So I’m in London. Post grad school/ pre-corporate America, sowing some “wild oats” so to speak.
Had been thinking about getting a nipple pierced for some time and figured, hey, I’m in a foriegn country, why not bring home a souvenir more memorable than a plastic Bobby’s helmet.
So I scope around, find a pretty reputable/ hygenic looking place in Camden Town. I go in. Katherine is the piercing person. Seems very nice.
Explains to me that she has both of hers done and the pain can be- (spoken with dramatic emphasis) RATHER SEVERE… (cue organ music)
O…K…
So I’m trying to remain relaxed, calm, even professional about it. Like this is a business transaction and I should be adult and… WHAT the Hell is THAT?
She brings out these tongs to grab the nipple.
Now, I’ve been around the block once or twice, but I’ve admittedly never brought tongs anywhere near my nipples before.
Ladles, eggbeaters, sure. But never tongs.
So she squeezes the area and marks were the insertion will go with a felt tip pen.
How does that look? “Great”, I say. Thinking it looks like my nipple in tongs doodled on with a pen.
Just like any other day, really.
What happened next I can’t really say with any great clarity. She asked me if I was ready, I said yes, and fixated on a jar of q-tips across the room while she made the insertion.
It didn’t feel THAT bad… Less than I thought it would. Kind of like getting a vacintation with a big needle-in your nipple.
Whooo, it’s over.
Oh… it’s Not over?
No. Now she has to thread the hoop. Which kinda feels like getting a vacination with a big needle - in a CIRCLE-in your nipple.
The pain’s pretty bad, she says, but it’s rather spiritual, wouldn’t you say?
“Sure”, I say.
(Just like when I get poked in the eye, I feel so much closer to God.)
So she finishes up. I pay my dough and now I have to find a pharmacy to buy “contact lens/ saline solution” to keep my nipple sanitary for the next couple of weeks. Naturally.
First though, I have to walk through some fair type booths under some tents located outside the shop.
As I’m walking through, I notice all these cool body piercing type hoops. “Hey, I can shop here now” I think to myself. I am now a member of the official overly-accessorized club.
So as I’m standing there, this gust of wind blows. Ruffling the canopies of over all the little booths. This one in particular happened to collect about a two gallon of water from the previous night’s storm. Just waiting for such a wind to let loose it’s contents unexpectedly on those below.
I was those below.
Now mind you, I’ve been out of the piercer for, oh… two, two and a half minutes. And I’m still a “little” sore.
I’ve just had a gallon of freezing cold water pour down on my head.
And DOWN THE FRONT OF MY T-SHIRT.
Now I don’t know if any of you on this side of the pond remember hearing a faint scream coming from the East about three years ago… But if you did, that was probably me. 3000 miles away.
You’ll never realize the full clingy implications of having a wet t-shirt on till something like this happens.
I can still remember the face of the pretty young girl behind the counter, looking at me with equal parts fear and surprise as I scurried away horribly wounded by a puddle of rain water.
My bewildering of the English continued as I stood in the eyecare aisle of the “Chemist Shoppe”. Drenched to the bone, holding the remaining, sopping bits of my how-not-to-recieve-a-horrible-infection pamphlet, I was approached by one of the druggists.
Can I help you?
I need saline solution for contacts.
What kind of contacts do you have?
I don’t .
-?
I’ll just take this.
Back to Le Hostel De Crackhouse I went for the sanitation process.
While I know most of you probably know what it’s like to stand half naked in a communal hostel bathroom 3 times a day, holding a Dixie cup of contact lens solution to your nipple while an older drunken French couple humps outside in a sleeping bag above your bunk. But for me, it was novel.
And I’ll always have the memories.
So now it’s three years later.
I’m completely healed.
And I can never go swimming with my parents again.
