Tattoos, Piercings, and Beans Up Your Nose
(NOTE: This essay is part of a group of essays, written roughly between 1993 and 1997, which I privately call “The Receipts.” They were essays written when I was an unquestioning lad engaging with the world in pure shock-jock mode, and if you want proof that I used to be an absolute dingbat, well… Here’s the receipts.
(It’s essays like these in part that made me create the BS-O-Meter plugin for my site, where I said:
(In this case, I left these essays up because I don’t believe in deleting past stupidity. If you wish to use this as proof that Past Ferrett was an idiot, well, I won’t disagree with you. If you wish to use that as proof that Current Ferrett is an idiot, well, I can’t blame you.)
Dana Luciano was my dream girl in sixth grade and I was her nightmare boy.
And how could she not ignore me? She had beautiful, glowing breasts and a body that could stop traffic quicker than a stoplight – I mean, at three in the morning men will ignore stoplights, but they’d have stopped for Dana Luciano. I too had beautiful, glowing breasts, but they weren’t nearly as attractive on me. I slavered over her from afar as she hung around shop class in dresses so tight that they required solvent to take off at the end of the day – and dreamed of a day she might want me.
(Hang on, we’ll get to the piercing stuff in a minute. Christ, can’t you people wait?)
So one day my friends walked up to her, trying to humiliate me, and said, “Oh Daaaana…. Ferrett liiiikes you….”
Chewing a mixture of gum and cigarette smoke, she just looked at them flatly and said, “So?”
Of course. Everybody wanted Dana.
And men’s minds being what they are, Dana became what I most desired in a woman: Someone who ignored me.
And whereas in the early 1980s the type of woman who could care less whether I was alive was an Italian biker chick, now the type of woman who finds me disgusting is the kind with all sorts of metal spikes rammed through their face. As such, I think piercings are such a turnon. Find me a woman who looks like an H. R. Giger painting and I’m in hog heaven.
But even in my miswired attraction, I have to say this:
Piercings are cool. The people who have them are not.
People now piss me off with piercings in the exact same way that people with legwarmers inspired homicidal urges ten years ago. And as such, now it falls to me, the Ferrett, to describe for you which piercings are cool and which are not.
Genital Piercings. Genital piercings are a painful way of getting cheap sex. You know why? It’s an excellent excuse to get people to look at your dick.*
I mean, let’s face it. As much as we’d all like to believe we have the Rod Of Wonder concealed in our pants, to women it’s just another dick. They’re like snowflakes. Some are bigger, some are larger, but they’re all engineered to go into the same area and do the same job. And there’s not a whole lot of ways to mention it in casual conversation unless you have a fourteen-inch erection… and if you do, what the fuck are you doing here reading this column? Go out and fuck something, for Christ’s sake. A man with a fourteen-inch dick shouldn’t be wasting his time around here.
But anyway, unless you really do have a python in your pants, the only way a woman is going to see your penis is during sex.
Unless you turn it into a freak show.
“Say!” you proclaim. “I have seven piercings in my dick!” And then they get curious.
What do seven piercings look like in real life? They kind of picture a Dalek from Doctor Who (“You – must – be – insperminated!“) or maybe a salt shaker. Seven piercings. Is there room on the average whanger for seven? When you go to the bathroom, it must look like a fire hydrant. You could hang your car keys off of your Johnson and it wouldn’t look out of place with seven piercings.
They have to see it. You could charge admission. You could have a carnival barker standing in your pants shouting, “Step right up! Step right up to see the Borg Penis! Half-man, half-machinery!” And they’d walk right in.
So you get them in the mood – chat them up for awhile and make them wonder. They’ll get excited. We all do when we think we’re going to do something that could end up in Penthouse letters. So talk to them for the next two hours and then get them alone in your grimy little apartment… and then whip it out.
Casually. You want to make it sort of clinical. Let them get close and examine it. Let ’em tug on a ring or two. And then slip on your best Barry White voice and say:
“You know – while you’re down there….”
And it works. I knew a guy named Scratch who hookers turned down before he got his piercings. Scratch was a nerdy, shaky little guy who reminded you of a chihuahua… but without poise and charm that chihuahuas possess. But he got laid more than Ron Jeremy. Trojan dedicated an entire wing of their factory to Old Scratch. Women would bring other women by to see the miracle of modern machinery that was his dick. All because he had the strength of character to plunge steel spikes through the most complex cluster of nerves available to him.
As such, I am totally against genital piercing. Because I don’t have that strength of character. And I want that cheap sex, dammit.
Nose Piercings: Can I just set one thing straight? The days when nose piercings were considered really “alternative” are over, okay? Get over yourself. Jesus Christ, you fucking kids annoy me.
Tongue Piercings: These would be kinda sexy except for what people do with them. The sight of a little silver bar couched on some raven-haired twenty year-old’s tongue is really quite erotic… until they start playing with it.
Because every moron with a tongue piercing does the same vulgar thing… they clack it against their teeth. They pull it as far out of their tongue as possible, using their teeth like the nail-removing back end of a hammer, and then snap it back.
And suddenly this woman with an erotic, forbidden piercing is instantly transformed into a dog choking on a chicken bone. And they’ll do it for hours, just out of boredom. Clack. Squish. Clack. Squish. Their mouths hang open the entire time as they stare off into the sunset, tongues squirming like a pink maggot impaled on a silver pin, all the while looking like cows chewing on cud. Except at this point cows are much more sexually attractive.
Having eaten next to a row of women with their tongues pierced, all I’m gonna say is that if you can’t stop playing with that damn piercing, next time I’m going into the McDonald’s with a big electromagnet and showing you basic physics, okay?
The one thing that might make a man overlook the clack clack clack of a tongue piercer is that I hear they’re quite useful in, er… orosuctuous type situations which makes a man very happy. I can’t say whether that’s true personally, never having dated a pierced woman, but if anyone’s willing just email me. I know how us anonymous humor columnists turn you chyx on.
Ear Piercings: As a guy growing up in the late 1980s, getting your ear pierced was a matter of courage. And not for the reasons you might think. It wasn’t the pain or the fact that if you wanted it done professionally you had to sit in the mall next to four giggling twelve-year olds at the free ear-piercing clinic.
It was because there was an urban legend that piercing the left ear meant you were gay. Only by piercing the right ear could you retain your manly hetero, non-dick-sucking character. Only the right ear staved off the knowing winks, kept your ass safe from random grabs in bars, allowed you to eat a hot dog in public without men snickering.
But wait. Or was it the left ear meant you were straight and the right ear meant you were some kind of deviant bonesmuggler?
Nobody knew.
For Connecticut teenagers mindlessly terrified of homosexuals because their best friends hadn’t come out of the closet yet, this was something to give you pause. Everyone agreed one ear fag, one ear straight… but which ear?
I knew metalheads who dressed in leather and then went to Judas Priest concerts to get sweaty slamming up against other guys with long hair dressed in leather and scarves… and they absolutely refused to get their ears pierced. Hey, people might think they were gay.
That’s since gone away – or maybe I just got the proper ear pierced. Who knows? (If this legend is still hanging around, it’s apparently the left ear, folks.)
But the other cool thing about ear piercings is that they’re the only ones that can be done casually. Get a candle, a needle, an ice cube, and a really boring evening and voila! You have a piercing. Or for even cooler effect you can go the total grunge route and have it done at a concert.
I myself had my second piercing done at a Lollapalooza; my girlfriend poured boiling hot rum on my ear to sterilize the area (if you smuggle rum into a concert by wrapping it in a black picnic blanket on a hundred-degree day, you will have rum that you could microwave TV dinners on), and then jammed an earring she found lying in the dirt into my earlobe. The pain was incredible. My ear bled pus for the next three weeks. But once it healed, you know what I have now?
That’s right. An earring I am terrified to take out of my ear because I think it fused to the flesh during the healing process. Get it done pro, kids.
Nipple Rings: These are quite excellent if you’re a tanned, tight-bodied woman with tits out to Brooklyn. Not quite so good if you’re a doughy, hairy mass of flesh with tits from Brooklyn. If you’re the sort of person who shouldn’t be taking off their shirt in public to begin with, sticking a pair of rings on you does not give you license to whip it off. Fat ugly guys take special note.
Also, try to be realistic as to proportions. We all have different-sized nipples; pick your rings accordingly. I’ve seen women with small breasts who insisted on getting ferris-wheel-sized rings, and as such they looked like they’d had some freak hula-hoop accident.
Bellybutton Piercings: These are incredibly stupid. Why? I’ve never seen one healed.
Even the dumbest yokel will tell you that any body part you periodically have to dredge for random bits of lint and sweat is not a sanitary area. But people think they’re gonna beat these odds… and so they get it pierced.
Hah. Let me tell you something, folks – amputations grow back faster than a bellybutton piercing. Stigmata heal faster than these suckers. Faith healers throw up their hands in dismay when it comes to stopping a bellybutton piercing from getting infected.
And so these girls walk around with dripping red sores on their stomach, purses full of alcohol-soaked Q-tips they have to rub into their navel six times an hour, and fantasizing about how sexy they’ll look once it heals.
I’m sure third-degree burn victims feel the same way.
Eyebrow Rings: Be creative with them, at least. Get clip-on glasses.
And so it is that you have now been instructed in which piercings to get. In short: Genitals and tongues, bad. Nose rings, earrings, nipple rings, and eyebrows, okay.
The piercing pain in my heart I still feel for Dana Luciano is, unfortunately, unremovable. <sigh>
* – Or pussy, actually, but most women don’t have a problem getting men to look at their vaginas. Assuming they just ask.