Blinking at the vaulted ceiling.

By Jordan Ginsberg | Published: July 24, 2007

“I was flying out of Newark, right? Early in the morning. I got to the airport so early, Jersey didn’t even smell yet. That reek of piss that starts in Secaucus and mouthbreathes all over Rutherford and Nutley and East Orange? Could barely pick up on it. It was a gorgeous day, if you’ll recall. I bet if nothing else happened, if all else remained the same, maybe it wouldn’t have crept up at all. Maybe it didn’t and nobody even noticed.

“My flight, though. I guess it wouldn’t have been number ninety-two, but you understand what I mean, right? The next one, that was the one, but hell if I knew anything. Of course, they look at my passport and what do they see? Pakistan. Afghanistan. Russia. China. Turkey. Venezuela. I’m a reporter, I’m all over the place, you know? These are important places. Even back then, there were important reasons to go to them.

“Basically, I go to check in and they leave me standing there for a minute. They take my passport and talk amongst themselves, and then I’m surrounded. Big guys, fucking giants standing behind me, leading me, ‘Come with us. Don’t say a word and just move like we tell you.’ Well, of course. Whatever you boys think is best.

“They put me in a small room and leave me on my own for a few minutes, and of course I’m scared. What could they want with me? I’m on my way to London and now I’m in an interrogation room. And like I said, we’re talking early in the morning. They took my coffee away. Remember when you could walk up to the gate with a coffee? If I tell you now that I was disoriented, that wouldn’t even be the half of it, believe me.

“You ever had an enemy? And I don’t mean somebody you don’t get along with, some asshole who picked on you when you were kids, someone who gets on your nerves at work, even someone you really, truly hate. I mean an enemy. Someone who threatens every good thing you know in life. The sort that makes no bones of being all about ruining you. I’m talking about the difference between a person who wishes you harm and a person who introduces you to evil at every opportunity. That’s how these men treated me in this small room: Like an enemy.

“Why was I in Pakistan? Who was I traveling with? Who do I know in Afghanistan? We’ve got people going through your bags right now with a fucking microscope and a blowtorch, so if you have anything you want to tell us, now is the absolute goddamn time of your life, because you will not get another, so help us God. Who is your God, anyway? Is that why we’re here right now? Motherfucker, start talking and don’t tell us no lies. You’re worth a lot less to us than you think. We have no problem sending you back used.

“FBI agents. Not just customs and border patrol, but actual feds. But they let me go, right? They had no reason to keep me. And hey, I wanted to help them; it looked to me like they were fighting for their lives, rotten as they were to me. I’d say I was in there for an hour, taking every bit of abuse they could level and probably looking as confused as anybody ever has. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life–‘Muslim’ has never been one of them.

“By the time I got to London, the world was a much different place.

“And now instead of being pissed, I’m scared. Right fucking spooked. I’m sitting in my hotel room watching BBC and they’re talking about Newark and oh my God it could have been me. This is what is going through my mind. And not just that, but if they tried to shake me down, then they sure as shit tried that on the real guys. Or did they? Did they just look at my passport and see I’d been in Karachi for a day and a half and decide this warranted a finger in my eye? Did they unleash holy hellfire on the ones who were going to do it … and then let them go?

“It also occurred to me that they knew this was happening. You don’t pull a doughy white guy out of a line because he’s been to Pakistan and put him in a box and act like you’re invading Poland as a matter of fucking course. They knew what was going on, and they tried to stop it, God love ’em. I don’t know if this makes me feel better or worse.

“At any rate, I’m sitting there calling everyone I know within a million miles of New York and D.C. and Philly and basically just anyone I can think of, maybe to check in on them but mostly to make sure I’m not alone. And then, because the day can’t get any fucking weirder, my brother-in-law is standing in front of those burning buildings and the president in whispering in his ear.

“You know the scene I’m talking about? Ground Zero. I’m in London watching the news, and my brother-in-law, who’s a congressman in the region, is standing there with smoking rubble behind him, and the president is next to him. That blows me away enough. And then he leans over and whispers in his ear, and my jaw detaches completely from my body. This whole day is washing over me–they thought I was a terrorist–it was the next flight out of Newark–my brother-in-law is right there, and sweet merciful shit, the president is saying something to him.

“I wait a few days before calling. The honest truth is that, today, I don’t even remember why I was in London. One-hundred percent dazed. I think I lost fifteen pounds. I went a month without masturbating, if you can believe that. If you’re a traveling journalist, you’re beating off maybe three times a day. It wasn’t ascetic enlightenment or anything like that, either–I think I seriously just forgot how, or at least forgot that it was an option.

“I finally get him on the phone, and before he can finish saying ‘Hello’ I’m jawing at him. ‘What did he say to you?’ I’m yelling. Pacing and smoking four cigarettes at once. ‘What do you mean? Who?’ ‘In front of the towers. You were standing there–I saw you on the BBC. He whispered in your ear. What did he say to you?’ ‘I’m not sure I should tell.’ ‘Oh, the fuck you shouldn’t. This isn’t going in any article. I just need to sleep again. For my sake and that alone. Please.’

“‘Fine. You want to know, I’ll tell you.’ ‘You’re standing at Ground Zero.’ ‘We weren’t calling it that yet.’ ‘Uh huh. And he walks over to you and pats you on the back and?’ ‘Are you ready for this? This is the honest-to-goodness truth.’ ‘Listen, asshole.’ ‘Okay, okay.

“‘He says, “Wow, you ever seen anything like this before?”’

“And I’m floored. Beside myself. I’m gaunt and starving and my cheeks are sunken in and my eyes are just dark circles around dark circles around dark circles and I have come leaking out my ears and this, this is what I get?

“‘That’s it,’ he tells me. ‘Texas drawl and everything. Sounded like a goddamn kid. I think he was in real shock.’ And now I’m throwing a fit. Somehow my desk tips over and water is everywhere and I’m shaking the phone in my one hand and whipping bananas and apples at the walls with the other. On the other end he’s laughing. ‘It was an emotional day, man. Isn’t he allowed a human moment or two?’

“‘Maybe I don’t want my president to be human.’ Now I’m laughing. And screaming, still. He tells me he has to go, to not over-think it, get some rest. I resent this, but accept that I’m no longer capable of rational thought. I chew a handful of melatonin and empty the minibar and do something resembling sleeping. The next day, I tried to convince myself that he was right–that everybody is owed a moment worthy of empathy, especially on a day during which vulnerability was, to a person, the deal in full. You ever tried to do that? To force down a steaming shit sandwich, and do it with a smile?

“What I really felt were the divisions revealing themselves in me. What I really wanted was to murder every frame of empathy. I wanted my hate to be normalized. And it was. That sort of thing became permissible. Everything did. I can’t tell, even now–I’m still not sure what that did to me.

“‘You ever seen anything like this before?’

“Fuck, no. Now I just wake up hoping I never do again.”

Posted in all, conversations that happened | 1 Comment

Today I was an evil one.

By Jordan Ginsberg | Published: July 19, 2007

If you want to stare, then you do what you like.

Motherfucker.

Burn a hole through me. Give me that look that lets me know you remember. The face. What I did to you. What I did to your mom. It was good while it lasted, wasn’t it? Remember when I took you to a ball game and jacked up some fucking wop in the parking lot? Remember the good times. You think it lasts forever.

We met at the bars. Or was it the personals? The artist moved out, and the guy from the Eastern bloc with the limp didn’t have much staying power. I came in and charmed the shit out of her. Charmed you too, big guy. Remember?

Here’s what I remember: The asshole look on your face every time something didn’t go the way you wanted. You’re still mad about the camera? You got everything back!

Your wallet was gone and you came to me. What would a grown man do with a kid’s wallet? Think these things through. You’re not so smart after all. And when Curtis pulled out the knife? It was a butter knife. Sure, your mom got mad and I smacked the shit out of him, but he’d taken worse. He’ll still take worse than that. He’ll forget about more beatings than you’ll ever take while you slip and slide through life by the hairs of your cunt.

Make that face. The one when I called Chuck a nigger right in front of you, and you looked like you might shit your pants. You thought I said it because I hated black people? I said it because he was acting like a fucking nigger!

She told me the basement was cursed. Believe that? Ghosts and goblins. And you thought I was dumb. A grown woman who believes in spooks. She thought if we took it, if we had the house to ourselves, we’d all get to start over. You ever think I was just trying to help her be right for once?

I never got through to you, but what good are regrets? I was growing dope in my cellar before you ever realized you had a life to be ruined. There’s a lot more to life than impressing faggots. Your brother still around? We got along. He GOT IT. He never even held it against me when the dog ate his face. Does he still have his scars?

Remember when I told you my granddad was a brownshirt? Your mom told you he was one of the good ones, like he had final edit on Schindler’s list or something. No way. He killed Jews. She hated me for that one–for giving that up to you. I was the first one to ever call you a hebe, wasn’t I? We had something in common. Me and grandpa, I mean.

Oh. You’re still bitter that I waited until a week before your bar mitzvah. It’s called a test, you fuck. Show me the grade on that one. There was only one question.

What does God look like?

Of course I went in through the window. I had a key, I could have walked in the front door, but I didn’t. I had the proper respect for the situation. I appreciated what I was doing. Three years in the making. One trip, one bag, grab what you can. A broken window. In through the basement. Sometimes, your ghosts are demons.

Right for once in her goddamn life.

But like I said, you got it all back. Most of it. What you heard is that my pack got raided at the YMCA, but you never believed that. She got the camera back, though. I’m not stupid. I know what important means.

We had our idyll, and I showed you the berserk. You got angry and never stopped smiling. Don’t act like you cherish pastoral horseshit. You were looking for your own way out.

So tell me. Are you staring or just looking right through me?

(I’m out of town for the weekend. See you all Monday.)
Posted in all, childhood, parents | Leave a comment

Ruffles and monkeys.

By Jordan Ginsberg | Published: July 17, 2007

“I don’t even know where to begin.”

“The beginning.”

“They gave me an assistant I didn’t want. Whether I even needed him was up for debate.”

“And he’s an idiot.”

“I’m not comfortable with that. Writing him off as an idiot doesn’t feel right.”

“A savant, then?”

“Oh, no. No, no. Drug use and a massive failure by the education system. He’s not bright, I’m just not sure it’s more than fifty-percent his fault.”

“An unwise fool. Tragic.”

“One day he turns to me and says, ‘My roommate and I are getting a maid. Guess who it’s going to be?’ Real suspenseful-like.”

“I can’t wait.”

“His eyes go wide: ‘A monkey!’ And I think, Well, of course. It turns out the roommate is a grip on commercial sets, and one of the shoots had a pair of monkeys.”

“He thought he would bring one home. Who would notice? They’ve got an extra.”

“And then train it to pick up after them. I think it says a lot that he believed their standard of living would increase by introducing a fucking monkey into the equation.”

“‘Step two: Replace toilet tissue with fly paper.’”

“He basically sounds like he was raised in an east coast fishing village, picked up the affectations, and was then whisked away to an Appalachian shack for his teenage years. And then hitched a ride on a turnip truck and was dropped off outside my office.”

“So they didn’t get the monkey, then?”

“One day I caught him laughing at something on his computer screen. I wheel over and he’s looking at bags of potato chips on eBay.”

“That doesn’t even make sense. And he is?”

“Twenty-four. A grown man. Of sorts.”

“Ruffles and monkeys.”

“But the malapropisms–I’m telling you, if you ever needed evidence of the majesty of a merciful God.”

“He ever have a friend commit ‘suitcase’?”

“Well, he was in a car accident–rear-ended on the highway–a few weeks ago. I ask him, Did the bastard drive away? ‘Of course not,’ he tells me, ‘but even if he did, it wouldn’t have mattered. As soon as he hit me, I looked in the rearview and mesmerized his license plate number.’”

“Incredible. And for his next trick?”

“He was looking for another job and had to fill out some forms and questionnaires on-line. He’s doing the personality test, but it’s written in English elegant enough that it makes no sense to him. I end up writing it for him.”

“He cheated on a personality test?”

“I did my best to make him seem like a decent person. Then came the aptitude portion, which, again, was written in no language with which he was familiar. I ace it for him.”

“And this presented no problem of ethics?”

“Of course it did! But I weighed my options. As far as I could reason, it was worth however many sleepless nights if it removed him entirely from my life.”

“But he didn’t get the job.”

“Well, there was still a face-to-face interview. After I helped him out, he went around the office the rest of the day telling people about the altitude test he’d just written. I don’t think he has a second gear.”

“How many years do you figure he has left? I see him as a Patient Zero type.”

“There was a close call a while back. We upgraded lights in the studio last year, so rather than hot lamps, we put in a flash strobe system. Keeps the heat down, evens the light out. The drawback, if there must be one, is the strobe; big seizure-inducing flashes all day. I don’t really notice since I’m behind the camera, but everybody else gets all dramatic about it and acts like they’re in the middle of a fucking supernova. But towards the end of the first day, there’s a lull in my shooting, and he turns to me looking exasperated and says, ‘Man, all this flashing light is going to give me leprosy.’”

“Impossible. It’s an act. Someone is doing this for your benefit.”

“I let it slide, though. Maintain decorum, you know? But a few weeks later, I’ve got a model in, and some other people from the warehouse are hanging out, and he says it again.”

“And everybody yelled, ‘Surprise!’”

“It just hung in the air for a second, and everybody exchanged glances to make sure they’d heard correctly.”

“‘All this flashing light is going to give me leprosy.’”

“Exactly. The room erupts, and he has no idea. He’s laughing along, just for the hell of it. The model, perfectly deadpan, says, ‘Yeah, it’s so bright I think my skin is going to fall off.’ More laughs. Finally, somebody tells him, ‘I think you mean epilepsy.’”

“But he doesn’t care.”

“Not a bit. Couldn’t matter less to him. He just laughs and shrugs his shoulders and goes back to work.”

“I’m in awe. Is he at least good at his job?”

“Technically. It’s not exactly brain surgery. It took him a week of classes to get the basics down, so I figure a top-tier chimpanzee would take three, four at the most.”

“If only the monkey plot had come to fruition. The thing could have assumed his entire identity.”

“And without the accent. God. I’m now officially depressed.”

Posted in all, conversations that happened | Leave a comment

Feeling Arizona.

By Jordan Ginsberg | Published: July 16, 2007

My connection to Arizona is tenuous at best.

When I was a kid, my dad would go to Phoenix on business every few months and come back with a brand new wardrobe of Suns and Sun Devil gear for me. At the same time, I dreamed of going to ASU some day, for the simple reason that I knew it existed and it made me seem worldly to other dumb-ass 11-year-olds. See? Dubious.

This had nothing to do with me choosing to root for The Buzzsaw That Is The Arizona Cardinals.

I’m from Toronto and, as such, I grew up without an NFL team. It’s not uncommon for people from the city and surrounding areas to adopt the Bills, but watching Buffalo play while I was growing up accomplished little more than killing any desire to watch football ever again. My dad, a fan of Toronto sports to the bitter end, basically just enjoys the game, but tends to support the Cowboys, Colts, cancer, genocide and bologna sandwiches. What the fuck, Merv.

I, too, watched the NFL for many years without a team to call my own, though with enough affinity to keep track of various subplots and storylines as well as, you know, a real love of the sport. Last season, however, I decided that watching without a vested interest–gambling notwithstanding–detracted from the experience somewhat, and I needed to choose a team. I came up with a set of criteria that served to create a rigorous process of elimination:

No teams from Texas. Sorry, just couldn’t do it. I’ve spent some time in Dallas and generally enjoyed myself there, but just on principle … no dice.

No teams from Florida. Same thing. I’ve never actually been to Florida, though, and maybe barring a visit to Miami (l’chaim!), I’m perfectly content to keep it that way.

No teams too painfully midwestern/rural. My girlfriend used to live in Batesville, Indiana, and claims–aside from the benefit of supposedly cheap gas–that the place did little more than sap her will to live on a daily basis and bestow upon her the booze-tooth that I know and love today. Regardless, this stipulation eliminated a host of cities, including Indianapolis, Kansas City, Cleveland and Cincinnati. I’ll hold my own KKK rallies, thank you very much.

Tennessee is out. This one was up for serious debate: An underachiever with a stud quarterback coming in seemed like a half-decent team to back. However, I had to nix this choice, and for admittedly nebulous reasoning. See, my uncle Barry … he’s a crazy person. He’s got a good five years on my dad, putting him a little over sixty, and the guy wears this disgusting piece of fur on his head that is fooling nobody, calls my brothers to ask them “what kind of pussy” they’re getting, occasionally asks if I want to play rhythm guitar for his band, and, to relate this back to the issue at hand, fucking thinks he’s Elvis. He dresses like him. He goes to conventions and stocks up on every piece of insane memorabilia possible. He’s gaining weight and, God-willing, is on the precipice of picking up a soul-crushing barbiturate habit. The point is, the less I have in common with this pile of crazy, the better–including an affinity for anything from Tennessee.

(Jack Daniels comes from Portland, right? Right.)

No recent Super Bowl contenders. So long to Seattle, Pittsburgh and Carolina. I wasn’t going to be that guy.

No traditional bandwagon teams. Patriots? Bears? Broncos? Redskins? Packers? Giants? You’re all cut. I wasn’t about to be that guy, either.

No teams that will serve only to break me and turn me into a pathetic shell of a man. Look, Buffalo, I’m sure you’re very sweet, but it’s just not going to work. Maybe if somebody gives me some tickets, I’ll come visit some time. You Jets fellas, though … just stop calling. Please. I got the restraining order against Detroit, and I’m not above a second one.

Personal choice. I really stuck my neck out and assumed everybody and their mother was going to be cheering on the Saints last season. Just a hunch I had. As for Minnesota, they were a strong contender, but I had a feeling that they really peaked with the Sex Boat. Lastly, I’m nowhere near gully enough to pass as an Eagles fan. Sad but true.

Of the remaining teams, I narrowed my options to San Francisco, Oakland and Arizona. On the brink of picking Oakland, my girlfriend reminded me that she and her family were from the Bay Area, and are, to a person, hardcore 49ers fans. Since I was, at the time, the Canadian asshole that none of them had met, I could have either (1) gone with San Francisco and been immediately identified as a transparent kiss-ass and/or homosexual, (2) chosen Oakland and been instantly reviled, or (3) declined a Bay Area team and taken my chances with Arizona.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit by giving total credit for my newfound allegiance to the Cardinals to the rooting interests of these people. They were a perpetual loser, true, but there was some upside with Leinart getting drafted, the Edgerrin James signing, and, uh … Leinart getting drafted. At any rate, the season started, and that was that: The Buzzsaw was my team.

Things got off to a tepid and disappointing start. This was unsurprising. And then it happened: Monday Night Football. Cardinals versus Bears. A first half that infused my penis with the glory of God, diamond shavings and delicious Oregon whiskey. All apprehension was tossed aside while I watched Arizona decimate what had been, to that point, a vastly superior Chicago team. Up 20-0. Holy crap, yes.

Then the second half started and that whole heartbreaking collapse thing happened. You know, with the inability to score or make use of Rextasy’s abysmal play or … Christ. It still hurts. In a lot of ways, that was the first NFL game that really meant anything to me, and the quickness with which it regressed from bliss to prison rape still haunts me.

But then Denny Green came out and crowned their asses, the clouds parted, Jesus winked, and it all made sense. A better trial by fire, you couldn’t have scripted: glorious peaks, crushing defeats, and a perfect, hilarious rant that defines an entire season.

Who the hell else could I cheer for?

Posted in all, childhood, sports | 4 Comments

Trimmed for comfort.

By Jordan Ginsberg | Published: July 15, 2007

“That sounds made up.”

“I swear to God.”

“I can’t even imagine. She must have been furious. It just didn’t occur to them?”

“It’s not like they’ve historically been the most considerate people.”

“That’s hardly an excuse.”

“Maybe they thought they were being considerate, that after all this time, it would just be a hassle to deal with.”

“Are you defending them?”

“Obviously not.”

“I mean, how would you feel if your parents told you, out of the blue, that you weren’t actually a Jew?”

“It wasn’t just out of the blue–she’s a grown woman. She was enrolling her kids in Hebrew school, and when the rabbis asked to see credentials–”

“At least you could just whip it out. ‘Bam. There it is, friend. That wasn’t trimmed for comfort.’”

“–because she’s adopted, right? Her siblings were too, but they were born Jewish. She’s goyische by birth, and they just never bother to take care of it. She grows up Jewish, but officially, in the eyes of God, the contract hasn’t been signed.”

“I’m sure He’d be devastated.”

“I guess it would bother me. But she goes to see them, her parents, and that’s when they tell her.”

“‘We forgot. We had the whole day planned. Buy some fish, visit Sheila in the hospital, go to the mikveh and convert our daughter to the religion of her entire family. It was an honest mistake.’”

“It’s different for me, because the association with the religion isn’t there. I guess it’d be disheartening to realize I’d just been making anti-Semitic jokes for years and years.”

“All the best ones come out of Israel, anyway.”

“But she really, really cares about it, and her kids also–and they all had to convert too, after that. And her husband’s family, Christ. They’ve got a few people creeping up on a hundred on that side. I think one of them banged out the nail that went through the feet.”

“So you wouldn’t feel lied to?”

“I probably would, but I don’t think it’d create an existential crisis. I can’t see myself losing much sleep over it. I doubt it’d be any worse than any other minor revelation.”

“‘Those pants you love? We switched the tags. We bought them at a garage sale.’”

“Maybe a bit worse than that.”

“‘We’ve been making your lattes with whole milk the entire time.’”

“Now you’re getting it. That’s acceptably traumatic.”

“I think it just exposes the lie, doesn’t it? She’s upset that she’s not Jewish, even though, for all intents and purposes, she’s led a more devoutly Jewish life than anyone else in the family. And why is she upset? Because now the way in which she’s devoted her time and energy to this cause, it’s going to be diminished in the public eye because, God forbid, not only was she a Gentile, but her kids, too. Her parents will probably get the worst of it, but there’ll always be that nagging feeling that she was born different, and she’ll resent herself for that more than anybody. And if her kids are anything like she is, they’ll resent her too, though only time will tell how that will manifest. And all for what? The difference between calling yourself something and a ceremony, a dip in the pond to signify to God that you’re for serious–except it’s not for God at all. It’s all about appearances, and hers has been tarnished, and it’s something that no amount of holy baths will ever be able to mend.”

Posted in all, conversations that could have happened, flimsy moral lessons, jewiness | 2 Comments

Does this make you uncomfortable?

By Jordan Ginsberg | Published: July 12, 2007

(2002. Cafe. Night. Empty but for the kid behind the counter and a man with an accent with Mediterranean ties.)

“Large. Strong. And this cake.”

“The cranberry? That’ll be three eighty.”

“Keep it. What’s your name?”

“Jordan.”

“This is a dangerous neighborhood, Jordan.”

“Really? It’s not so bad.”

“It’s not the safest. Do you carry a gun?”

“Oh, no. No. Definitely not.”

“Maybe you should. I do.” He reaches into the breast of his jacket and pulls back with a silver handgun. He turns it on its side and bounces it in his hand, the barrel trained chest-high and ass-deep. “Does this bother you? Does this make you uncomfortable?”

“Should it?”

He smirks and holsters the weapon.

“No. Hey, relax, you know? These things happen. Look, where I’m from, this happens.”

“Where’s that?”

“Israel. Served thirty-five years. Here, I’ve been two months. That’s what you do — you kill for a long time, and then you come here. You learn what makes a man, what they’re capable of. It’s good stuff. Would you serve the military?”

“What, in Israel?”

“You’re a Jew? Wonderful. Sure, whatever. Israel, this place, wherever you like.”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

“I made it thirty-five years. Not everybody dies.”

“It’s not even that. Well, it is.”

“I killed men in front of their families. I killed families. You get used to it.”

“I don’t think –”

“You walk down the street and you see piles of dead bodies, and this is something normal, you adjust to it. I started to like it after a while. Dead bodies can’t hurt you.”

“I guess not.”

“And what do they call them, suicidal? The bombers, the fucks on the buses, suicide bombers? The secret is that we’re all like that, every one of us. You have to be at least a little crazy, a little suicidal to fight in that war. That’s what they tell us, the commanders, and that’s what I told my soldiers. It’s not advertised, but we’re ready to be martyrs just like them. When we make it through, we act like we’re happy to be alive, just like they wail and cry when the bullshit they strap to themselves doesn’t go off. You put yourself in the middle of that, and you give up any hope — any desire to get out — and you make the right face if things go differently.”

“You said thirty-five years?”

“It’s a long time. I did terrible things. I did many things. My cousin, he’s a friend, he just moved here too, last year. He was in the army as long as I was, but he was in the Elite Corps. They train the best killers in the world. Kill with their hands. My cousin. He made a lot of money, so he buys himself a nice car when he gets here, some Porsche, a German. And he goes to Jane and Finch.”

“What?”

“You know it, Jane and Finch? Of course you do. Worst in the city, that corner. He hears about it. He thinks everybody in this city is for shit, and he buys the Porsche and, since he lives just east, the guy at the dealership says to be careful. So my cousin, he waits till night, and he goes driving. A brand new Porsche! He takes it around the area, he flashes his lights, honks his horn. Stops at a red light. He tells me, these four niggers come toward him, and he tells me, ‘I wasn’t so happy in months.’ He turns the car off just as they get there, start kicking his tires, and he opens his door.”

“Christ.”

“They didn’t know, right? How could they know? He gets out of the car and hits one in the throat, bam! Just like that. He drops. He sees one go for something in his belt, pulls the knife away, just throws it across the street like it’s nothing. It’s nothing to him. He beats these niggers within inches of their fucked up bullshit lives. Leaves them in the street like dogs. He’s done this before.”

“He was looking for it though, right?”

“He found it, too! We go out sometimes. It’s good to have familiar faces. So this is what I do. What do you do? High school? What do you want to do?”

“Journalism, I think.”

“That’s shit. Journalism? What, you want to write for the newspaper? Shit. Do something important. Be a doctor. Help people. Don’t say your columns help people. You said you’re Jewish?”

“Yeah.”

“So be a doctor, a surgeon. Yeah, we need a writer, that’s what we need. You barely said anything to me in here, and you want to be a reporter. I’m standing here talking to myself.”

“I’m not sure what to say always.”

“Oh ho, nah. This is just chickenshit talk. You just don’t think you can have a proper conversation when someone has a gun. That’s shit. So, what, a lot of Jews in the area?”

“Yeah, all the way up Bathurst, really. Hey, you know what mailmen here call Bathurst Street?”

“What’s that?”

“‘The Gaza Strip.’”

“That’s funny.”

Beat.

“It’s getting late. I’ll get going.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“But you know what I’m going to do now?” He reaches into the same breast of his coat that held the pistol.

“I –”

He pulls out a set of car keys.

“I’m going to go play tennis for three hours.”

“Oh, where?”

“Over by the pool, next to the high school. I’ll see you around.”

Posted in all, conversations that happened, jewiness | Leave a comment

A quick one (about a slow one).

By Jordan Ginsberg | Published: May 22, 2007

Basically, regrettable moments can be divided up into three distinct categories.

There are those that are accidental, slips of the tongue. The first time I met my good friend Matt, it was the first day of our last year of high school. We’d both just transferred, and I took his being tattooed as an excuse to talk to him. We got to discussing comedians, and I mentioned Bill Hicks, rattling off an annoying amount of his routines in a poor Texan accent. Matt asked if he’d done anything lately, leading to this exchange:

- Nah, he died from pancreatic cancer a bunch of years ago.
- Ouch. That’s a rough way to go.
- So I hear! It took him in just a couple months or so. There’s supposedly a zero per cent survival rate or something insane like that.
- Yeah, I know. My dad died from it when I was 12.

Drowning myself in the lake next to the school seemed like a pretty good idea, but we managed to get past it. I guess it could have been worse, but luckily I forgot my Kancer is Kooky! flashcards at home that day.

Then there are those times when you’re doing something you know you’re going to regret, but you do it anyway. In this regard, spite; jealousy; anger; drunkenness; everybody-else-was-doing-it; and being a spineless dipshit are all acceptable reasons. The last one was always my personal favorite, hence the existence of what I can only assume are photo albums full of pictures of me wearing poorly done make-up (as if it would matter if it had been nicely done), all manner of ridiculous clothing (miniskirts? Check! Skin-tight, size-too-small dance unitards? Check!), and an assortment of grimaces that are worth thousands of tear-soaked words.

Sometimes, though, you’re just a passenger when the universe decides it’s time to inflict some hilarious emotional scars. Case in point: I worked at a day camp in the west end of Toronto the summer I turned 15. Though it wasn’t advertised as such, the camp happened to host a disproportionate number of young children with developmental disabilities across all age groups; I had the good fortune of being saddled with the four-to-six-year-olds, a solid five per cent of whom had some sort of condition. Luckily (I guess), kids in that age range are about as likely to fall down/wet themselves/wet each other/vomit regardless of mental development.

Among the special needs kids was a five-year-old boy named Julian, who was afflicted with what was explained to me as some sort of hyper-autism, and what I’ve since deduced to be microcephaly or something similar. He didn’t really speak, was extremely hyperactive, and was purchased by P. T. Barnum in the late 1800s. At the time, I had a number of facial piercings, which, shockingly, caught the attention of many of the kids — Julian among them.

One-on-one time with the special needs kids was delegated mostly at random, and one afternoon I ended up baby-sitting Julian in one corner of the room while the rest of the kids and counsellors occupied themselves on the other side. I tried in vain to get him to do a puzzle, but all he seemed interested in was pawing at my face. I was flattered, don’t get me wrong, but God knows where those hands had been. (Remembering my girlfriend at the time, I guess I was less than consistent in gauging my response to the relative filthiness of those I let touch me.) Then he started sticking out his tongue at me. OK, sure. He sees all my other piercings, and wants to see if I have anything in my mouth. Fair enough. So I stuck my tongue out.

I don’t really know what happened next. It was like a little person had been shot out of a cannon, directly at my face and midsection. Julian and I were in close quarters, and considering the speed with which he sprung into action, I don’t think there was anything I could have done to prevent it. I mean, if anything happened. And, really, unequivocally, I can’t say that anything did.

That said, I’m pretty sure Julian shot his hands over my eyes and shoved his tongue in my mouth.

Sometimes, you just find yourself in a regrettable situation, by no real fault of your own.

So I threw him off me. Gagged a little bit. He sat there, glazed over for a second, and then went on with whatever other dirty, sinful business he had planned.

Meanwhile, I found myself in the unenviable position of hoping that none of the other counsellors, campers, or my supervisors had just seen me making out with some little retarded boy.

And the worst part of it all? He was a fucking lousy kisser.

Posted in body modification, deep-seated emotional trauma, unpleasantness | 3 Comments

I got bugs.

By Jordan Ginsberg | Published: March 6, 2007

I’m not exactly proud of this, but bugs freak me out.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve dealt with them in some capacity for most of my life. Growing up, I lived in a house that was perennially occupied by spiders, ants, and cursed millipedes. (Or were they centipedes? Whatever.) We even had a barrel in the garage that ostensibly served no purpose, and when I was four or five, I made the mistake of loosening the lid out of curiosity and thought nothing of it; hours later, an entire outside wall of the house was covered in earwigs. Sweet holy fuck, I still have no explanation for that.

When I was 18, my mom and Brian, my step-dad, moved to a suburb of Toronto called Newmarket. My brothers and I stayed in the city with my dad, but I visited often enough. In the old house on Roberta Drive, Brian had kept a few snakes and lizards as pets (among other animals), but once he had more space to work with, the operation expanded exponentially. The majority of the new place’s basement became devoted to housing all manner of reptiles, which I could handle. The lizards ate crickets though, and as is common, they managed to escape and, as a result, were all over the house. These things happen, I suppose.

My history with them aside, I still don’t like bugs. Living in Mexico, having to deal with giant fucking cockroaches just about ruined my life. I couldn’t bring myself to get close enough to actually kill them, and so I often found myself snapping a belt or a wet towel at them on the wall, hoping they’d get the message and flee my room in terror. I’m pretty sure I didn’t kill a single roach that year, but hey, at least my roommates thought I was a total pussy.

I don’t like bugs for the same reason I don’t like mushrooms or wearing shoes without socks: The general feeling of dirtiness that’s produced. I really feel like we as a species have evolved past the point where we should have to deal with vermin in our day-to-day lives. At the risk of sounding like a complete drama queen, if I were living in a place that was seriously infested by insects, I would feel like an absolute failure as a human being.

Which was precisely my state of mind when I found maggots in my room when I was 16.

We were still living in the Roberta house, and I had what I thought was a pretty typical 16-year-old’s room. Messy, sure, but not exactly brimming with disease. Most of my time in there was spent in the dark, sitting in front of my computer and developing a vitamin deficiency. In the darkness one evening though, I noticed something moving across my desk near a slice of pizza that may or may not have been sitting on a plate there for a few days. I switched on the light, and there it was.

This disgusting, slimy, wormy little shit, inching across my desk.

My first thought? I’m a terrible person. How could I have let this happen? Where could it have possibly come from? It looked pretty big; how long had it been there? Had it been on me while I’d been asleep? Had it been in me while I’d been asleep? What the hell was wrong with me?

Once I finished dry-heaving, a second, more urgent thought came to mind: Maggots don’t generally show up one at a time. Fuck fuck fuck.

I scanned my room, and yes, there were more. Under clothes on my floor. On my bookshelf. In my dresser. Behind my bed. How? Why? Guhhh.

Suicide seemed like a pretty good option. Not terribly confident in my knot-tying capabilities though, I did the next best thing: Tucked my tail between my legs and called for Brian to help. After a hearty gut laugh at my expense, he agreed.

“On one condition,” he said. “You clean your room, and I’ll get rid of the critters.”

It was a deal. I tore that place apart, and he periodically poked his head in when my girlish shrieks became more frequent. Over the course of two days, I scoured every inch of that room, coming upon an absolutely embarrassing, demoralizing number of these vile creatures. It was official: I lost at life.

I tried to reconcile my keen sense of humor with being a horny teenager. As mortifying as this had been, I would have to tell people. That said, it did seem like the sort of thing that might stop girls from ever, ever wanting to have sex with me. A predicament, to be sure.

As it turned out, most other people didn’t find my maggot saga quite as noteworthy as I did. In fact, the majority of people to whom I told the story ended up looking at me like I was crawling with the little bastards, close to vomiting and slowly moving away from me. Philistines.

And really, as disastrous as the whole event had been, I did feel like I’d learned something. Granted, that “something” was just how thin the line was between being a civilized person and being some filthy ditchpig, but regardless. A lesson is a lesson.

Then, six months later, it happened again.

I was apoplectic. This was now the worst thing I’d ever done in my life. Again? Fucking AGAIN? My room hadn’t even been that dirty! Were they in the carpets? The walls? Was I secreting them in my sleep?

So I destroyed my room again. After a full-scale bedroom enema and three nights of sleeping on the couch, I felt like I had expunged them. I was apprehensive, but Christ, my little room was not getting any cleaner than it was at that moment. You could see yourself in the drywall. It was a palace. It was majestic.

And sure enough, they never came back.

* * *

A few years later, I had just finished high school, and my friend Shannon and I were about to move into an apartment together. Prior to the move, she came up to Newmarket for dinner with Brian and my mom. My mom made mention of making sure that I kept up with my end of the chores, and Shannon laughed, saying that I’d better, because the hell if she was going to put up with maggots in the house.

Brian and my mom looked at teach other, and were suddenly doubled over in laughter. Oh really.

“What’s so funny?” I asked. They shot each other a quick succession of you-tell-him-no-you-tell-him glances, trying to stifle their giggles.

“No, seriously. What is so funny?” And that’s when Brian laid it on me.

“Those weren’t maggots. Those were mealworms that I fed to the lizards. We put those there so you would clean your room.”

It was approximately that moment when my entire world came crashing down around me.

“NO.”

“Sorry sweetie,” my mom said, choking on her food from laughing so hard. Shannon had joined in on the fun.

“You don’t understand! I thought I was a disgusting pig for years of my life! I thought I was actually capable of creating an environment hospitable to vermin! And it was you! You! Both of you! Just to get me to clean my room! Could you have just grounded me like normal people! Shit! Fuck!”

“Well, yeah,” Brian said. “It worked though, didn’t it?”

And that is how I got punked by my parents.

Posted in all, childhood, deep-seated emotional trauma, guhhhhhhh, i'm a pussy, parents, unpleasantness | 4 Comments

Of kikes and pig-men.

By Jordan Ginsberg | Published: February 16, 2007

So, this one time in Mexico, I thought I might get raped by this guy with whom I had to share a tiny, soiled mattress. And not just because he wore leather pants to bed. Let me explain.

In early 2005, I moved to La Paz, Mexico, for almost a year to write for BMEzine.com. This was a huge deal at the time; I’d never written professionally before, and prior to the move, I’d never been on a plane. When I got there, my bosses were on a trip in South Africa, but we’d discussed beforehand that if I was feeling up to it, I should go to Mexico City the following weekend to cover an event there called “BodyFest.” Hey, why not. I like free trips.

My first mistake was neglecting to lock down a surefire place to stay in Mexico City. (In hindsight, a hotel would have done just fine.) I had been put in touch with a local named Beto, and from a brief phone conversation I seemed to gather that I could either stay with him or, worst case, he would find me a friendly couch/floor/donkey to sleep on.

I arrived in the city with little fanfare, attempted to not get robbed by a gang of toddlers in the airport’s atrium, and took the most terrifying cab ride of my life to the club where BodyFest was taking place. The event itself was essentially a two day festival of body rituals, as well as a venue for a body modification practitioner named Lukas Zpira to do some procedures. Zpira being from France, I was the only person who spoke English as a first language in at least ten city blocks.

The day wore on, evening approached, and all I’d eaten were a few chalky orange cookies from the plane. La Paz was clean enough, but the prospect of putting anything from this city in my mouth was mortifying. But, sensing the onset of delirium, I drank bottle after bottle of funny tasting water, smoked about nine million cigarettes, and made the questionable decision to pound dirt-cheap beer that was being served in oversized novelty cups. Also, I was afraid to use the bathroom. My day was going from “not so bad” to “comically pathetic” at a record pace. But I digress.

The BodyFest performances were pretty spectacular. In my coverage of the event, I wrote about one in particular:

[…] two men were suspended vertically from their chests in the center of the stage. As well, a semi-circle had formed around another member of the group who had stationed himself on the floor of the club rather than on the stage. Wearing various pieces of armor and a grotesque hog of hell mask, he unleashed guttural death-metal throes that would not have been out of place in front of a crowd of 30,000 screaming Norwegians, all the while stomping around the perimeter of his area and clanging his sword and shield together.

In my notes, I referred to this character as “the Pig-Man,” for obvious reasons. He was a large Mexican fellow who had dressed himself as a sort of gothic Flintstone – tattered rags and whatnot – and wore this bizarre demonic warthog half-mask. As well, he was fairly adept with the fire-slinging and the sword-handling, and his singing voice led me to believe that he may or may not have spent a brief period burning down churches in Scandinavia.

The performances ended just before midnight, and by this point I was a carcass. In desperate need of sleep, I tracked Beto down, only to be told that there was not, in fact, any room where he was staying. However, he told me, he’d find me somewhere to stay for the night. Anxiety was very much setting in as he made the rounds, asking various guests and performers if they could help me out, but he emerged victorious and introduced me to my ward for the evening, George White.

I did a double-take – why did this guy look so familiar? Then I noticed his large frame. His large, Mexican frame.

Oh fuck. The Pig-Man.

Okay, I told myself, this wasn’t a big deal – without his swinish accoutrements, he seemed fairly pleasant. He spoke little English though, and I spoke even less Spanish. As a result, we ended up having the same conversation about four times over a 20 minute span – mostly him trying to teach me rudimentary Spanish phrases for asking for food and alcohol. Shockingly, my retention capabilities were at an all-time low. I needed to get out of there, and George was feeding me beer out of a big novelty cup.

See, George was aggressively friendly. Not in the way that 17-year-old boys get drunk off a mickey of peach schnapps and wrestle with each other in those fantastic displays of latent homosexuality, but more in that, due to the language barrier, he struggled with an appropriate way to convey how non-threatening he was. He would get right in my face while talking to me, put his hand on my shoulder, rub my leg, and occasionally, give me a long, hard kiss on the mouth.

(Okay, maybe not that last thing.)

But he did it all with a smile on his face! Intimidating as he was, on some level, I knew that he didn’t wish me any particular harm. I was not confident that he would not inflict said harm on me, mind you, but I was fairly sure that it would not be intentional. At the very least, it wouldn’t be culturally unacceptable.

He eventually introduced me to his merry band of travelers – fellow performers and an alleged girlfriend – and we were on our way. Walking out to the parking lot, I noticed that George had decided to take his enormous beer along for the ride. Good for him. I started to nod off during the drive, and subsequently because absolutely terrified that I was reaching my breaking point as far as staying awake was concerned. If it came down to it, I was convinced that I could literally have been swallowed alive by Mexico City and never heard from again. I regained my composure, and after making a few stops to drop people off we arrived at George’s building, which was accessible only by navigating the narrowest, labyrinthine alleys on earth. Terrific.

George, his scrawny friend and I made it upstairs, and I was shocked to discover that it was actually an immaculate, huge apartment. Expecting some level of squalor, I couldn’t believe my fortune; there were literally about ten large, clean rooms. Early-on creepiness on George’s part aside, it seemed as if I’d lucked out in terms of accommodations.

The universe has a dark, sadistic sense of humor.

Knowing how tired I was, George and his friend showed me to the room I would be sleeping in. It was substantially smaller, but he rolled out a mattress for me, and that was really all that mattered at that point. He insisted that I take my shoes off - not because it was rude, but simply because he wanted me to get comfortable. He then insisted that I replace my jeans with a pair of worn-in sweatpants to wear to bed. Puzzled and mildly disturbed, I declined his generous offer as politely as possible. Having had more than enough for one day, I gave a wave goodnight, and went to shut the light off and pass out. The boys shot me an odd look.

“No,” said George, “we sleep here too.”

I’ll be honest – I laughed. There had been some innocuous gay humor in the car ride over, and while I didn’t agree with the sentiment, I also was not prepared to deliver an international morality lesson to a car full of drunken screaming Mexicans. So again, I laughed. He wasn’t serious. This was, at best, a twin-sized roll-out mattress. There were about seven other perfectly viable rooms in the apartment, many of which had beds or some sort of sleeping surface. He couldn’t have been serious.

He was serious.

Apparently, a look of abject terror crossed my face, because George worriedly began asking me if I was okay with the plan. Not wanting to know what my other options were, I said it was fine. Evidently, the three of us were to lie horizontally on the mattress, our heads and feet protruding from either end. Sure. I got in first and threw myself ass-first against the wall.

Paranoid? Maybe, but I wasn’t in a risk-taking mood. I replayed far-out scenarios of impending doom over and over in my head. In my mind, it seemed highly unlikely that the Canadian Embassy would want to bring too much attention to an international sex scandal involving a pig-man, his diminutive concubine and a dim-witted boy from Toronto.

George asked if I liked Radiohead, to which I replied with a dejected whimper and an involuntary piddling of urine. He popped a CD into his stereo, which was clearly not Radiohead, but instead some asshole with an acoustic guitar terrorizing the band’s songs. Perfect. George took off his shirt and boots, left on his leather pants, and hopped into bed between his buddy and me.

I got about 12 seconds of sleep that night. Apparently, it’s tough to get any shut-eye with the imminent threat of being stripped and sold for parts to a taco vendor hanging over your head. By morning, I was a complete zombie. George offered to take me out for coffee, but the idea of putting unfiltered local water into my body gave me the dry heaves. He insisted that I take a shower, but again, I declined. Before long, we were on a bus and off to the second day of BodyFest.

Of course, I was safe in the end. I stayed elsewhere the second night, and the following morning, I returned to La Paz (which seemed like a womb by the time I got back). These trials-by-fire certainly have their benefits, though. The next time I traveled to mainland Mexico, it was to Guadalajara, and I had the good sense to get myself a goddamn hotel room. Old habits die hard though, and if you don’t think I made the crank-addled hustler I picked up my last night there wear a pig-mask while we played “hide the chorizo,” then frankly, you don’t know me at all.

Posted in all, body modification, deep-seated emotional trauma, guhhhhhhh, mexico, sex, unpleasantness | 2 Comments

The worst thing to ever happen to my penis.

By Jordan Ginsberg | Published: February 8, 2007

[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.

Posted in all, body modification, greyhound stories, guhhhhhhh, uncategorized, unpleasantness | 1 Comment