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I never understand it when they say, "That isn't funny; it's sick!" If it's not funny, why am I laughing? It's like women who get weirded out because I laugh when I'm hurt or bleeding. What should I do? Cry? If it hurts bad enough to cry, why keep doing it? Maybe I am sick, but at least I'm smiling. I like people who understand this sort of thing. But they're hard to find.
Not that it's so hard to find my latest fellow sufferer. Her name is Frango--what's she gonna be but a barista? Wow, moms, huh? Could be worse: her sister's name is Nordy. She exhibited the usual early outbreaks of tattoos and piercings, but I might have given her the impression I thought they were a little passe. And not even all that committed. Tats can be removed, holes heal over. What's forever is scars. Forever and NOW.
I might have had a hand in starting the fad by predicting scarification would be the next big thing--minor window dressing in a novel I was serializing in a L.A. underzine of the "now-defunct" variety. Nobody will publish the conclusion of the novel (Hint, hint, if you're reading this, Asher). And too bad, because the story also mentions that piercing becomes totally old hat and the new edge is "Jack-Ins"--stainless electrodes and bolts that go through the skin to contact bones and nerve tissue ala Neuromancer and Frankenstein's monster. Wouldn't you love to see Seattle trendoids affecting that one? Remember, you didn't read it here first.
My eclipsing of her studs'n'tats with the artless references to scarification led, as I'd hoped, to a guided tour of my own scar collection, which was suddenly found to be just really cool and really, like, Now. At some point, I notice, she stopped gawking and started window shopping. Personally, I like the zipper in my groin from the congenital hernia because it feels racy when stroked. Location, location, location. The knife cut in the eye socket gets lots of raves, also where a slug bounced down my ribs. But what she dug was the burns. The tissue is so slick and pink, you know. Butch, yet feminine. So we were talking branding. Another very Now auto-mutilation. The very idea of brands hotted her up considerably. She wondered where she could get one and how much it would cost. Visualizing, you know, NAME brands.
I convinced her it would be infinitely "phatter" to have custom work hand done by a degenerate ex-con. Leading, as I'd strenuously hoped, to her guided tour of potential sites. I thought she should start fairly small and pointed out that hair doesn't grow on scar tissue so searing something into her pubic hair would be dramatic. But she took a week to decide and you could tell she was really stymied by not being able to try them on and take back the ones she didn't like.
I had a lot of ideas of the kind you get when you discover new artistic media. How about heating up some gears and tossing them on you at random? Bend intricate patterns out of wire? Just take an oxy-acetylene torch and go freehand? Hell, why not just sit on a hot stove burner, get a nice mystical spiral leading the viewing eye in to the central depths of being? No, she wanted something like "tribal" tattoos. Something conventional.
Finally the design firmed up as three crescents (suspiciously like Nike swoops) tracing ridges of the ribs under her right arm. She even made the branding iron herself, filing down a scrap piece of steel, a touch we professional mutilation providers term "Subject Participation".
We saw putting on her scars as three separate steps and agreed it'd be a good idea to use anesthetic for the first application. We used cocaine for the local, since it's easier to get than novacaine. Am I the only one that thinks that's weird? Not much to it: we used a load-binder to strap her to a housemate's massage table after I'd heated the iron up to around 1600 degrees with a gas torch. I told her Fahrenheit 1451, but not a glimmer. I grabbed it by the braised-on handle and branded that lil dogie. She got damned excited, but didn't feel a thing. Until the coke wore off.
There's my alltime worst sensation; anesthetic wearing off. The pain slipping in on you from everywhere like wolves daring in towards a dying fire, each new-found pain bud a promise of more and worse, prognosis nothing but bigger, badder, and redder spears of hurt. Conversely, my favorite high has gotten to be pain killers. No buzz can match that cool, serene breeze of comfortable numb, the ibuprofin or morphine or whatever unfolding like glossy white satin sheets, letting you breathe and unclench and slip into the sleek, quiet blessing of sleep. There've been times I actually wished I was injured so I could get relief out of simple pills. And times I counted out my remaining percodans like beads on a rosary.
But Frango seemed to take to the returning sensation. She kept studying her fried hide in a mirror and picking at the mounting pain, flirting with it, replacing hurt with fascination. She applied aloe with a touch and intensity that looked almost sexual. Doing the other brands without a local was entirely her call. That participation thing again. Except even at that point I suspected she was identifying it, zeroing in on her latest crush. An aerobic dance dropout going straight for the burn, no chaser.
I wanted to see more healing from the first swoopy scorch before doing the next one, but she was hot to go in a few days. We did it right in her bedroom where I could lash her down good and firm to her sturdy single bed. Just like old-time photography, I told her, if you move during the exposure you screw up the image. Besides, I believe that something as personal as a lifetime disfigurement shouldn't be entered into lightly, but with a modicum of ritual. So I used black mantled climbering rope and created an intricate and vaguely Japanese configuration of lashing. I suggested a gag, which she rejected as quickly as Gary Cooper refusing a blindfold from the firing squad.
The trussing wasn't just visually pleasing, though; it also left her emphatically sexually available. I figured that being sizzled cold turkey would be a easier to handle when freshly fucked, and the whole idea of associating the scarring with sex seemed pretty well understood from the get-go. Besides, I wanted a comparison, what sociologists call a baseline, to confirm my impressions of what she was up to. And I have to tell you, her behavior during sexual extremis, trying to writhe away from the stimulus contact areas, whimpering, "No, no!" and screaming, "Yes, yes!" were almost identical to her reaction to the branding itself. She later told me she'd never come so hard before, which checked out with where I had figured she was coming from.
You get around tattooing, especially up in the joint where you see the really great full body stuff people on the outs don't even know about, and you realize a lot of guys are in it mainly for the sensation. Guys who'd rather have pigment stabbed in with a guitar string than with a motorized needle. Eventually they run out of skin like a junkie runs out of veins, end up living out their lives in prison because it's the only place people accept that full-sleeve, three-teardrop kind of thing. I've known needle freaks who'll shoot up wine or even water when they're out of shit, just for the boot. And it's not only the rough trade that coasts along the line of the pleasure/pain syndrome. Or there's always the endorphin addiction theory. My point is she was hooked on a feeling. Five years from now she'll probably look like Freddy Kreuger, sitting around alleys snuffing cigars on her tongue.
After the triple rib job, she only did one more piece before I lost track of her. Going along with my thoughts on the pubic hair, we used a six-pointed martial arts throwing star with a dragon design that I emphasized by routing it out with a Dremel tool. By that time, there was no question about it. I could see the breathing, the muscular flutter, the flushing of orgasm during the branding. Much deeper than when I'd fucked her brains out ten minutes before. Afterwards, she told me the different thing about the shiriken "installation" was that she'd noticed the odor of her hair and skin cooking. Yeah, it's an odor that, once experienced, leaves an unmistakable and indelible impression. One I'll always associate with an undertone of burnt phosphorous. And a white blinding light.
The guy was about ninety pounds, but about as concentrated a bundle of devious, cold-blooded, hell-bent-for-homicide viciousness as it's safe to even shoot at. Your definitive specimen of Charlie the Cong. Even lashed to a tree and pissed on he made me twitch to waste him everytime he caught my eye. Not a man to blab freely in the presence of his enemies, you figure. Not even under the kind of gentle persuasion that had so far rendered him lumpy, bloodspattered, sucking air through a new lesion between his ribs, and missing his left eye. The strong silent type. And me thinking, If I hate this guy's guts so much, why do I admire his guts so much? C'est la guerre.
One of those obscure, nasty wartime tableaux; six strung-out grunts looming over the pitiful little nemesis. trying to get him to give up what little he ever had. So Groton, implacable foe of stasis and status quo, broke it all open with his usual flare for the dramatic. Put Groton on the problem and you know one thing: for the better, the worse, or the uglier, change will ensue. He pulled a hard-bitten little belly dagger out of his harness, hacked open a flare, and carved out a hunk of white phosphorous. Not your plant nutrient--it's prized because it burns with a sizzling incandescence under any conditions, including under water. An advantage that can cut both ways, as ol' Br'er Chuck was about to find out.
Groton held the blazing phosphorous like an avenging sun in his hands, wide-eyed as a kid with a sparkler, then close to the captive, who wasn't even blinking. No need to explain; last chance to get gabby, Chas. No dice. The blinding star fragmented into a white-hot meteor shower on the guy's thighs. No more Mister Silent. He was screaming all kinds of stuff, but none of it intelligible or militarily useful. Groton decided the debriefing was a flop--he cut the guy's ropes with the dagger. Then he flipped it to him. You ever see six gun muzzles come up in drillteam unison. I still can't believe he gave that muderous little fuck a weapon. He must have known what the reaction would be. Maybe he'd done this before.
Charlie Brown snatched up the knife and started feverishly hacking the burning phosphorous out of his muscle tissue. I don't know what it was...maybe something about his facial expression or the jerky movemnets with the knife like a demented Woody Woodpecker, but we all busted up laughing. Oh, we were horrified and all that, but we were laughing fit to die. Maybe even Charlie was laughing. On the inside or something. I've told the phosporous story before and almost nobody laughs. I guess you just had to be there.
