Not Even Not Zen 419: Biomythography - Note 132: The Earring, Part II

The Earring, Part II

I woke feeling like I'd been kicked in the brainstem. But I felt like that every time I spent the weekend partying with friends. My world had returned to three dimensions (plus or minus a half) before I slept. My arms and legs rose with me, under my control about as much as they usually were. Most of my cognitive functions reported for duty. That was enough.

Even though Adam and I were in pretty decent shape for a Sunday, we decided to take the bus to the mall rather than drive. We had money in our pockets. We had seen a fancy-ish cigarette lighter Adam wanted to buy. And we knew the jewelry store kiosk manager would gladly shoot holes in our ears. 

We hadn't counted on her young assistant.  

The kiosk manager herself was probably in her late twenties, professional, and the kind of person who had done this eight thousand times. Her assistant, however, looked seventeen with the eager, slightly terrified expression of someone being given responsibility for the first time. She stood maybe five foot seven with brunette hair in a pony tail, nice jewelry, and an expensive shirt. She smiled longingly at my ear while holding her ear-piercing gun. It was brass colored and looked like a cross between a stapler and a nail gun.

"Who's first?" the manager asked cheerfully, as though we were volunteering for a fun carnival game.

Adam and I engaged in the time-honored male tradition of determining our actions through a complex series of facial expressions and half-gestures. The ladies stepped between us and started to speak. 

"There are two of you," Adam pointed out, raising a finger.

"Both at the same time, then," the manager concluded. 

Her young assistant led me to a chair. After a conference with her boss, the assistant returned. She told me her name and that this was her "first time with a guy." I laughed because I thought she was making a joke. She adjusted the light. She touched my jaw to put my head in the position she wanted. With hardly any fumbling, she loaded a gold stud into the gun.

"Just a second." She strode over to where her boss was working on Adam. I could hear they were making sure the pointy side of the stud was facing the right way and all that, just a young woman making sure she was doing things right. 

When she returned, she played with my left earlobe for a moment. She leaned close and I got a reassuring whiff of her perfume, which wasn't too heavy and didn't smell like I'd be allergic to it. A sigh escaped her lips. She raised the gun.

"Oh, you're really thick," she said. 

"Ha ha," I allowed, thinking again it might be a joke. 

But no, she disappeared. I blinked under the interrogation-room style of lamp. A moment later, her boss came to my side. The older woman watched as her assistant squeezed my too-thick earlobe between the barrel and the backing of her stapler. 

"Hold still," she said. It's a popular thing for people to tell you before they cause pain in a humorous way. 

She pulled the trigger. I felt a brief, sharp pinch, as if I'd been snapped by a rubber band. Now I was a man with an earring. When I blinked, Adam was already standing. I don't know for sure but I think his experience was roughly identical. Maybe one of us winced more gracefully than the other. 

"Don't pull out the earring," the manager said, launching into a speech she had given to countless young girls, and now to us. "Don't substitute another earring. Don't try to put a safety pin in its place."

Adam gave me a meaningful look.

"Clean your ear with alcohol every evening for a week," she continued. "Turn the post every day."

Her assistant stepped back and examined her handiwork. She put her hands on her hips and delivered her professional assessment, "You look good."

Like a barber showing off a haircut, the manager turned us so we could observe our new fashion statements in a mirror attached to the kiosk. I hadn't thought we would look any better or worse with earrings. I figured we'd look the same but with small shiny things stuck in our heads. In fact, we did look a little better. We approximated the style of the too-well-dressed guys around our college campuses. Chances were that some young women were going to like this. Adam grinned. His folks were going to have opinions but, at the moment, they didn't matter. For the rest of the trip, he didn't even worry about his folks back home.

Instead, I worried for him. It was a correct concern, as it turned out, but also slightly misplaced.