When I was sixteen I decided that I wanted a piercing in my lower lip, what I have since learned is called a "labret" piercing. Thirteen years ago, such words were not so common, nor were the places where one could get them done. You didn't just hop down to the mall and get your mouth punctured on the way to pick up some Christmas presents for your family. I can't say that I took my choice of salons very seriously; I found the place that I went to by asking a guy that I met in Washington Park if he knew a good place. I was directed to a building somewhere on the South Side, where I went happily to get my shiny new hoop.
At A Glance Author Lynn Mei Contact Lynn Mei@bme.anon When Ten years ago or more Artist don't remember Studio don't remember Location San Francisco Luckily enough, the place was fairly clean. This was a surprise, considering the fact that I had to get in by ringing a bell on a building that was thickly encrusted with various city debris and smelled of years of urine. The girl who called me up turned out to be a very fastidious looking blonde and the parlor itself was sterile, white walled and had a pristine look about it. I was comforted, not that my dumb, sixteen year old ass would have known any better had the place been a total dump, but like I said, I was lucky. The girl took me to a glass display case and showed me the various jewelry at my disposal, from which I chose a simple hoop with a blue bead enclosure. She directed me to a chair, where I promptly sat down and warned her that I was very likely to pass out were I to see any blood. She was not concerned, saying that there wouldn't be much blood, and that it would be over in milliseconds.
The first thing that she did was put a black dot on my lip, right in the middle, where I wanted the piercing to be. Next she used a tool that looked like the bastard child of a pair of cooking tongs and a hemostat to grip the area of my lip that she intended to pierce. I had expected her to use a gun like the one that had been used on my ears as a child, but she whipped out a metal tube of a seemingly gargantuan diameter. After dabbing my mouth with a sticky, orange paste, she tucked the metal rod under my lip, tucked the hoop into it, and asked me to prepare myself. Honestly, she needn't have said anything. The pain of the ordeal was comparable to slamming your finger in a desk and went away quickly. The piercing looked fine. Everything seemed to be as it should be.
But I'm not lucky in a certain way- I'm not a hemophiliac, or anything of the sort, but my blood seems to have an agenda of its own. I once spent half an hour with a phlebotomist puncturing nearly every area of both of my arms before she finally used a pediatric needle to draw my blood. This is a common experience for me, and possibly because of it, I have an unnecessarily drastic reaction to the sight of my own blood. Not in small doses, but when it starts to pour, well, I pity that girl who pierced my lip.
The bleeding began as any normal bleed from a piercing, a little trickle under my chin. The trickle grew to a puddle, and the puddle was soon carrying ocean liners full of tourists (not really, but you get the idea.) The piercer pulled aside a curtain, exposing a metal bed of the sort seen in movies about dentists and torturers, and bade my lie down for a while with a hand towel wrapped around my face. I could hear her whispering to someone on the phone, but whether she was retelling the story out of panic or a humorous respect for the absurd, I will never know, as I passed out. When I woke up there was another piercer there, a tiny, tattooed Asian kid with bleached hair. He asked, "hey, are you okay, girl?"
"Uh-huh," I felt out of my element and dizzy, and didn't quite feel the triumph of what I had achieved until I reached the streets and a neatly-ironed businessman passed by me and scowled. Success! Long live the offensive arts!
Unfortunately, my poor little piercing was short lived. A year or so later, I went to a Bikini Kill show at the Gillmore and was struck in the mouth by a hippie in the mosh pit. I remember hearing a sound like you hear when you have accidentally eaten an uncooked bean, a kind of grinding, crunching sound. I went outside, where I checked my piercing to feel if it had torn. The piercing, itself, was fine, but the bead was gone. In the violence of the moment, I had accidentally bitten-through and swallowed it. The hoop would inevitably slip off of my lip and I would likely choke on it as I slept. With a sigh, I pulled the jewelry from my mouth and tucked it into my pocket. By the time I could finally get back to the piercing place, the hole had already healed down to a neat little white scar on the underside of my lip. I tried one more piercing, in my tongue, with a similar outcome. Now I have my tattoo, which cannot be knocked off of me or accidentally swallowed (I should hope.) I guess I just don't have luck with piercings.