I distinctly recall an occasion on which my friend Erika turned to me and said, "I want to get my tongue pierced." I nodded, sympathetically. "That's cool," I replied, "but I wouldn't do it."
At A Glance Author kattums Contact katnclapp@hotmail.com When A month ago Artist Loren Studio A-Z Masters Location Pueblo, CO
"Why not?"
"Because it fucks up your teeth."
So she went back and forth, agonizing over getting it done. We were in high school at the time and not eighteen, so she had time to hem and haw over the thing. So when she turned eighteen, she hops her happy little self down to a local tattoo shop and gets her first tattoo and her tongue pierced in the same day. She pops over to the apartment where my boyfriend of the time was living and shows these things to me proudly. I applauded the tattoo, a nautical star with exceptional color and flawless symmetry. I groaned at her tongue ring. "You're going to fuck up your teeth," I told her motheringly.
Sure enough, about a month later, we're all hanging out, drunk as skunks, and she and another friend are horsing around. At one point he picks her up, loses his balance, and drops her on a cement curb. She bites down on her tongue ring and chips one of her very nice front teeth. She's in an incredible amount of pain for days and all I did was hand her ice water and shake my head.
Mind you, after expounding upon the evils of the tongue ring, I could not disguise my own interest in having this done. A number of things mentally blocked me from doing this to myself, however. All the time I'd spent in middle school and early high school dealing with orthodontia, for example. I was not about to fuck that up. Infection, pah. Fucking up my teeth: BIG DEAL.
Now, for my nineteenth birthday, I decided I was going to 'take back the day.' I had seen my grandmother for the last time on January 23rd, 2005 (happy eighteenth birthday to me!) and she died the next morning. So on January 24th, I went into my tattoo shop of choice, put $35 and my ID on the counter and signed my paperwork. It was a way to translate mental anguish into physical pain, the later of which being a form of healing in that it is easier to overcome. I had to learn to make my birthday something more than the anniversary of Grammy's death.
Mind you, in the Carpe Diem theme, I had taken a friend of mine out to lunch earlier that day, and when I dropped him off at the chemistry building (punny, don't you think?) on our campus I turned to him and said, "Okay, do me a favor."
"What's that?"
"Kiss me."
"What? Why?"
"I'm getting my tongue pierced, and I want to know what it's like from someone else's prospective what it's like to kiss me. So for the sake of experiment, kiss me now, and in a week when it heals do it again and then tell me what you think."
So I'm sitting in the chair in my tattoo shop flipping out with my tongue hanging out of my mouth complete with clamp rubber banded in place and watching Loren (my piercer) as he gets prepped and smiling this idiotic grin because I'd finally managed to kiss that friend of mine who I'd had a crush on since the beginning of fall semester. At one point I said to Loren, "Okay, before you turn around with that thing, tell me to close my eyes, 'cause if I see it I'll go ape-shit." Loren just laughs at me. He's a cordial fellow in his mid-twenties with two kids. "Close your eyes, Kat," Loren tells me, knowing I'm a total flaming needle-phobe.
It felt absolutely nothing like I thought it would. I've read other stories where people said that they felt the needle move through the top and the bottom but not the middle, and that always sounded totally stupid to me. Also, "it doesn't hurt." Yeah, right. You're allowing someone to shove a piece of surgical steel through your tongue and you expect me to buy that line? Long story short, on a scale of one to ten, one being a slight dull ache and ten being excruciating pain like you've been eviscerated, I'd give this a two or three. And no, you can't feel it pass through the middle of your tongue.
So I walked out of that tattoo shop with another piece of metal through my anatomy and the knowledge that another friend of mine was right the year before when he told me that my birthday is still my birthday and not simply the anniversary of the death of the most important woman of my life. I could make any day exactly what I wanted it to be. The moral of the story is that you should not hold yourself back. "You have to rock out hardcore in every aspect of your life," another friend told me. I realized while walking away triumphantly that I held myself back from too many things for the wrong reasons, and by piercing my tongue I took back the day, and myself. Do it for the sake of experiment, if nothing else.
Erika looked at me last week and said, "I knew you'd do it."