Pierced

My bloggings are taking a back seat to the constant whir of life. Freelance assignments have swamped me. And I try to keep my weekends computer free. Working at the screen all week all day long fries my eyes and my mind.



My niece is visiting from Isreal for a few weeks, and we spent last weekend together pursuing a kind of holy grail. Nose piercing. I've been wanting to do it since I was a teenager. And when I turned 47 a few months ago, I promised myself to do it at last. When my niece came I asked her if she would come with me. She said she wanted to do it too. So we asked her mom, my sister, who said yes, and the adventure began.



I thought it would be fun to have it done in Woodstock where we might spend the day, do a little shopping, have a little lunch. So I made some calls the day before, and was told I would need a signed release form from my sister, notarized, with her passport because my niece was not 18.



When I walked into my mother's house the next morning to pick up my niece, my sister was trying to fax the documents, my mother was freaking out, my father was stomping around, and my niece couldn't wait to get out of there. It was pouring, torrential. My parents were on their way to the funeral service of a freind who had died a few months before.



When we finally got to my house, my niece realized she'd left her own passport at my parents, so we had to drive back to get it. By the time we got to Woodstock, I'd been driving for 4 or 5 hours. So when the guy who was supposed to do the piercing told me he wouldn't, I was aggravated to say the least. He claimed he didn't know she was only 13. I'd told him on the phone the day before. And he said that their faces change too much. I countered that babies have their noses pierced in other cultures. But he wouldn't budge and back into the car we slumped.



We'd noticed another tatoo/piercing parlor on the way to Woodstock and I kept it in mind driving back toward Kingston, wondering what we could do. We stopped and looked in; it wasn't open yet. And while we waited for the rain to let up to run back to the car, we noticed a woman opening the door and followed her.



While the place in Woodstock had been slick and bright, with displays of tatoos and body jewelry, even a counter top interactive video screen, this one had decidedly female energy. It seemed like the kind of place you might go for a seance or a fortune telling.



The girl at the desk told us what the guy in Woodstock had said on the phone: we needed a notarized release form. She also warned us against trying to have our piercings done at the mall, where they would use a piercing gun that would splatter our flesh. She also let us know that only a ring would do; a post would almost insure infection too.



When we left I was feeling a bit desperate. Everything I was being told was fueling fear. And yet, I desperately wanted to do this, not only for myself, but as an experience with and for my niece. I owed her a gift for her bat mitzvah a few months before, and this was I thought, going to be perfect, something we'd both remember forever.



By this time we were both starving so I headed for downtown Kingston where I knew a great little place for lunch, and suspected there might also be a tattoo parlor around the corner.



It was the real deal. We could have been in the East Village. The room was smokey; the music was heavy metal, loud. There were Jesus posters lining the walls. And beyond the jewelry cases, arranged in a v with the wide angle opening into the room, as if to invite you to travel its unmarked path to the back, was a darkened space with barber shop chairs.



The guy who came out to help us was pierced and tattooed everywhere. His fingernails were dirty. I noticed that none of the jewelry was in the little sterilized pouches like those I'd seen in the city. They were just laying flat inside, on the glass.



I used the bathroom in back and it wasn't pretty. The guy in charge who was doing a tattoo had a cigarette dangling from his lips and quite a few teeth missing. But he didn't ask me to sign any papers for my niece and said they would do it, as long as she was tough. We said we'd think about it and come back.