Counter Culture: Minor Surgeons                                                            Adam Matcho

“Can you guys pierce my nose?” the girl said as she walked through the entranceway of the store.  It was a slow Wednesday night in the mall. She was the first person to walk into our store in the last hour.

I looked to my co-worker, Bobby. We knew her. She was in our novelty store with her boyfriend every other week. Unlike most of the mall rats or recent high school graduates, she had a job. She used her money to buy lava lamps, black lights, optical illusion posters, shocking pens, misting gothic fountains and once purchased a $100 light saber with LED lights and movie-inspired swooshing sounds for her boyfriend.

“Okay, sure,” Bobby said. He opened a small stepstool, locked it in place and set it next to the tall, spinning body jewelry case filled with naval rings, horseshoe earrings, zero-gauge plugs, spacers and packets of nose studs. Our body jewelry selection had the best variety and most affordable prices in the mall. Even better than the pseudo-punk-hipster store, Hot Topic.

Sure, they dressed the part at Hot Topic and the workers took pride in condescending to their customers, but the kids knew. The mall rats who were stretching the holes in their ears and the teenyboppers who shopped for belly rings and their mothers all knew too. And this girl, with the tar-black hair and porcelain skin and her boyfriend with his spiked bracelet and padlock on a chain around his neck knew as well. Our store didn’t have workers in Dead Kennedys shirts and mohawks and jackets with 70s punk band patches. Our staff consisted of unmotivated drunks, complicit drug addicts, flamboyant homosexuals and any other weirdo, misfit, and outcast considered unemployable by any self-respecting business. In other words, normal people. People like Bobby and me. People who were more than happy to talk to anybody who wandered into our store on a slow Wednesday night.

There were only a few places kids could get their ears pierced in the mall. Even Hot Topic didn’t pierce. They just provided the overpriced barbells and plugs to fill your holes after the fact. There was also Claire’s. That’s where the babies got tagged with cheap cubic zirconia studs, where the grade-school girls and their timid mothers flocked for the latest, cutest fads and patterns. There was a sense of cleanliness and professionalism with Claire’s, a milieu exuded in their perky staff, the dangling bracelets and chandelier earrings displayed on spinning racks, the kid-friendly radio hits from the store’s speakers and the purifying scent of Nair in the aisles. Then there was our store. We burned Nag Champa incense to obscure smoke from the backroom. The music was loud and would indiscriminately jump from Cher to Lamb of God to The Smiths to 50 Cent to Metallica. Our store’s reputation was built on talking novelties and fart machines and sex toys, not ear piercing. But we were trained. We had plastic, handheld piercing guns and the nerve (and free time) to puncture a person’s ear like no other store in the Monroeville Mall. We pierced everyone. We pierced the ears of children, teens and adults, with and without parental permission. Although real body piercing — nose, naval, eyebrow, clitoris — was forbidden and could only be done by a professional with a needle, we did sell a do-it-yourself nose piercing kit: a thin-nosed, plastic gun with pre-loaded, sparkling studs in a cartridge. It seemed easy enough.

“It’s considered minor surgery,” the boss explained to Bobby and me before our piercing training years before. “So make sure you listen to this lady. This isn’t something I want you two jagoffs screwing up and getting us sued over later.”

I was young, maybe 22. I had earrings in both ears, a stud in my nose and tattoo for a dead writer on my calf. I had a healthy respect for the art of body beautification and was eager to become one of its practitioners, even in the limited capacity of a novelty store employee at the mall.

The training was nothing more than a woman coming to the store one afternoon and spending 30 minutes with Bobby and me. She was a pear-shaped woman with feather earrings and blue and green makeup smudged across her cheeks and eyes. It appeared this woman attempted to kiss a peacock, only to have it explode in her face.

She handed Bobby and me a plastic piercing gun. It was flimsy and as white as a dentist’s teeth. It seemed almost incapable of puncturing a person’s skin.

“Although the safest form of piercing is with a needle, we can use these guns to set a person up with a starter’s stud,” the woman said.

I was pulling the trigger on my gun. Whenever you squeezed the trigger, you could see a silver bar push from the back, through the open space at the top of the gun where the cartridge was loaded. My gun was unloaded, so I just watched the thin silver bar jut into the open space when I squeezed and disappear when I let go.

“Please stop doing that,” the woman said. “I know these aren’t real guns, but you should handle them with the same amount of care. First, you need to know how to load the gun.”

She handed us a plastic cartridge the size of a portable pencil sharpener. Mine was blue, Bobby’s was pink.

“Oh, I guess you got the girl’s stud,” she said to Bobby. “That’s how you can tell: pink is for girls, white is unisex.”

She showed us how to snap the cartridge into the open space at the top of the gun. There was U-shaped crevice in each cartridge and that’s where the person’s earlobe fit. This U-shaped gouge separated the stud in two parts: the portion near the nose of the gun held the stud and post and the other portion contained the small earring back. I pressed my cartridge into the space at the top of the gun.

“Nice and easy,” she said. “Wait for the click so you know the cartridge is secure. There you go, locked and loaded.” The peacock lady laughed. Bobby and I did not. We were fixated on the piercing weapons in our hands.

She handed us thin, foam squares, each one about five by five inches. Bobby immediately began to wipe his ass with his.

“Okay,” the lady said, “please stop that.” When she bent over to reach into her bag of supplies, I acted like the foam square was a tampon and placed it, with precision and trepidation, between my legs.

“Are you two done yet?” the woman said, staring at my hand, holding the foam square to my crotch. “Seriously?”

“Okay, okay,” I said, “I’m sorry.” I held the foam square out in front of me like a library book I planned to go home and read right away. I really did want to learn how to pierce people and so did Bobby. It was part of being a key-holder in the store: if you could open the jewelry cases and sell the necklaces, rings, earrings and body jewelry, you should be able to do the piercing too. We wanted to do the piercing.

“This,” the woman said, producing her own foam tampon, “is your practice pad.” She placed one section of the practice pad in the cartridge’s open space of her own piercing gun. Her gun was pink and customized with glittery decorations and a Hello Kitty sticker. It seemed she took the same Cubist approach to garnishing her gun as her face. We watched as she placed the practice pad into the U-shaped space in the cartridge. She lifted the butt of her gun slightly.

“You want to do this at an angle,” she said. “You never want to pierce a person straight on.”

She pinched a piece of the practice pad between two fingers and squinted. She took an audible breath.

“Feel free to take the earlobe and bend it, try to come down on it,” she said and abruptly squeezed the trigger. “And make sure you really squeeze. If you do it too softly, the stud won’t go all the way through. Then you’ll have a real problem.”

Bobby and I stared at the bronze-coated stud attached to the practice pad. She had pierced it perfectly and now, it was our turn.

We pierced at angles. We squeezed the triggers with force, penetrating the foam square with the power of our hands. I imagined I held a small grapefruit in my bare hand and projected all the force I would use to crush that grapefruit into the squeezing of the trigger. I was making splattering sounds in my head each time I broke through the practice pad, imagining exploding grapefruit and earlobes alike.

The peacock woman said we weren’t done yet. She showed us how each stud came in a self-contained casing which included two sterilized wipes and cartridges. We were to open one wipe and clean the soon-to-be-pierced area, dot the lobe with a purple marker for a visual target, load the stud and pierce. We were given a bottle of solution that should be sold with each piercing. We were told to offer advice for cleaning the ear and stud and tips on how to break down the ball-shaped tissue buildup in the lobe after a piercing. Then she gave us a handful of cartridges of practice studs.

“These are in case you want to practice before the real thing,” the woman said as she began packing her bag. “We are only permitted to pierce the earlobe and the cartilage at the top of the ear. And remember, the further you go up the ear, the more it hurts.” She pinched her ear all along the cartilage, starting at her low-hanging lobe and working up to the little notch at the top of her ear.

“You see this little flap here?” she said, wiggling the ridge of flesh at the front of her ear, right by the ear hole. “That’s the tragus. You can’t pierce that either. That has to be done by a professional.”

Bobby and I looked at each other.

“Okay,” I said. “I think we’re ready.”

After the training, the lady made us sign a piece of paper promising we would only use our newfound powers for good and, most likely, exonerating the store from any potential harm inflicted by employees of our store. After all, we had a half hour of training and a signed piece of paper. We were minor surgeons now.

The girl who wanted her nose pierced sat on the stepstool and her boyfriend took her hand.

“Babe,” he said, “you’ll be fine. Look at me.” He turned his head back and forth, showing his own earlobes. They were lined with earrings and studs, at least five in each ear, a semi-circle trail that began with a large spacer at the bottom and tapered to a small skull stud at the top of his lobe.

He removed the spacer from the bottom of his lobe. It was neon green with the girth a highlighter, a zero gauge, maybe even a double-zero. He held it out to her.

“You wanna smell it?” he said and laughed.

“Eww, no,” she said. “You know I hate that. It smells like moldy cheese.”

They both laughed and he rubbed her back and shoulders with his free hand.

“Come on, babe,” he said, “you like to smell it at home.”

She glanced at me leaning against the body jewelry case and Bobby who was ripping open one of the do-it-yourself nose piercing kits we sold for $14.99.

“No, that’s gross,” she said. “Ask one of them.”

“No thanks,” Bobby said, now loading a pink cartridge into the piercing gun.

I held my hand out the way crossing guards do to stop traffic. “Not a chance,” I said. “I know how bad ear funk smells.”

“It’s really not that bad,” the boyfriend said and laughed. “It’s really not.”

“Yeah, that’s okay,” Bobby said, stepping toward the girl sitting on the stepstool. “So are we ready to do this?”

The girl tightened her lips and shook her head. The boyfriend took a step back and worked the green spacer back into the dime-sized hole in his ear.

“Would you like a Care Bear or something to hold during the procedure?” I said. I offered this same comfort to anybody who seemed nervous about an ear piercing in the store. People laughed when it was offered and most of them said no, but there were always a couple folks who enjoyed the security of clutching a stuffed animal as they anticipated their piercing.

“Sure,” the girl said and laughed nervously, not sure whether I was serious or not. I walked to the shelf with the Care Bears (yeah, we sold them too) and snagged the green one with a shamrock on its chest.

“Here,” I said and handed her the stuffed animal. She seized the bear and hugged it to her chest.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

Bobby put the piercing gun up to her nose so the open space at the top of the cartridge cradled the bottom of her right nostril. The tapered tip of the gun was in her nose and Bobby lifted the butt at an angle, like we were trained.

“Okay,” Bobby said softly, almost whispering to her. “Here we go.”

She violently cradled the Care Bear to her chest and breathed through her teeth. Bobby squeezed the trigger. There was a small popping sound. Bobby took the gun from her face. The boyfriend and I stepped closer. The girl said, “That wasn’t so bad.”

The stud was in her nose. Bobby had done everything right: the placement of the stud, the force required to puncture her nostril, the efficiency he handled it all with. But there was one problem.

“It’s stabbing me from the inside,” the girl said. She reached up with her forefinger and thumb and softly daubed her nose, dropping the Care Bear. She bent her nostril upward so we could see up there, how the stud’s straight post was too long and jabbed into her septum. “It hurts,” she said.

I knew it did. The Johnstown tattoo artist who pierced my nose four or five years earlier told me as much right before he stuck a needle through my nostril. I was 18 or 19, probably the same age as this girl on the stepstool. I was working my first steady job — at a gas station/sandwich shop — and was receiving a steady paycheck. I wanted to get my nose pierced.

“Now don’t fucking move,” the artist said as he put the tip of the needle to my nose. “If you move and I hit the inside of your septum right there between your nostrils, you’re going to be in some bad fucking pain. Got me?”

“Yep,” I said. I didn’t move. I just closed my eyes, sat in the chair (which was much more comfortable than a stepstool) and let the man shove the needle through my nostril. There was a hot pain for only a second and it was over. The artist was holding a mirror out in front of me. I loved it. I liked the subtlety of it; how you had to focus your eyes to see the shimmer in the stud and the way it fit the fold of my large Italian nostril, as if I’d had it forever.

At 18, I knew I loved it more than anything I owned. I loved my friends who were sitting around a table, drinking and smoking with me, when I declared, “I want to get my nose pierced. You guys coming with me?”

I was excited to go home that night and show my dad who would hate it. But he couldn’t do anything short of ripping from my face because I was finally an adult. I had a job at a gas station and paid my own car insurance. I had the right to do whatever I wanted to my body because I was the only one on earth who controlled it. And nothing proved that point more than an understated stud in my nose. I felt this was nothing short of the most important decision I had ever made.

I stood at the register, counting my money. I recounted the cash, doing the math for the cost of the stud, the piercing and a tip for the tattoo artist in my head. While I was sliding the bills from my left hand to my right, I noticed a spot of blood on one of twenties. Then I saw another drop. Then my nose starting raining blood onto the cash.

“Quick, quick. Fuck. To the back,” the tattoo artist said and grabbed the bloody money from my hands.

He sat me in the piercing chair again and placed a moist cotton ball up my nose.

“Hold that there until the bleeding stops,” he said. There was a tingling pain if I pressed too hard. I pulled the cotton ball away and stared at the deep red blood on the little cloud in my hand. I nodded my head and smiled at the blood, quite sure I had just done something awesome.

The tattoo artist came back into the piercing room. “You alright now?” he said.

“Yep,” I said and stood quickly, accidentally rolling my foot on a tattoo gun pedal below the chair. The artist looked at me and shook his head.

“It’s probably all that fucking dope you smoked before you got here,” he said. “It thins your blood.”

I almost denied it. I was close to saying, “What is this dope you speak of?”

Instead, I opened my mouth only to close it again. There was nothing to say. I didn’t owe this bald-headed, grad school glasses wearing, Moby-looking guy a goddamn thing. He already had my money. Blood money at that! The last thing I wanted was a lecture. I was an adult who just got his nose pierced. Everything I needed to know, I already did. Everyone I really cared about was here, in this room, in this moment.

“Are we good?” I said.

“Yeah, I guess,” the artist said. “If you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” I said and walked out to the front room again. I saw my friends sitting in the waiting area, looking at a sample book of tattoos. “Let’s go get something to drink,” I said.

I was pierced with a corkscrew style stud. Instead of a straight bar on the back of the stud, like a typical earring, the back of my nose stud curled down and inward, resting against the inside of my nostril. This kept the stud secure and didn’t extend toward the septum.

Unfortunately for the girl sitting on the stepstool, the stud that came with the do-it-yourself nose piercing kit was the standard, straight-post stud. It didn’t seem very practical for the company that made the product to package the kit like that, but it did. And now we had to do something about it.

“This is kind of hurting,” the girl said, trying to sound disinterested, as if it were simply an inconvenience like a fly in the house or clouds obscuring the sun. I exchanged glances with Bobby. We knew there could be no fallout from this because we weren’t permitted to pierce noses in the first place. We even signed a piece of paper saying so.

“Pliers,” Bobby said and retrieved a pair from one of the drawers behind the counter. They were old, rubber-handled, needle-nosed pliers. We used them for every task around the store and I knew they were not sterile.

“What about these?” Bobby said and held up the pliers.

The girl seemed a bit hesitant to answer. Her boyfriend stepped forward and rubbed her shoulder.

“It’ll be fine, babe,” he said. “These guys know what they’re doing.”

Bobby and I traded fast glances again. Sure.

“Do you want to smell it now?” the boyfriend said to the girl on the stepstool. He held his green ear plug in the palm of his hand again. The girl bent forward, burying her face in his open palm, and whipped her head back like a person reacting to smelling salts.

“Oh my god,” she said in a single breath. “That is so gross.” Then she looked at us. “Okay. I don’t even care. I just want to get this over with.”

I took the pliers from Bobby. I don’t know why. I just felt compelled to act, to help.

I placed a hand on the girl’s forehead and leaned it backward so I could get a better view inside her nose. I saw the stud’s post, with its rounded end, stabbing horizontally through her nostril. It was centimeters away from her septum. I put the tip of the pliers into her nostril and tried to gently clamp them onto the post. As soon as I tried to tighten down on the post, it slipped free from the pliers and the girl breathed in sharply.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said. I kept my hand on her forehead and imagined people would think this was some sort of exorcism or baptism or some kind of holy ceremony if they happened to walk in the store and see this. But nobody did. The store was open and shoppers walked through the hallways of the mall, but nobody entered our store the entire time. Some days were just that slow.

I removed my hand from her forehead and bent the end of her freshly-pierced nostril outward, giving myself a better view and more room to operate.

“Can I do this?” I said, already doing it.

“Yeah, sure,” she said and kept her eyes closed. There was a tear that had run from the corner of her eye down to her jaw. Her boyfriend rubbed her back. He reached down and kissed her on the temple. I opened and closed the pliers and looked at Bobby. He just stood there with his arms crossed waiting for the next move.

I worked the slightly spread tips of the pliers back into her nostril and placed them around the post. I clamped down on the post quickly, the way I was trained to squeeze the gun for an ear piercing (or when crushing a grape fruit). I latched onto the post and tried to gently bend it downward. Rather than bending and nestling securely against the inside of her nostril, the entire stud moved with my downward tug, causing the girl to breath in deeply. I noticed a thin trail of blood running down the front of her nose, from under the round head of the stud.

Bobby fetched a paper towel and cleaned the blood on her nose. The sight of blood had changed the sentiment in the store. Now the girl was eager to finish. She didn’t display that same laissez-faire attitude about our shady approach to body piercing as when she first entered the store.

“Just do it the right way,” she said. “I just want this to be over with.”

“Fine,” I said. “Bobby, hand me another paper towel.” I reached my hand out and Bobby placed the paper towel right in it, just like a real operating room. I was finally starting to understand this whole minor surgery comparison now.

I took the towel and held it on the outside of the girl’s nose, pinching the head of the stud, holding it in place. Then I reattached the tips of the pliers to the post inside her nostril.

I began to bend the post downward and applied the opposite pressure to the stud head on the outside of her nose, forcing the post to take a new shape and sit snugly against the inside of her nostril. I was trying to make her straight-post stud into a corkscrew style one like I had.

There was more blood. It was leaking from the paper towel I had pressed against her nose. Some of the blood streamed toward the corner of her mouth and a couple drops fell onto her jeans.

“You know,” I said, trying to sound calm, like I’d used pliers like this before, though the truth was I was straining to bend the post. I didn’t want it to snap off. I didn’t want the pliers to lose their grip and tear her nostril. I didn’t want her to sneeze.

“You know,” I started again. “I got my nose pierced a long time ago, even before my tattoo. And when I did, I didn’t know one other person who had their nose pierced.”
The post was bending. Slowly, but bending. I took the girl’s quiet whimper as an invitation to continue.

“Then I went to the doctor’s earlier this year — I had this bad planter’s wart on my foot and had to have it scraped off—“

“Dude,” the boyfriend said. “That is gross. I don’t want to hear this.”

The girl was still breathing through her teeth and the blood kept coming.

“Anyway,” I said. “So my doctor is this lady from India and she said she liked my nose piercing. And later when she was freezing the wart so she could scrub it off with her scalpel, I asked her what a nose piercing means in her culture. And she said —“

“I got it,” I said and stepped away from the girl on the stepstool.

It was true. I had bent the post completely. So now, it went in, straight through the nostril’s cartilage, and then down, almost like an upside down L inside her nose. Bobby had given the entire roll of paper towels to her boyfriend. He gently cleaned the blood from the side of her face and where it had dripped onto her thigh, staining her jeans.

“It looks good, babe,” he said. “It really does.”

I brought one of the store’s square mirrors over so she could see for herself. It reminded me of how I looked into the mirror at the tattoo parlor in Johnstown and loved what I had seen.

She examined her nose, a bit swollen and dotted with specks of dried blood. She smiled and nodded at her boyfriend who smiled back. She said, “Nice.”

The girl stood and Bobby rang her up at the register. She wanted to leave us a tip, but Bobby declined, saying we put her through too much to take anything extra.
The girl was happy. She kissed her boyfriend and put her things back in her purse. Then she turned to me.

“So what did she say?”

“Who?” I said.

“Your wart doctor, what did she tell you?”

“Okay, first,” I said. “I don’t have a wart doctor. She is a regular doctor who removed a wart for me once.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Whatever.”

“She said in India, women get their noses pierced, especially before their wedding day, because they feel every item of beauty should have at least one blemish, one point of imperfection. It supposedly deflects all the bad luck of a jealous universe that a perfect person would be prone to with all that flawless beauty.”

“Hmm?” she said. “I think I like that.”

“Okay,” I said.

Then the girl with the new nose piercing and her boyfriend with his many old piercings left, holding hands.

Bobby collapsed the stepstool and gathered the bloody paper towels from the floor. He looked at me, smiled, and said, “Another satisfied customer.”

I nodded at the ground, to a small blood spot on the carpet. “Yeah,” I said, “I just hope the boss doesn’t find out.”

Adam Matcho regularly shares his work stories with The New Yinzer. Names and details have not been changed, as they are all as guilty as Adam. His chapbook, Six Dollars an Hour: Confession of a Gemini Writer was published by Liquid Paper Press.