lady] after my wife who passed away. She was a piercer here. Me and her actually built this shop together.” He points to the wood-paneled wall beside him. “We went to the lumber yard and got all this wood and hand-sanded it and hand-stained it ourselves. We put everything into it,” he says.
Misty Alford-Riendeau died on October 18, 2020, just three months before Riendeau opened the doors to The Hanging Lady. “I opened up The Hanging Lady a little over a year ago, man.” He catches himself, looks up at the ceiling and says: “well, shit, almost two. It was a pretty low point in my life and I wanted to pay a sort of homage to her,” he says.
“She struggled with substance abuse and got real clean for almost a decade. She had a child that was staying with the father’s family. They kept on telling her ‘you’ve got to get clean,’ ‘you’ve got to jump through this hoop and that hoop.’ She would jump through every hoop, and they still wouldn’t let her see him,” Riendeau says.
“Eventually, there were no more excuses. We were successful business owners, we owned our own property, so she started getting to be around her son. That was like the happiest I had ever seen her,” Riendeau says.
“One weekend, she went to North Carolina to participate in a body suspension and oddity convention. She posted a status update on Facebook, and the grandmother who had her son sent her a message. She told her she wasn’t allowed to see her son anymore because it was ‘Satanic’ and that he didn’t need that influence in his life. From there it was just a downward spiral until she committed suicide,” Riendeau says.
“We have an urn with her ashes right over there.” Riendeau points to a glass display case in the corner of the room behind the cash register. “We had her memorial here in the shop. She helped build it.”
In the case are photographs, the bulletin from her memorial service and flowers that the staff at the shop change out periodically. On one side of the bulletin there is a photo of her hanging from body suspension hooks. On the other side are the words from her last Facebook post over an image of her piercing a client. The text reads: “If what I choose to do to my own body for my own personal gratifications makes me a freak so be it… Just because it’s different doesn’t make me a bad person.”
Riendeau continues, “Both of us collected weird stuff and antiques. It was our thing. In our offtime from tattooing and piercing, we liked to go to flea markets and swap meets and yard sales, but everytime we would go into an antique store it would be the same shit. Here is your dad’s rusty tractor seat and here is grandma’s China cabinet full of stuff, so when we found something weird or unusual we would grab it,” Riendeau says.
“It was something fun, a chance to bring something different to the community that people don't often see,” he says. “It was also a reminder that you need to learn to watch your mouth and what you say to people because someone can be one bad day from ending their life.”
Riendeau has been collecting oddities his entire life. “It kind of started with comic books and action figures and Saturday morning cartoons, but I was always drawn to the villain. Skeletor, Joker and stuff like that because they were just more interesting,” he says. Prior to opening the doors of The Hanging Lady, Riendeau booked a booth at a local flea market and sold off some of the items he would find, mostly as a way to sustain his hobby.
“I’ve been collecting weirdo shit my whole life. In my personal collection I have everything from a human skull to horror VHS. If I think it's cool, I’m going to grab it. If it's out of the ordinary, I’m going to grab it. If it's something that probably offends people, I like it,” he says.
Riendeau is a fan of creature feature films, the “The Wolf Man” from 1941 being one of his favorites. He says he could always relate to the werewolf protagonist of the story.
“As a kid, especially as a teenager when shit is rough, you’re getting all this testerone pumped into you, you feel like you’re about to explode at any minute and you’re always angry. I kind of identified with that,” he says.
“In the original ‘Wolf Man,’ this guy was cursed, he didn’t want to hurt anybody, but it happened. The beast comes out of him. It’s the same thing with the ‘Hulk,’ same thing with ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.’ It was one of those things that I identified with as a kid,” he says.
Riendeau attributes some of those feelings of anger to feeling like a bit of an outsider, especially in Cullman. “I moved here from Southern California as a teenager. To Cullman.” He takes a moment to pause and smirk.
Urban Dictionary defines Cullman as “the most 'uplifting' place in the world… this corrupt Catholic small town where you can't skate and metal is the devil.”
From the upholstered chair, Riendeau looks over at the shelves across from him and surveys the contents. “I think the coolest thing for me up there is the chair,” he says, pointing.
Atop the shelf is an antique wooden chair, painted black with a red embossment on the front. The edges are peeling, but the words “tarot readings” are still legible.
“I actually found that in a barn here in Cullman,” Riendeau says. “A lady that lived close to me was kind of a collector herself. That chair came from New Orleans where a lady would drag it out to the square and read tarot cards and futures and palms and stuff. She was doing that back in the 1960s. We nicknamed it ‘the witch’s chair.’” Reindeau says the chair was a major display piece in The Hanging Lady.
Riendeau grew up listening to a variety of musical artists, all of which, he says, shaped his interest in creating art. “Listening to a lot of punk rock, metal and hip hop and stuff, I guess you just get drawn into graffiti and the more interesting things,” Riendeau says. “Artists like Dead Kennedys, Stormtroopers of Death, Ice Cube, all the way through to Johnny Cash. My musical taste is just about as eclectic as my collection. It just kind of spiraled out from there.”
As far as the business end of things is concerned, Riendeau says his moves were calculated. “My wife and I were down in Birmingham working and I was making the commute back and forth to work. I thought to myself: ‘Man, when I turn 40, I’m going to stop working for other people and open my own thing.’ I opened this up three weeks before my 40th birthday, “ Reindeau says.
“At this place here, we are going on four years. It’s been cool,” Riendeau says. “The cities of Cullman, Hanceville and Good Hope have certain ordinances. They can’t ban tattoo shops based on the First Amendment, but they can zone it so that you can’t open. That’s why Cullman doesn’t have a tattoo shop in its city limits whatsoever, so this was kind of the last spot available.” “It started out just this side, we were tattooing over here,” he says as he points to the ground beneath him. “At that time there was almost a six month wait to get tattooed here. I brought on a couple of other people, including my apprentice Rene, and we had to expand over to that side.” He nods to the doorway of the adjacent room and stands to his feet.
Riendeau walks the opposite direction, toward a hallway in the back of the room. He passes a couch with three taxidermied deer heads mounted on the navy blue wall above. On their heads are Soviet-era hats that Riendeau bought at a swap meet. At the end of the corridor, sitting sideways, is the metal sign that used to hang above the entrance of The Hanging Lady.
He opens a door and walks into a small room they use for piercing. “Our piercer is on maternity leave right now so this has sort of become a storage closet.” In one corner of the room is a piercing table. In the other corner of the room are two large boxes.
Riendeau points toward the bottom of the piercing table where a frame is propped up. “There she is right there,” he says, pointing to a larger copy of the photo that is on her memorial bulletin. Misty’s piercing licenses still hang on the wall of the hallway outside.
“She was one of the most educated body piercers in the state, super highly-respected,” Riendeau says. “She would actually train the health department on how to inspect tattoo shops on the piercing ends of it. She built a life that was real good, and it just took one asshole to say ‘Jesus don’t like that.’”
Riendeau walks out of the hallway and past the chair he was sitting moments ago. He passes the random-chance gumball machine standing in the doorway of the tattoo room. Just inside are two more shelves full of VHS tapes, nearly all horror flicks.
Just beyond the shelves is a television the size of an air conditioning unit. The edges of the screen are bordered by wood paneling synonymous with the early 1980s. On top of the television is a cardboard crate once used to hold berries in a grocery store. Now, even more VHS are stored in it.
Riendeau walks past one of the four tattoo chairs in the room. He glances up at one of the dozens of framed tattoo designs hanging on the wall. Tattooing is an apparent passion for Riendeau. He is a member of the Coalition for Tattoo Safety and is also a sponsored artist for Goliath Needles. In 2019, Riendeau was recognized as the best artist in Cullman by the Chamber of Commerce.
“We’ve been pretty successful,” Riendeau says. “There is still like a three month wait to get tattooed here. Everyone kind of doubted me opening up in Dodge City, but it’s all about doing good work, having a good reputation and bringing something different. That’s what I want to do here,” he says.
Nikki Kane is a Cullman local. “I have two tattoos,” she says. “My first one was done many years ago in a small shop in Troy, not far from the university. I had a horrible experience with a very heavy-handed artist. Honestly, it traumatized me. After several years I finally got the courage to get the second tattoo I had been wanting. I did some research on different shops this time and decided I would give Dodge City Tattoo a shot, and boy am I glad I did.”
“I made an appointment with Kortni and she sat down with me and discussed my art, was honest with me about the placement I had originally wanted not being ideal and was ultimately able to help me decide on a better location. She was incredible. I am beyond happy with my finished piece and would definitely recommend her to anyone who has had a bad experience with an artist before,” Kane said.
Riendeau says he hopes to put on more events at Dodge City Tattoo Company. “When we first opened we used to do art markets on Friday the 13th. We had what we called Lucky 13 Art and Oddity Market. We did $20 tattoos, $13 for the tattoo and a seven dollar tip for good luck. We also had an art market out front, food trucks, and local musicians coming up,” Riendeau says.
Riendeau’s cell phone rings. From his pocket comes the sound of a theremin playing a tune that would fit right into a 1960s science fiction film. He looks down at his phone and the only sound in the room is the bubbling of a small decorative fountain behind him.
Riendeau looks back up. “Me and another guy named Brian Burks started the Birmingham Punk Rock Art Show in a tattoo shop in Birmingham. My part in it was just helping start it up for the first couple, then Brian really took it to a whole other level,” he says.
“The idea was to have punk bands playing while local art vendors set up. Like a flea market with this type stuff and punk and metal playing,” he says, lifting his hands and signaling to the assortment of oddities filling the shop.
“When COVID happened we didn’t get to do much more of that. I think the goal now, since things are more relaxed, is to get back to those roots, bringing unique art out and holding events in the parking lot again,” Riendeau says. “The insurance place next door shut down a couple of months ago so we have the whole parking lot to ourselves. We can do whatever we want,” he says.
“When we do events, we draw in about 200 people — that’s just people getting tattooed, not the people brought along,” Riendeau says. “We do crazy shit here and as long as we don’t bother anybody or cause problems, they kind of let us get away with whatever we want to do. We donate money to the Dodge City Senior Center and they love it,” he says.
Riendeau steps into his office through a portière of wooden beads. He returns holding a large canvas covered in paint. During a tattoo session, a client mentioned to Riendeau how she was struggling to purchase the oil paints and supplies she needed for a college art course.
“I went through an oil painting phase so I had some lying around,” Riendeau says. The two struck up a deal: Riendeau would give away the supplies in exchange for a painting of Skeletor, the villain from the 1980s cartoon ‘He-Man.’
Riendeau puts the painting back and ambles into the main entry way of the tattoo shop. He swings open the glass front door and walks into the parking lot. The sidewalk is fractured in multiple spots and plumes of dust rise from the gravel parking lot and hang in the air.
In October 2021, the staff at Dodge City Tattoo Company held an art drive for Hanceville Elementary School. The school struggled to provide funding for art courses, so donors brought in supplies and raised over $2,000 for the art program. In a livestream posted to the company’s Facebook page, Riendeau took a trip to Micheal’s and loaded up a cart with paint bottles, cardstock, brushes and pencils.
Kortni Quick is a tattoo artist at the shop. While sitting outside on her smoke break, she stressed the personal importance of the art drive. “Art is something that is obviously very, very important to us, but it is something that we think is important overall. I know for me, it has gotten me through a lot of stuff that I probably would not have made it through. When I started tattooing, I lived in my car,” Quick says, holding the butt of a cigarette between her fingers. “Art has done a lot of really great things for me, and it has brought me a long way.”
Riendeau opens the driver door to his black truck. He grabs a green pack of KOOL cigarettes from the cab and puts one between his lips. He raises a lighter to his face, smiles and strikes the flint. “We’re just trying to raise a bunch of weirdos,” he says.
Comments