When I was twenty-two I found out my friend P had a nipple ring. We spent a weekend in Palm Springs drinking and getting sunburned with a big group of friends from school. When P took his shirt off I saw the unassuming metal hoop going through his nipple and was immediately jealous. I had never seriously thought about getting any kind of piercing but as soon as I saw P's I knew I wanted one.
Growing up, the only friends I knew that had piercings or tattoos tended towards extremes. They were loudmouth punks so entrenched in an outward persona that it would have been hard for me to imagine them without their tattoos and metal. So I never took it seriously. None of it registered as a series of choices they had made with their bodies. It seemed genetic, like some people came into the world with moles and birthmarks and others came with torsos of ink and pierced faces.
Seeing P's piercing on his otherwise unadorned body gave me the immediate realization that it was something I could choose to do. It wasn't some distant phenomenon wrapped in stereotype and stigma. It could be me, too.
I still didn't choose to get pierced. I was poor and barely scraping by on $200 a week in my post college years. My wardrobe was almost entirely hand-me-downs from my older brother, or ill-fitting Christmas presents chosen with the fashionable eye of my mother. I wanted a nipple ring, but I couldn't imagine spending money on something purely decorous when just making rent was a feat. This was especially true of a decoration that most people would never see.
The idea of getting pierced gradually faded away until I had forgotten about I wanted to do it. Last year I went out with a grad student from Berkeley who I liked a lot. She was a cranky only-child and wickedly well read. She knew how to spell "Gaulouises" and dropped Djuna Barnes quotes into conversation as if she were auditioning for Jeopardy!. She was pale and freckly with a self-confessed selfish streak that she claimed was a product of her being raised in the hinterlands of Michigan's upper peninsula.
We had drinks downtown on a Tuesday and made plans to hang out that coming weekend. I started thinking about what we could do besides go for drinks, and soon I was stuck on the idea that we should go get piercings together. It would be an adventure, I thought, and a fulfillment of something that I had wanted to do for a long time. If she didn't want anymore holes in her own body, I imagined it would still be fun to have her with while I got pierced. I could imagine all the pre-pierce anxiety, and the adrenaline relief afterwards being a perfect little frisson for a second date.
I called her Saturday afternoon, but got her voicemail. She didn't call me back. Scorned. I sent her a text message the next day, "You suck." She called me back and explained that she had been seeing another guy off and on when we met, and they had just decided to move forward with each other. Suddenly the idea of getting pierced seemed a little hollow. I had built up the fantasy around doing it with someone else, sharing the experience. I thought it would have been pointless to go alone. I started seeing someone else a few weeks later and forgot about piercing again for a while.
When she left a few months later I was hopeless in a way I'd never been before. I was gutted and shell shocked and felt numb to all the things I used to take pleasure in. So I decided to pamper myself. I walked down to a tattoo parlor where my friend's roommate worked, looked at hoops, considered getting both nipples pierced, decided against it, and then followed a lanky man with sleeves on both arms to the back of the main room. I took my shirt off and lay down on a broad table covered in the same crinkly paper they use at the doctor's office. I was nervous and wanted to cover it up. I tried to be glib, asking informational questions about the right way to clean a piercing, possible infections, whatever else I could think to appear at ease.
The man answered my questions by rote, almost without listening as he poked through the tools in his cubbyhole. He found what he was looking for, turned back to me, pinched my right nipple and marked either side with a small dab of black ink. He cleaned my nipple with rubbing alcohol, and then put it in a metal clamp. He took a big needle in his hand and said this would probably hurt. Without stopping he pushed the metal needle into my nipple and ran it out the other side. He put a small metal hoop through the hole immediately after. The pain was over so quickly I almost couldn't register it. It really did hurt but for less than a second before the adrenaline started flowing. There wasn't time to experience the pain before it became abstract.
I took the long walk home feeling the metal gently riding against the cotton of my t-shirt. It was secret and joyful, all the nicer because of its concealment.
I don't think I want any more piercings, but I'm still convinced that it's a good thing to do on a date. I may get something else pierced this weekend. Something to share with someone this time, a private joy made public.
Previous Posts:
Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After
Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans
Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog
Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home
Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party
Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays
Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date
Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson
Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap
Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction
Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex
Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens
Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux
Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog
Date Machine: Rate My Politics
High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies
Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux
Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN
Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings
Love Machine: What Work Is
Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked
Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message