The Earring

I was a pretty girl.  A pretty ugly one.

I have one piercing.  A simple little hoop earring in my left ear.  It's old school.  It used to be pretty rock n' roll.  It doesn't really represent or mean anything or than I wanted an earring when I was nineteen.

I got my ear pierced just after my nineteenth birthday.  The summer of '99.  Maybe I was killing time because I was young and restless and needed to unwind.  No wait, that would have been the summer of '69.  I get them confused sometimes.

I waited for my parents to be out of town before getting my ear pierced.  They're a bit old fashioned.  They wouldn't have disallowed me to get an earring, but there would have been thirty questions designed to make me change my mind about it.

"Well, why would you want to go and get an earring?"
"Well, is this something that you think you really need to do?"
"Well, have you heard that earrings can lead to diseases..."
"Well, why not just get a fake one?"

So my parents were in Winnipeg visiting my sister, and I was still celebrating being nineteen.  Just a few days earlier I had spent a lovely evening at a strip club.  But that's a story for another day, if I haven't already blogged about it.  I was working that summer at an art camp, teaching art to children and showing them how to be a cool teenager.  They thought I was the bees knees.

After work one day, on my way home I stopped by the mall to get a hole punched in my ear.

"Hi, I'd like to get my ear pierced," I said.
"Just one?"
I had forgotten that many dudes were getting both ears pierced at that time.  It was a cool thing to do. "Yeah, just one," I replied as she sat me down in the chair.
"...so which one?"
"Which one am I supposed to get?" I asked, raising an eyebrow in my patented way much like The Rock had stolen from me.

I miss that GnFnR t-shirt.

The nice girl just stared at me for a moment.  She looked at my long hair, my red jeans, my leopard print shirt.  I knew what she was thinking, but it was also the late nineties and people weren't as forward about such things back then.

"Just give me a second," she said, and then poked her head out of the store to yell at her friend in the clothing store across the hall.  "Hey, I've got a guy here who wants just one ear pierced! Do you know which one is the one I'm supposed to do?"

From across the way I heard a little bit of silence and then a louder girl's voice. "Is he queer?"
"I don't think so!" She looked at me and didn't ask, but lifted both of her eyebrows in an curious manner.
"I'm not," I said. "Don't let the clothes fool you.  I just really want to be Steven Tyler."
"He's not," she shouted back to her friend.
"Then do the left one!"

A couple minutes later I had a hole in my ear.  And it's still there today.  I ended up having to get a gold hoop to wear in it because, as it turns out, I'm allergic to most metals.  The cheap earrings I was buying had studs made of cheap metal that were eating away at the back of my ear lobe.  Pretty gross, huh?

A week or so went by and my parents came home from their vacation.  It was late at night and I was in bed, but not asleep.  They came in separately to visit but knew I had to wake up early for work, so our chat was quick.  After my dad said goodnight I could hear him in the living room, all the way from my bedroom.

"Your son got an earring."

Thanks for reading!
-ryan