R1n65 & Pl13r5
Woman ‘made to remove nipple ring with pliers’. “Weird News,” Metro.co.uk. 3/28/08
This brings back memories. Once upon a time, very near the end of my first marriage, I had a nose ring. I had installed it myself with the help of a friend, a few beers, some ice, and a carrot, about 5 months after my wife had taken our toddling daughter to a hippy community in some southeastern mountains with a vague intuition that the world was going to end. Also, she wanted to go far away from me, as my drinking, depression, inability to forgive her infidelity with another woman, refusal to buckle under the hysterical sweeping generalizations of her burgeoning angry, male-bashing young feminism, and hesitance to share a faith in some harmonic convergence or another made her somewhat unhappy.
In the time of the nose ring, I lived in an apartment with a musician friend. A young woman, a freshman at the college I also attended, lived down the hall. She was a clown, professionally, or on her way to being so. A little granola, too. I guess I liked them that way back then. Hippy chicks like to get fucked up and are easy. Anyway, I pursued her and we hooked up. Being the honest, indiscrete fucker I was, I told my wife about it when we next talked on the phone, somewhere between nonchalant and celebratory, like “Look at me, I’m happy! Aren’t you happy for me?”
My wife came back then. I picked her and the kid up from the mountains, as a matter of fact, after staying up all night attempting, unsuccessfully, to screw my little hippy clown girlfriend. We three ended up moving into my parents’ basement, but I could not find a taker for my half of the rent in the old apartment, and I retained a key.
One day, on the anniversary of my friend & roommate’s birth, there was to be a party at the old apartment. My wife told me I could not go, and I resented that, and told her so. So, I bought one or two bottles of red wine and a fifth of scotch and went to the party early, before my friend & roommate even returned home. I was pleasantly drunk by the time he came back, planning on getting absolutely fucking smashed.
Before I could do so, my friend spies my angry wife climbing up on the porch from the parking lot, screaming the way she still does. She entered through the sliding glass door (was it unlocked? did my friend open it to avoid unnecessary noise? i was drunk, and a poor witness) and screamed more, pushing me, threatening to go down the hall and physically harm my little hippy clown. I pushed back hard enough to slow her down, but not enough to give credibility to any claim I was “fighting” her.
Then, the cops came, separating us to get our stories but already under the assumption that them man assaulted the woman. We both attested, however, that we pushed each other, and we were thus both arrested for spousal assault, me drunk, her having left the baby in the car. They asked us the usual questions. I cracked cop jokes (wish I could remember the jokes, but it’s all a little hazy). My wife chuckled nervously. The cops grew more and more agitated.
By the time they got to “Have you ever thought about suicide?” they were just itching for an excuse to do me so harm. Of course, the nose ring had to go, as hundreds of suicides are carried out yearly using quarter-inch needles made of cheap, flimsy metal. Not so flimsy, though, as I was unable to remove the nose ring quickly, and they had to step in with their special tool.
Unfortunately, the pliers didn’t work either. They only twisted the nose ring, widened the hole, traumatized the tissue. (On the other hand, maybe they did work–maybe that’s just what the cops had in mind.) Good thing I was anesthetized.
The nose ring stayed in for several days, until I was no longer able to fight off infection without breaking and removing it. I have a tiny little scar, and a reinforced dislike of authority figures, and a train wreck of an ex-marriage to remember it all by.
