Suspended Haze

Fueled by a plethora of cold medicines and the thickest, blackest coffee imaginable, I careened down Derry Street in my Cherokee towards downtown and my office. My head felt inconceivably light as if gorged with helium and my hands trembled as I tried desperately to grip the steering wheel. The inside of my mouth was as dry as the straw doormat on Satan’s doorstep and the world was engulfed in the yellow particle suspended haze that only days choked with sunlight can produce.

Despite the brilliance of the light the day had ordinary written all over it, as most days do, and there was nothing that would have made me think otherwise until I saw a crack in the sky and the weirdness began to rain down.

I remember thinking that school bus in front of me was like some great yellow metallic warthog rooting through the industrial jungle of Harrisburg and that it was making me late.

“Hurry up you bastard,” I yelled out my open window.

This did nothing to hurry the great beast and we continued to limp along at a pace most suited for funeral processions, while the children in the back, peering out the windows, mocked me with extended fingers and out stuck tongues.

“Santa Clause isn’t real,” I yelled.

This seemed to quiet them or maybe they just lost interest but at any rate I was freed of their menacing gestures and as I drove through the paper scattered intersection of 13th & Derry Streets I spied a rather rotund youth in a puffy down jacket poised to cross the road. At first I thought he was wearing headphones upon his ears--positioned down towards the lobe--but as I drew closer I realized this wasn’t the case. What I had thought were headphones were in fact black discs the size of hockey pucks wedged in his ears, stretching his lobes to the point where they looked like strips of thinly sliced bologna.

“Yikes,” I said to myself, squeezing the steering wheel.

It was abundantly clear, if only to me, that some imbecile had forgotten to shut the rusty padlock on the freak cage the previous night because they were out in numbers storming the streets like zombies damned from the dead. The hustlers, pimps, street walkers, dealers and dopers were spread out so as to cover as much area as possible. It was impossible to walk down the street and not be touched by their disease.

It usually isn’t necessary to lift too many stones to find examples of the demented and deranged, and it never takes too much prodding for the sickos to open their Kevlar trench coats and expose all their ground in ugliness but today was different. They were walking right up to the side of my car like lions in a wildlife preserve, clawing and scratching at the doors. I didn’t dare role down my window because they are an unpredictable breed. There are some that will spit on your windshield and smear it around with an oily squeegee and still others the will yank you out of your car through the window and try to sell you a piece of ass or a bag of hedge clippings.

Quickly I rolled up my window and as I sped off I pondered this whole body modification thing, the studs, the discs, the rivets, the scarring, the branding, and pins. What was it all about? Why the permanence? Does it symbolize some other level of freakiness that my generation couldn’t ever grasp?

I knew that in Omo, in the Ethiopian River basin, women in the tribes there wear enormous plates in their lips. As teenagers a hole is punched in their lips and then gradually stretched until they are big enough to put in plates the size of cafeteria lunch trays. The bigger the lip, the more “beautiful” the girl is thought to be and thus the more cows she will get for her dowry. Surely, in America females aren’t swapped for farm animals but still these bizarre body modifications occur. What pray tell are you going to do with such a lip here in America where such modification is generally seen as bizarre and repulsive? I suppose one could use the lip as a substitute Ping Pong paddle or serve tea on it but what if you wanted to mug down with said sweety? I do believe that such an appendage would make the average lip lock not only awkward but virtually impossible.

I had to find out more about these modifications so upon arriving at the office I searched the Internet for information on body modification and found something quite interesting. It seems now the self mutilators and deranged carnival sideshow freaks are on the cusp of another more dangerous trend in body modification. A Dutch institute is now offering something a little more eye catching. It seems these clog wearing doctors are cutting slits in the cornea and inserting small, metal half moons and stars into the eye! Yes, eye jewelry. Wouldn’t it just be easier to get contact lenses with stars and half moons on them and not risk going blind? I suppose this would be the equivalent of the fake tattoos children get out of bubble gum machines and which wash off when they bathe. Perhaps the thrill is in the permanence. Or is it in the pain?

Upon further investigation I happened upon pictures of a penis cut in half and pierced with rings and the rings attached to a chain worn around the neck. I saw railroad size spikes stuck through the labia and ghastly green fish scale tattoos that covered a person’s entire hide. I read about people shooting themselves so that they can have the scars to show off; still others have stainless steel balls and rings implanted under their skin. Soon, enough it was time for lunch but I had lost my appetite. It appeared something was seriously awry, that standing out in a crowd now required more than snappy shoes, a spiked hairdo and an attitude.

I walked down by the Susquehanna River and sat on a bench amongst the melting snow. Women in sneakers and floral print skirts power walked by me chatting back and forth at a frenzied pace. Men in short sleeve dress shirts with sweat stains engulfing the arm pits huffed and puffed going up the cement stairs. Joggers and roller bladders whipped by. I stared at the brown choppy river not quite sure what I was doing but then I saw a girl walking an extremely long Dachshund and as she slowly approached me I saw the glitter of earrings and studs all over her face. As she drew closer still I saw her arms were sleeved with colorful and intricate tattoos. Her dog stopped and sniffed at my Burmese Jungle boots.

“Ernie, stop that,” she said.

“He doesn’t have any Mississippi leg hound in him does he?” I said.

“What?” she said with a smile.

“Nothing…why all the piercings, studs, and tattooes?” I asked.

“Why not?” she said, giving me a dirty look.

Evidently I’d pushed some invisible button but didn’t care because I was focused on her nipples which at that time were poking through her shirt like the beaks of angry parakeets and they too appeared to be pierced.

“Right,” I said.

“Come on Ernie,” she said, and took off down the macadam path.

Ernie unwrapped himself from around my legs and took off wobbling back and forth and wagging his tail happily.

This wasn’t the answer I was looking for but it would have to do. My lunch hour was rapidly dwindling down.

As I walked back to the office I wondered if perhaps if I wasn’t hopelessly out of it, that my time for being “cool” had effectively passed me by but I quickly nixed the idea for I knew that cool wasn’t a concept that should be defined by outward appearances, that the mind is what truly needed to be modified in order for one to be “cool.” So these people and their odd body modifications were either cool or they weren’t but it wasn’t because of anything they might have stuck through themselves or had permanently inked on their skin. Cool is a state of mind.