Birthday Craziness September 29, 2004 ~ 1:21 pm
Posted by Julie in : Daily Grind , trackbackLiAps posted something in the comments about a friend of his getting her bellybutton pierced, and that reminded me of another birthday spent mutilating my body. See, from 21 to 24, I had this thing about doing something wild on my birthday. Not sleeping with every man, woman, and dog in site after drinking everyone in the bar under the table kind of wild. Something tamer. Something that I’d wanted to do but had been terrified to try. It shook out something like this:
21 - Cartilage piercing in my left ear. Hurt like a mo-fo for weeks. The first time I picked up a phone and put it against that ear, I screamed. I pity whoever was on the other end of that phone line.
22 - The tattoo. You can read about this in the previous post.
23 - Second set of holes in lobes. Not terrifying, but I wanted to continue the mutilation trend.
24 - Belly button piercing. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about in this post.
My friend Lori has one of these, and I thought it was really fucking cool. Half of New York also has them, but I still thought it was really fucking cool. I was determined to get one. And my birthday was coming up, and we had to continue the tradition of “customizing” my body.
So Lori and our friend Amanda and I headed down to the East Village. Everyone there is pierced, it seemed an ideal place to go to join the masses. The original plan was to go down, get a couple of drinks, get me pierced, and go shopping, but by the time we hit St. Marks Place, I was twitchier than a Central Park squirrel. There was no way I was going to be able to sit through drinks and still get pierced. I was going to wus out if I didn’t do it right then. (There’s a pattern to this.. When I got tattooed, Kim let me go first, because otherwise I was going to wus out. But I digress.) And since such twitchiness is not attractive in two legged mammals (and not really even in squirrels), Lori, Amanda, and I headed to Andromeda, the piercing place.
Andromeda is a product of its environment. Nearby there are vintage clothing stores, vinyl emporiums, comic book shops, and punks everywhere. As we walked up the stairs, several of them commented that we were “walking the gauntlet” by walking between them. At least they didn’t spank us. Turn left at the top of the stairs (the right side is for tats), and you have entered World O’ Piercings. It’s dark, dingy, and there is a giant lit up “menu” (much like the ones in cheap Chinese restaurants) with pictures of all the piercings they do. I learned a lot about anatomy from those pictures.
I picked out a ring, and then was sent into the back room to be pierced. I could only take one person with me, so Lori sat out in front with some freaks, and Amanda went in to distract me. Maybe now I should talk about the guy that pierced me. He was medium height, white with brown dreds, some of which had rings looped into them. Normal enough for the Village. But if you looked at his face…he had blue dots of varying sizes tattooed in a pattern around his eyes. A lot like a raccoon. And he was pierced everywhere that was visible. Multiple piercings in his ears, in every conceivable direction, including a pair of discs in his earlobes that stretched them out. I guess it was supposed to be tribal. Piercings in his lips, in his nose, across the bridge of his nose, in his eyebrows. And then, the piece de resistance, his horns.
That’s right, he had horns. Little metal horns. As I laid back on the table and he put the guide marks on my bellybutton, I tried to make nervous small talk. I asked about the nose-bridge piercing. Apparently there was no cartilage involved in that, they just pull the skin away from the cartilage and pierce it. And then I asked the fateful question: “And what about those horns? How are they attached?” He said, I swear to God, “Oh, they’re implants.” WTF? You let someone drill fucking holes in your head to put in horns?
Now you’re going to ask what everyone asks. “Why would you let someone with horns pierce you?” Well, I could’ve run away. But I was already on the table, and marked up, and I figured “He’s got a lot of piercings, he should know about this.” So I let him pierce me as I squeezed the shit out of Amanda’s hand because it hurt. Worse than anything had ever hurt before. And when it was over, I had the feeling that my bellybutton wanted to reject the damn ring and spit it out. It definitely felt like something that didn’t belong there. I couldn’t really sit up for three days, because it hurt. And the waistband on my pants kept tugging at in, which hurt worse. But I was pierced, dammit.
While reading a tattoo magazine a couple of weeks later, I saw an ad for Andromeda. It listed the names of their crew. Normal names, like Mike and Karl. And then there was the abnormal name. Virus. I thought of crazy piercing guy with his raccoon facial tattoos and his horns, and I just knew. Mike and Karl hadn’t pierced me. Noooo.
I had been pierced by Virus.
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