Be careful what you say around good friends who know your line of blarney. I guess I said one too many times this year that I’d like to pierce my nose in honor of my 40th year on the planet. I didn’t think anyone was really listening – until I found myself on vacation with friends in Santa Barbara last week.
The first night we arrived at the cute little hotel on the beach, my friends announced that tonight was the night we were going to find a piercing parlor and have my nose done. I told them to go jump in the ocean. Two of them did, while my other friend joined me for a drink on the Santa Barbara pier.
I thought the nostril noise was done until we headed for dinner on State Street (a super-cool downtown area that Gilroy and Morgan Hill chambers of commerce should study carefully). My friends were inspired to check out a tattoo place with a window sign saying, “We pierce anything.” At this point, I was referring to the ladies at my side as my “so-called friends.”
So, the four suburban housewives stepped into a subculture where anything is pierced and anything goes. The “parlor” was a high-end space in expensive Santa Barbara real estate with groupies of tattooed and pierced bodies milling about.
Undaunted, the so-called friends called out, “Who does the piercing in this place?” A polite young man – with 2 1/2-inch wooden disks hanging from his ears – came forward and announced he was the piercing artist (a CalArts grad, perhaps?).
My piercer’s name was Gauge, and the piercing studio he works in is called Golden Eagle Tattoo. Gauge explained the procedure very professionally and asked us to relax in the “waiting area” (actually an open area in clear view of fellow clients getting tattoos) and to perhaps enjoy his portfolio of work on the far counter.
At this point I reverted to the Bradley Method labor breathing in anticipation of a painful nose while my so-called friends head for the portfolio (who doesn’t like to look at pictures?). Remember the sign on the window?
My so-called friends were gasping and turning white. They look at me, horrified, and I sensed a moment of empathy for dragging me into Golden Eagle. They started to bring Gauge’s graphic portfolio toward me, and I fended them off with a stop-sign hand in the air.
“OK, Mary Anne, follow me this way. Oh, your friends can come to if they like,” Gauge said. Of course my so-called friends followed us. They wanted to take graphic pictures and put them in my portfolio of “big ideas” I tend to have when I lose all sense of decorum.
So the crowd grew as we headed to a back room furnished with a black padded table and red rolling tool chest filled with autoclaved piercing implements. We picked up some colleagues of Gauge’s – including one apprentice who was fully pierced, tattooed and even younger, with two rows of implanted balls in his arm.
Gauge pulled out the surgical tray and began loading it with sterile gloves, Q-tips, a metal tube (that I somehow knew was going up my nose), and an 18-gauge needle (no word play on my piercer’s name).
Crap. My heart started to race, but I knew it would make a good story.
I got a simultaneous cleaning of both the inside and outside of my nose, then up the nose with the tube. While I was still waiting for the pain, Gauge pronounced it was pierced! No pain.
A note of warning for all of you thinking, “Great, it doesn’t hurt. I think I’ll do it tomorrow.” I have birthed two children each weighing more than eight pounds au natural – no pain medications. Can you say “high pain threshold”?
Gauge was a highly professional piercer, and I can’t help to think he would do well in a surgery residency. After the pictures and smiles of relief, Gauge performed his after-care instructions, and I couldn’t help to laugh when I read the “What to avoid…” list. It warned, “Don’t hang charms or any objects from your jewelry until the piercing is fully healed.” I think I will heed the warning and not hang my keys from my nose for a few weeks.
The other warnings had to do with the “piercing anything” genre, and I don’t think I will be experimenting in that subculture anytime soon.
Ciao for now.
