What's Satan Got That I Don't?
an excerpt

My first week living in San Francisco, I did three things: pierced my tongue, cut off my hair and had my credit card company increase my limit. My second week I got a job cocktailing in the Castro, bought my first nickel sized bag of crystal meth and negotiated an open relationship with my girlfriend. Things move fast in the big city and I was proof.

I got my tongue pierced at a place called The Gauntlet. It was two blocks from where I lived and had a reputation, a good one. It doesn’t exist anymore but in 1996 it was the shit. Although I’d admired, fondled and sucked on other people’s piercings--they point is they weren't on me and whether it was a delicate gold ring though the labia or a steely barbell through the nipple, they belonged on others. Had never considered allowing these these glinty bits of rebellion to hang off my me. But when I moved to San Francisco everything changed, including my tongue.

To get to The Gauntlet you had to climb a narrow set of stairs which opened up into a small well-lit space where photographs of altered body parts lined the walls. Breasts with tattoos of dragons. Black and white pictures of naked caucasian men with dreads piled atop their heads and huge slivers of bone in their noses and through the tips of their penises. I’d never been in a place like this.
The woman at the counter looked like she'd just been attacked by a swat team of lilliputians. Sharp pieces of metal had shot through her lips and got stuck there. Her nose looked like part of gem sweater. Big round knots of bone stretched her earlobes to incredible proportions and little silver arrows were stabbed like darning needles through the skin of her forehead.