mexico...mexico

The nature of adolescence is being contrary to one’s parents. When I was 18 I got my nose pierced after seeing Elizabeth Fraser in a video. When I shared my plan, Ma argued with me about it and I did it anyway. My friend T, an experienced punk piercer a few years older than me, used an ice cube and a needle. As I sat on the toilet in his bathroom he said, " Let me see something..." then he stabbed the needle into my nostril. ‘Motherfuck! You psyched me out!’ At 18, I thought the whole process was quite cool. Long live rock and the badass girl.

Thirty years later T would end up serving life in prison for being a predator of young girls. In the 1980s, through all his punkness and progressive politics, recommending that I read Dharma Punks ( an ego trip of a book ), I had no idea how destructive T truly was as a person. 

" What the fuck." I said to Jimmy, T's best friend he grew up with. We were all Nature Company punks together. Jimmy was in a few well known punk bands at the time. We would karaoke The Damned's Shadow of Love in the warehouse to the annoyance of our peers.

"Maybe I should talk to T or write."

I said. 

" Don't even try it." Jimmy said. "He's fucked up. He has an excuse for everything and doesn't grasp the harm he's done. He had a really messed up childhood. His older brother was a Nazi skinhead." 

" Whaaat?!" I said. I never knew that about T in the years I'd known him. I guess he held a lot of dark secrets.

The last time I saw T was in the early 90s. We were having lunch at Poncho Villa in the Mission with a mutual friend. T talked about his new girlfriend who was around 18 at the time. T was approaching 30 himself. Listening to him talk about the girl's underwear, my intuition kicked. Something was wrong with him. I never hung out with T again. He was convicted in 2012, released, registered as a sex offender, moved to another country, and did it again. He was sentenced to life after that. 

I still have that piercing, although I stopped wearing a nose ring after I got my labret, 27 years ago. At this point I’ve had it so long it’s just a part of me. At times people don't even notice it, distracted by my hyper-symmetrical face; the illusion of an alien beauty.

I almost lost the labret to an infection while I was living between Guatemala and Mexico. I had been ingesting flora and bacteria for months. My labret became inflamed and the skin closed over the flat back of the stem - as though my face was absorbing metal. Since the piece was screwed in, the only way to get it out was to cut it out. What you read next has moments of extreme gnarly, but it's true.

At the time my labret got messed up I was living in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, a city built during the colonial period in the highlands. I worked at a bar owned by a Mexican lesbian who had borrowed a lot of money from dangerous men. One local cop she paid bribes to liked to show off the 9mm Beretta strapped over his shoulder. He would stand contrapposto, his jacket open, casually revealing his gun, as he talked. That dude has killed someone, I thought. I never spoke to him except the one time he asked why I didn't say hello. Eeek!

I nearly got snatched off the street by a gangster in San Cristobal. He swerved up to the curb erratically as Marlon and I were walking towards the town's open air market. Marlon was a tall Guatemalan mestizo whose features were all planes and sharp angels. He had followed me from Guatemala to Chiapas. One morning, a cool girl that worked at the internet cafe I went to regularly, said a man was looking for me. He left a note and a small passport photo of me, which she recognized. 

Marlon had been on me for days not to walk on the street side in San Cristobal, but I was defiant and naive. 

The gangster pulled up at the curb, I glanced inside and saw him reaching for something beside him. Instinctively I yelled to Marlon who was just a few feet ahead of me. Once the gangster realized I wasn't alone, he sped off. Marlon gave me such shit. ¡Te dije! Peligroso! I told you! Dangerous! I never walked on the street side in San Cristobal again.

My labret got so bad it became difficult to eat. A young teen I met at the internet café referred me to Gabriel, a pachuco from Buena Park, Orange County, who ran a piercing and tattoo spot above a skate shop.

I sought Gabriel out and we bonded over being from California. Once he was released from prison, he said, he decided to return to his ancestral Azteca homeland to heal from the experience. Gabriel's entire torso was covered in tattoos; mapping his gang youth to prison with Buena Park in bold Old English letters across his shoulders. The Chicano illustrated man. To me, in all his adornment and shaved head, Gabriel looked more like a kind of shaman than an ex-convict.

‘ It's gotta come out, hermana.’ Gabriel said, snapping his latex gloves back. ‘ No problema. I’ll get a scalpel at the pharmacy and some novocaine.’

‘ A scalpel?! Novocaine?!" I winced. " I don’t know, dude…."

‘ Morena, you gotta take it out.’ He said. ‘ You could gangrene.’

The next morning, after Gabriel bought supplies, Marlon walked me to the shop before heading off to his job at a construction site. Gabriel disinfected my mouth and swabbed my inner lower lip with novocaine. He gave me two shots of rum. Then a third.

I was feeling alright as I laid down on the table. I watched him snap on his surgical gloves, disinfect the scalpel, and pliers. After that I started to trip out. I closed my eyes and breathed. Don't look out, look in and chill.

I felt pressure as Gabriel pulled and tugged on my lip and what felt like small incisions in different directions. There was more pressure as he went in, gripped the metal with the pliers; maneuvering enough space to unscrew the flat back.  I felt some pain, then a release of fluid flow out. I was out after that - my body let it go. I opened my eyes and slowly sat up, realizing I was quite buzzed. Gabriel gave me a cup of listerine to rinse.

‘ You’re all good now, hermana!’ Gabriel said, patting my back.‘ The infection in there was pretty fucked up. I made a nice cross-cut, cleaned it out, and got to the metal.’ He cleaned my mouth with antiseptic gauze and packed more over the wound. I stumbled home and showed Marlon the gore. He shuddered. Que malo, Bonbon! That was Marlon's nickname for me, like a piece of milk chocolate.

Within a week my labret was healing nicely. By the time I returned home to Berkeley, I went to Industrial Strength to get it re-pierced, or so I thought. Apparently the line was still open.

‘ Wait. What happened to you?’ The piercer asked. ‘ Well, whoever did that was a pro. That’s a super clean line in there."

I bought a replacement piece that's been with me ever since. Several months after being home, I got a message from Gabriel's wife that he’d been taken for trafficking guns on the black market. In Mexico no one shows up with a warrant and reads you your rights. Nope. It's not unusual for goons to bust in the middle of the night, throw a bag over your head, and take you. Apparently, Gabriel had taken too much and offended someone. The only way to get him out, his wife said, was to bribe a few municipal officials and the police.

There was back and forth between family and friends scrambling to get money together to help. I had a sense that Gabriel would survive, because he had survived so much already. That pachuco shaman vibe he possessed, I suppose. The healer. I was so buzzed I don't remember if I paid Gabriel a dime or a peso. I must have because that's my nature. I'm not cheap. 

I will always be grateful to that homie from Buena Park for helping me out. I hope he's well wherever he is.