it’s a mitzvah!

[Note: This story gets pretty graphic and moderately gross. Don't act like I didn't warn you.]

Before we begin, a few things:

(1) I like genital piercings. They look good, they feel good, they’re the soup that eats like a meal, they’re the real San Francisco treat.

(2) Yes, they hurt initially. Yes, they’re still worth it.

(3) In spite of this, no, I don’t get off on pain per se. Not any more than your average NHL-fan-cum-twentysomething-satyr, at least.

Also, at the time this story took place, I had a genital piercing called an apadravya, which, well, looks like this: http://wiki.bmezine.com/index.php/Apadravya. That link is obviously not safe for work, and obviously contains images of pierced penises. So, you know, beware ye who enter.

(This is all valid prologue, by the way; the proper context is of the utmost importance for what is to follow.)

It’s also important to note that I take the always-fancy Greyhound bus from Toronto to New York City about once every other week to see my girlfriend, as it was while riding one of that company’s sinewy canine transport vehicles that I experienced the most horrific penis-related catastrophe of the modern era.

And to be honest, I’m not even sure how it happened.

I always take the late bus out of Toronto. It leaves at 11:15 p.m., I dope myself up with some kind of sedative prior to disembarking for customs in scenic Buffalo, and by the time I get back on, I can usually get about eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Awesome. People think I’m crazy for taking a 12-hour bus ride so often, but in addition to having a hot piece of ass great girl on the other end of line, the trip itself is pretty much the best shot I have at anything resembling “free time.” I’ll take it.

The bus makes a few stops en route to New York: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Binghamton. Excepting Buffalo, I’ve never actually spent any amount of time in any of these places, though they all give off the vague impression that they’re about one meth-lab explosion away from getting kicked out of the state and being annexed by Idaho – Binghamton in particular. I’m pretty sure that place shares a magnetic polarity with college degrees, functioning sperm, sobriety and teeth.

And so, it was just outside of that jewel of central New York that my adventure began. I woke up just after 7 a.m. to find that Aunt Jemimah’s less attractive, thicker-in-the-britches sister had set up shop next to me, which in and of itself was not a problem; the fact that the Greyhound is largely inhabited by all manner of mutants is not news.

Now, I knew immediately that something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it – people were watching, after all. (I’ll be here all night, folks! Tip your waitress!)

The feeling, however, was much like what I imagine “women’s intuition” is like, but for dudes with their junk. That is, I wasn’t in pain, didn’t really feel anything at all, but I also knew that immediate inspection was absolutely necessary.

I amazingly made it into the aisle without the aid of a vaulting pole and hauled ass to the bathroom to inspect the goods. What I found … well …

Guhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Somehow, over the course of the night, the barbell I had been wearing in my apadravya had sunken down into the piercing. To make matters horribly, horribly worse, thanks to some sort of freakish healing capabilities of which I had no prior knowledge, the top half of the piercing had scabbed and healed over.

To put it another way, I had an inch-long piece of steel very much stuck in my penis. On a Greyhound bus. At seven in the morning. In the middle of absolutely nowhere.

This took a moment to register. Because really, what were my options? Try my luck with nail clippers in the bathroom of a moving fucking bus? Wait until we stopped for breakfast in Great Bend and ask the mopes at the Iron Skillet for a steak knife and a wet-nap? I was giving myself hepatitis and several other less-pleasant forms of cockrot just thinking about it. If I were to proceed down that path, I might as well have asked the woman in the seat next to mine to put down her duffel bag full of Pringles and root beer and try to dig it out with her one good canine.

No. This would require the swift prevalence of a cooler head. My friend Brian in Brooklyn owned a piercing and tattoo shop, and was equipped to deal with a situation like this. I would sit my ass back down, pick up my book, kindly decline Chocolate Thunder’s attempts to get me to join the diabetes club, and calmly make arrangements to have a soft-spoken bald fellow remove a foreign object from my penis. Or drown myself in the Greyhound’s septic tank. Both seemed like pretty good options.

As it turned out, my ability to focus on the delightful epistolary prose of Douglas Coupland (or anything more involved than the burn marks on the seat in front of me) was more than a little compromised by the fact that, best case, it would be another five hours or so until my predicament could even begin to be corrected. And it’s not like the prospects of the actual procedure by which it would almost certainly be accomplished were anything resembling pleasant, either. I braced myself; retrieving this errant piece of titanium, I knew, would require nothing short of full-scale penile excavation.

I thought of ninth grade, and how most of my friends joined the rugby team while I started smoking and listening to Coal Chamber. The party line back then was that body piercing was no less crazy than throwing yourself into a scrum full of a bunch of sweaty dipshits fighting for a ball. At least I had control over the infliction of pain, I told them, not to mention that the odds of some guy with a speech impediment biting off part of my ear were greatly diminished while in the confines of a tattoo parlor.

Which isn’t to say I don’t still believe this, though years later, piercing has lost much of its appeal for me. And when you know that by day’s end, barring some sort of miracle of lubrication, you’re going to voluntarily submit to having a hole bored into the head of your penis to remove a piece of metal that was initially put there of your own volition, well, running laps around a dewy track at dawn before getting crushed by some monster with a dubious chromosome count sounds oddly appealing.

So I stared blankly out the window. Prodded the crotch of my jeans a little when nobody was looking. Tried to remember the good times. Did my best to convince myself that better men than I had faced greater problems than this while aboard much lesser modes of transportation, knowing full well that that was absolutely in no way true.

(You heard me, Elie Wiesel. Want to fight about it?)

Upon reaching the Port Authority in Manhattan, I was a shell. I called Brian and explained the situation as delicately as I could, and he told me that I should probably head to his shop as quickly as possible – my thoughts exactly.

By the time I got off the L train, it was roughly 900 degrees in Bushwick, and a terrible day was made sweatier. Perfect. Pure Body Arts, Brian’s shop, felt like an oasis. I followed him into his studio, closed the door behind me, and let him give me his professional opinion of the damage.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s pretty bad.” Great!

“I mean, it can be taken care of,” he continued, “but you know what’s going to have to be done, right?” Well, unless you’ve developed a way to plow through over a quarter inch of hardened scabs using magic …

At that point, we decided this was going to be a team effort. I put on a pair of sterile gloves and did the honors of applying a slick blue numbing agent to the scene of the crime while Brian prepared a scalpel. Guhhhhhhh.

Praise be to Allah, the anesthetic was working; though I clearly saw him slicing into the bull’s-eye on the head of my penis, I felt nothing. Unfortunately, the top of the barbell was still nowhere in sight. We’ve only just begun …

Brian began nicking the edges of where the piercing had once been, hoping to create a kind of cup-dispenser effect whereby he could then peel back each little flap of scabby skin in an attempt to expose the rogue piece of jewelry. Not a bad idea, though a method which caused the inevitable bloodshed to begin.

(If you find it thoroughly disgusting to read about a penis in these terms, rest assured that it’s about a thousand times worse when said penis belongs to you.)

When I got the apadravya piercing five years prior, it was easily the single-most painful experience of my life. Hot, white, blinding pain surged through every inch of my body … for a split-second. No blood to speak of, and the world’s greatest endorphin rush quickly followed.

This was about as far-removed from that little bit of ecstasy as you can get. This was like getting Dr. Nick to remove a garden gnome from your ass as compared to that brilliant moment when you first discover the Jacuzzi jet. Not to say that Brian was anything less than professional and extraordinarily competent, of course. It was just … unpleasant.

Fast-forward half an hour, and I was caked in blood, the topical anesthetic was wearing off, and we were only beginning to catch glimpses of the barbell. I could feel every scalpel slice, and every time the blade touched the bead that sat on top of the bar, it felt like somebody was scraping a blackboard right behind my eyes. This was going to have to be wrapped up, and soon.

Brian suggested that he stop cutting away at the scarred tissue and starting trying in earnest to push it through the cut he’d made. This seemed reasonable enough, and if worse came to worse, at least I was in a good position to knee him square in the face and snap his neck. But, I held back the four corners of skin he’d cut on top while he pushed the bottom of the barbell upward.

Oh, I felt that.

Blood poured, and a glint of silver appeared, increasing in size until … eureka! It’s a boy! I was saved! Sweet fancy Moses, it was out!

I sat there, covered in my own blood and sweat while Brian unscrewed the top bead and removed the jewelry – ever the gentleman. I cleaned myself up while he fetched a ring that I could wear as a Prince Albert – a much less stressful, less accident-prone piercing that, barring the outside chance that it ended up attracting a lightning bolt at some point, would never give me anything close to the trouble that I’d just endured. After a moment to decompress, I gathered my wits, thanked my friend profusely, and headed back into Manhattan to get blind stinking drunk. Months later, only a tiny scar remains to indicate that any sort of trauma ever occurred.

There’s no moral here – no lesson, nothing to take away. There’s no posturing, no grandstanding, no bragging or bravado about anything that you’ve just read. I’m not a stronger or better person for what I went through that day. Sometimes, ridiculous shit happens, and if you’re lucky, you get a good story out of it.

And if you’re lucky, you’ll never, ever have to hear me talk about my dick again.