Living on a farmhouse outside Elkton MD. with my friend Karl, who was apprenticing as a piercer and was a pit-bull farmer (in potentia), I often played Saint Sebastian to my friend's apprentice arrows. All the wounds from that foolish and often inebriated summer are gone, all except the first. For some reason I have kept my scrotum piercing, but I'm not sure why. Perhaps, the reason involves the unique situation and the results of that piercing, although it could also be laziness—one can never be sure about such things.
At A Glance Author Propertius Contact propertius13@hotmail.com Artist Karl Hedgepath As can be surmised from the above paragraph, I was often drunk that summer (I was waiting to go to graduate school) some years ago and one night Karl decided that since he never pierced a scrotum that he would like to pierce mine. I don't think that Karl had any particular desire to see my privates (he was quite fat and heterosexual), but he knew that I was often game for most things and lacked that most human quality of shame. He happened to have the equipment at the house and decided that the kitchen would make a suitable ad hoc studio.
As we entered the kitchen, we could here the number of punks and skins that often spent their evenings at our house drinking on our porch. Neither Karl nor myself paid much attention to the noise and we began the piercing. As we began our roommate, Cindy, whose most salient quality was her humorlessness, wondered in from the porch. When she realized what was going on—my testicles resting in the gloved hands of Karl—she immediately brought in the Suburbia extras to witness this event. Before I was quite aware of what was occurring, Karl and I were surrounded by a flock of cultural deviants staring at my exposed genitals. This did not bother me, not even when a friend of ours began video taping the event (I'm not sure what happened to that video tape, so if anyone knows, please contact me). Karl after asking me if I minded the crowd, which I did not, began piercing.
I do have to admit at this time that a man touching my testicles did have an odd effect. If someone had asked me before this moment what would it feel like having Karl touching my most private areas, I would imagine that this contact would arouse either indifference or contempt. But as his hands quite nimbly caressed my testicles—I do have to say that I have always considered myself heterosexual and I am not attracted to men—I found the sensation not at all un-pleasurable. I'm not sure if it was the almost sticky way that the plastic gloves caught on my balls or maybe it was just the fact that I find anyone touching such a sensitive area arousing.
But anyway, back to the story...
The actual piercing went without notice—in fact, the actual needle puncture was quite painless and felt as if a pimple was being popped (I wish that I could remember more about the actual piercing because I suppose that would add that something that this story seems to lack). What was noticeable about this event was the fact that one girl noticed a mole on my scrotum—not that this came as any great surprise to me; I knew my privates exceedingly and empirically well—what man doesn't? She found this small mole or birthmark incredibly adorable (an odd thing to find attractive, but I suppose we are all slaves to some odd taste or another).
After I had re-packaged my package, as it were, I began talking to this petite blond girl. Our conversation in no way broke with the genre conventions of flirtatious jokes and smiles, so I won't go into the details of this flirtatious talk (we all know the naïve pleasure we have in talking to a potential mate). At first we didn't seem to have much in common beside an appreciation for my genitals, we eventually became desperately involved for the next seven years. All because my balls were being pierced and the existence of a small birthmark I found the person that I first gave my heart to, so sometimes—to give this narrative a moral—love can begin with the crotch (I don't think that I like that sentence, but I'll let it stand for now).
To add a postscript to this story, even though I spent several years with this most unique woman, I eventually soured the relationship with infidelity (I always seem to destroy what is best in my life, but c'est la vie (that's fairly flippant, but my take on existence seems to be one of indifference)) and I haven't seen her in years, but I still have the birthmark and the scrotum piercing.