A Threat to the Moral Order!

Societies are based upon preventing potentialities and on channeling the energy of an individual female into a specific body, but they are also based on the repression of this energy and, as a final resort, on the censuring of the self. This situation is what makes the stability of this constructed body uncertain and explains the long duration, the never-finished nature, of its construction. – in Reading the Social Body, CB Burroughs and JD Ehrenreich (eds.)

---

On a cold winter day in 2002 my daughter Moe and I rode the subway from her apartment in Harlem to the Village, headed for Andromeda, where she would get her second and my first tattoo. Trying hard to remove my “I am a woman from the Midwest!” facade, I disinterestedly read a magazine in the damaged-chic grunge waiting room and listened to the employees entertain me.

“Can you tattoo my balls blue, man? I want my ball sack blue.”

“You want your balls blue? Well, I can do that, but YOU have to shave yourself, man.”

Two young gay men studied flash art on the walls. They wanted traditional anchors on their biceps, with their names etched on each others’ bodies for eternity. A young kid wanted to know “how much for a Frankenstein scar around my neck”? Asian girls pointed at bright flowers. A stretch of prime gallery wall space held a large rear view of a blonde girl bent over, legs apart, with WHITE” tattooed atop one hefty thigh, and “TRASH” tattooed on the other, both bordered with bouncy pink satin ribbons.

I go first, and I like the drops of blood that appear as a pierced heart appears on my wrist. Moe also gets a flaming heart, on her back, and she asks if I’m OK, and I am giddy and full of meaningful lightheadedness, standing outside at the top of the steps, squinting in the winter sun. An amazingly exotic and beautiful employee with at least three hundred piercings in his face it seems, is taking a cigarette break in the doorway, talking to a friend who has come by to show off his newest piercing. I see a community of decorated people who take joy in their bodies, who enjoy one others’ body art, who are together, somehow, in their confrontation of invisibility, in their thumbing of their noses at social hierarchies. “Yes! Fuck social hierarchies!” I silently concur. The moment takes me back to those endless days with friends, before the knowledge of time colored the pace of my life. High school, college, long summers, girlfriends, wasting time, getting high. Having adventures. Laughing.

We walk down the street to Starbucks, and I order a venti latte. I don’t want to say the word 'venti', but rejection of corporate slavery is so difficult. Moe asks me what my tattoo means, and I say that I have been wounded, but my heart is still beating. There is hope.

The Village is feces, and vendors, and hunger. I smell all of the lunches coming from all of the restaurants, and I love the inclusiveness of this place. I love the dark places, because I know that to be open, a city must to be open to all of its dark places. Decadence can be a signpost of liberation.