Thursday, August 14, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Goldberg: The hole truth

By Tod Goldberg

My wife came home a few weeks ago with her belly button pierced. She'd gone out for the evening with a few of her girlfriends and one thing led to another and next thing she knew some guy named Trooper was poised above her belly button telling her she wouldn't feel a thing.

"So you have no idea how you got there?" I asked.

"Are you mad?"

I had to think about it. The last time my wife had some bodywork done, she came home with a nice tattoo on her back, one I didn't particularly care for. I was slightly mad about that for the obvious lifelong implications, but since my wife has also become fairly perturbed over the years, I've let that one rest. Besides, I've made lifelong mistakes that are more visible and available for purchase at Barnes & Noble.

"I guess not," I said.

"Great! I love it!"

My wife is a young woman, only 30, but her piercing made me think she was feeling old, that she was acting out because we'd turned from being all-night party animals into the kind of people who own an Entertainment Book and actually use it. I didn't say anything, though, because I'm a man and thus programmed to keep all doubt bottled up.

A few days later we were sitting out by the pool baking the cancer into our skin and I noticed that my wife's piercing resembled a mottled cheeseburger.

"I think you have an infection," I said.

"It's normal. Trooper said to expect it."

"You're taking medical advice from someone named Trooper?"

"You don't need to have a doctorate to pierce people. You think the 16-year-old hoochie at Claire's Boutique is board-certified?"

"Still," I said, "it looks awful." I leaned over and smelled my wife's belly. "Ugh. And it smells bad. You might have gangrene."

A week later, the piercing looked better, but my wife's stomach was covered in a bright red rash that stretched from her sternum down to the top of pubic bone. Three times a day, she'd soak her skin with hot salt water and then she'd apply some dubious-looking cream. If I tried to touch her stomach, my wife would flinch away like Boo Radley.

"Maybe you should just remove the piercing," I said.

"And have to wait five months for it to heal? No thank you. I'm not going to walk around with some gaping orifice on my abs."

"Just so I understand," I said, "you'd rather be an infected mess for the rest of your life because you don't want to heal for a few months?"

My wife suddenly looked very sad to me. "I've already invested so much time," she said. "It would be silly to just give up."

I don't pretend to understand the motivations of women. Oh, I've tried to figure them out since my sister Linda painted my fingernails one summer day when I was 6 and then let me parade around the neighborhood in my underpants (thanks, Linda!) and then through a series of either certifiably insane or just simply evil girlfriends leading up to my spectacular wife. I've learned that women are a peculiar sex and that they deserve proper study, though only in a controlled situation.

A marriage is not a controlled situation. It's more like an algae-filled Petri dish beneath a heat lamp, constantly changing and morphing with the elements. You don't wanna mess with it too much if it's working well.

I didn't bother my wife about the conflagration spreading across her body for another week. She was sitting in front of the computer, a tank top pulled up over her belly button and the exposed gash of red flesh that used to be her stomach region, and she was trolling through Google.

"What are you looking for? MILF porn? I have a couple sites bookmarked."

"No," she said, "I'm trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with me."

"I blame your mother."

"I mean my stomach," she said.

"Why don't you call Dr. Trooper?'

"I think he might not know what the hell he's talking about," she said. "If you haven't noticed, I look like a friggin' alien."

I stared at my wife for a few minutes but didn't say anything. I was trying to be the strong, silent, brooding type.

"What?" she said.

"I don't know why you got it in the first place."

"You wouldn't let me get my tongue pierced."

I considered that I might be one of those controlling guys generally found in old 'Til Tuesday videos and then remembered that my wife's mother, a dentist, had told her that if she ever came home with a pierced tongue that she could pretty much expect to have it removed the next time she came in for a cleaning. Maybe it really was her mother...

"I don't say anything about how you try to shove yourself into that Jane's tour shirt from 1987," my wife said, "so pull up a chair and try to help me."

There are some arguments you just shouldn't enter into.