Avast, Ye Lubbers! And A Happy 4th To Ye! Yarrrr!

No 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door. But 'tis enough. 'Twill serve. -- Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 1.

Today, as my little way of celebrating Independence Day and my impending 57th birthday two days from now, I marched bravely (well, semi-bravely) into a Claire’s at the local mall and paid a young woman $20 to pierce my left ear. This admittedly trivial bit of fashion news -- news in the sense that when word gets out that geezers like me are getting their ears pierced now, piercing and earring sales will soon plummet -- requires a bit of background information.

Long, long before Pirates of the Caribbean and even before straight white guys tentatively began to get their ears pierced back in the late seventies, youngster D.A. Ridgely was especially taken with those 1940s swashbucklers he watched on the old black & white RCA console in the living room, especially including Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk. Truth be told, I didn’t know then and don’t know now how to go about buckling a swash or if Flynn even wore an earring in that movie, but somewhere along the way in my childhood I became enamored with the idea of getting a pirate’s earring.

Well, it was the 1950s and not only were there no straight white men with earrings in my neighborhood, there weren’t any straight black men to be seen anywhere sporting earrings nor any gay black or white men, either. Of course, Arlington, Virginia was still segregated in the 1950s, so I didn’t see too many black men of any sort most of the time and as far as gay men went my family was still in denial about Liberace, never mind Uncle Julius who everyone said was a “perennial bachelor.”

Anyway, the point here is that in the working class neighborhood of my childhood expressing an interest in getting an earring would have resulted in even more beatings than my use of the occasional three syllable word already engendered, so dreams of pirate gold faded or were repressed or some such. The years passed with my decidedly non-Jewish body nonetheless still qualified, should I ever convert, for burial in a Jewish cemetery with nary a tattoo and only the orifices that came as original equipment.

Life goes on, Obla Di Obla Da, and my maturing fashion sense drifted increasingly toward what I’ll call Eternal Preppy: Oxford cloth button-down shirts, Harris tweed jackets, that sort of thing. In terms of sartorial consistency, jewelry of any sort hardly enters the picture here, a wedding band and maybe a college signet ring excepted. Well, that’s pretty much how official and professional Washington, D.C. has always dressed and dresses to this day and that’s where I spent the bulk of my professional years.

But those years are over for me, or at least on hiatus, and so I decided what the hell? But this raised a somewhat delicate point; namely, where the hell should a fifty-six year old (for two more days, thank you very much!) man go to have his ear pierced?

I actually considered doing the deed, myself, but besides the fact that I have a yellow streak where my spine should be, the fact is that I am famously bad at doing anything manually. (God made me a little bit smarter than most people, I am sure, simply so I wouldn’t starve to death as a manual laborer.) The thought of having to go to my doctor or show up at an emergency room with an infected ear thanks to my own ineptitude quickly ruled out the do-it-yourself approach. This left shopping mall stores and strip mall tattoo / piercing parlors.

Now, as it happens, I have a cousin Nancy who does (or did, I haven’t seen her in a few years) tattoos professionally. I suspect she’s quite good at it but I don’t know if she does piercings too, and, besides, we no longer live close to each other.

Worse yet, though, and let me hasten to add that I genuinely like my cousin Nancy but, but, but... well, let’s just say that she fits exactly my image of the sort of person I would expect to find running a tattoo parlor and if I didn’t already know her I wouldn’t let her get within ten feet of me with anything sharp in her hand. Actually, now that I come to think of it, even knowing her I wouldn’t let her get that close.

So there I was this morning at Claire’s, their literally closest competition, the Piercing Pagoda, being closed. If it is true, and it is, that I am not your typical walk-in customer for the local tattoo / piercing parlor, it is equally and perhaps even more true that, by virtue of gender and age, I am far from fitting the demographics Claire's aims for.

Look, I’m not the shyest guy around, but let me put it to you like this. When I was in high school and college I smoked a little pot now and then. Experimented, you might say, as long as it’s understood that we're talking about a longitudinal study. Still, the day came when I stopped smoking pot, and that was in no small measure because buying it was no longer a matter of asking a fellow student whose experimental studies were even more rigorous than my own where I could buy an ounce. When I was very young the adults used to try to scare us with images of old men hanging around the school yard trying to sell us drugs, but I was afraid I would become an old man hanging around the school yard trying to buy drugs, so my longitudinal study finally came to an end.

So, okay, I felt foolish walking into that store. A perfectly charming 20-something young woman didn’t so much as bat an eye at my request. Had I been she and someone like me came in and asked to get his ear pierced I have no doubt words like Alzheimer’s would have been crossing my mind. Moreover, I probably couldn’t have resisted offering me a senior citizen discount, one of the many reasons I would have failed at a retail career.

But no, she was very gracious and matter-of-fact. I picked my starter earring; alas, not the pirate’s gold hoop I plan eventually to get (before September 19th, of course!), but a discreet little gold ball and she had me sign and initial various acknowledgments and waivers while she put on surgical gloves, inserted the earring cartridge into what amounts to a plastic rivet gun and, bingo, it was all over. Well, over except for the aftercare demonstration. I tactfully declined to point out to her that poking open the bottle of formerly sterile solution with her ball point pen rendered it no longer sterile, paid for my purchase and wandered off into the day.

Sadly, but to nobody's surprise, I still don’t look anything like Errol Flynn or Johnny Depp. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I already have buyer’s remorse but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if, after I get my hoop in six weeks and wear it a while, I don’t take it out and let the hole heal over. I’m certainly not trying to make a statement and, besides, piercings and tattoos long ago stopped being signs of rebellion and uniqueness -- a status they only enjoyed for a very brief period a long time ago. Today, if anything, they are signs of an almost slavish conformity to mass market fashion.

As I said above, when aging Baby Boomers like me decide to do something of this sort, that is in itself sufficient proof of its complete absence of hipness. (See? We even still use words like “hipness”!) But I’m happy with my decision and additionally happy to note it has annoyed my family. Now, if only I can figure out how to get this swash buckled!