Sub Q

"How can you not see it? Holden Caulfield is just like your or I? He's just bucking under all the pressure of growing up and under the specter of becoming a part of the insanity of modern life, joining the workforce, giving priority to things you have to trick yourself into caring about, wearing down your..."

"Dude! Holden's nuts. It's a great book, but it's the story of a nut, a looney, a madman. He has the seed and as the book goes on it grows, it grows into full blown insanity. It's fascinating, but if you find yourself relating to him, maybe you're a bit nuts."

"THAT'S THE POINT! I am a bit nuts. We all are. It wouldn't take much for us to crack. Or maybe, we did crack. Maybe we cracked by buying into this culture. Maybe running away from it would have been the more sane response."

"Well, I'm glad we both enjoyed the book, but I think I got what Saligner was laying down and you pretty much made your own weird religious experience out of it."

“Ah shit man. Someday the sequel will be out and you’ll see.” Mike laughed at this. “No dude, I’m serious. Salinger wrote a sequel. It and a bunch of other writings are just sitting in storage. He says it’s all shit and he doesn’t want to publish it.”

“Okay. You see. Salinger’s nuts, he created Holden, Holden’s nuts.”

I loved Mike Battle. What a strange man. How could he read Catcher In The Rye and remain so jaded toward Holden. Obviously the book was written with great compassion for it's main character and his struggles accepting the bullshit life he was handed. It felt like life had just made more sense to someone like Mike. It's not that things were made easy for him. Hell he was working at the work station next to me so he hadn't been handed too much. He just took things in stride and the idea that someone could have so much trouble swallowing what to him was obviously the reality of the situation threw him.

We were listening to They Might Be Giants, and polishing tiny little rings. The green polish we used was all over our faces. I wore a mask like everyone else but when they pulled their's off behind it would be a clean spot. When mine came off there was no sign of where it had been.

Sean had come through on his promise landing me a job making jewelry for Scott. The tattooed, pierced Scott had five work stations cutting, grinding and polishing surgical steel. Then there was drilling, dremeling and polishing up the beads. Put the steel rings and the beads together and voila, captive bead jewelry, ideal for all your piercing needs. Thick gauges for stretching, thinner gauges for newer piercings or piercings that were fine left the size they were.

A workstation opened and I was in. No interview, no application, no taxes. Of course no benefits, no vacation pay and no applying for unemployment if things went sour. But the good still far outweighed the bad.

The shop was in the basement of a house that had been made into two apartments. I'm not sure just how the location came to be but were friendly with the tenants of the apartment upstairs and a ladder let us climb into their apartment through what looked from the other side like an airconditioning vent. We made use of their bathrooms and kitchen.

The apartment was occupied by two very cute young women. Jessica wore her blond hair cropped short and despite hollaring that I was coming up I often walked into find her fully nude on the couch doing her nails. She'd flash a smile and I'd make my way awkwardly to the bathroom. I might have had a harder time fighting temptation if her and her roommate weren't such abysmal housekeepers. The place was most uneroticly disgusting.

Sitting in front of a polishing machine all day might have been pretty boring if not for the great conversation. And the occasional burn. The metal heated up while being polished, requiring us to wear rubber thimbles over our fingertips. It was perfectly acceptable to take a burning hot ring and leave a mark on the person sitting next to you when things got too quiet. If you were really ambitious you'd attempt to make a small trail or even a picure composed of small burn marks on your coworkers arms.

The pay was by the piece. I'd known Creepy Dave, a fallen Jehova's Witness, for years. He'd been a friend (except durring the frequent times when we weren't speaking to each other) for years. After I moved from Sean's couch to an apartment that I shared with a girl I'd just met named Nicole, Dave would come by early in the morning or even just crash at my place the night before. We'd get to the shop before the rest of the crew and crank out the jewelry with no distraction. By the time the rest of the crew arrived we could relax and enjoy the bufoonery. When we felt we'd made enough we'd head out and grab some coffee or maybe hit a bar. I wasn't much for bar culture. I sucked at pool and darts and though I considered myslef a master at the jukebox I was often alone in this estimation. Hanging out with Dave though, while waiting for the love of my life to return from Yosemite, I learned to enjoy the unique pleasure of an ice cold two dollar pint of beer on a hot afternoon in a dark mostly empty bar.

Dave was trying for the upteenth time to convince me to learn how to play pool when a Native American woman in pigtails walked in with a look of purpose. The intensity of her gait caught my attention and seemingly everyone elses. She walked to the coat rack, and retrieved a pair of leather hot pants. She turned and realized she was being watched.

"I left them here last night." She announced as she headed back out the door she'd just come through.

"Maybe we should come by here at night sometime."

Bryna moved back from Yosemite and into a huge victorian with me and Dave, and a revolving cast of house mates including a stellar drag queen with no sense of personal space or porperty named Erick (or Porsche 666), Bryna's sister Erin, my drug casualty friend Robbie (remember him? from Der Wienerschnitzel) and Robbie's girlfriend Regina who had an anoying habit of pretending to commit suicide. There were more. Many more. The house was owned by Mike, my one time Boss at California Kids. He'd moved out to the foothills to raise a family and some chickens. Though the house was the most amazing place I'd ever lived, with wooden floors and trim and an old Wedgewood stove, the cast of character's made it hard to appreciate.

Bryna became a regular at the shop. She got a job as a waitress at at an English style pub a few blocks away and would often swing by with a Vegetable Pasty for lunch. I was working away polishing when I felt a warm mouth close around my ears. I kept polishing figuring I'd enjoy the treat as long as I could when I notice the giggling around me. It occured to me that the often naked blonde from upstairs might have her mouth on my ear, but it still felt good and as long as I didn't know for sure I wasn't guilty of anything. The giggling got louder and something suddenly felt wrong. I turned around sharply to find Sean's monkey looking face grinning into mine. The now red hot ring I'd worked on longer than necessary was thrust foward against Sean's belly. Not even the pain that sent him flying backwards could stop him from laughing his ass off. I went back to polishing and took the ribbing. Nothing they could say hurt me be as bad as having the unwelcome knowledge that Sean can really suck an ear.

I got my own ears pierced, twice per lobe with one ring between two wholes looking like a staple. This was as far as my conformity would go. I made it clear that the holes were neither stretching nor multiplying and that I'd not be needing an appoitnment with Scott's tatoo artist friend when he came to town to put yet another Albert Einstein on Scott's back.

Mike Battle had been promoted to Scott's right hand man. That was about as official as titles got around there. Scott would leave Mike in charge when he needed to go out of town which he did with increasing frequency. Not much changed when Mike was in charge.

We were all pushing Scott to fulfill his promise to get the shop above board. We wanted to pay taxes and unemployment and to be official, mainly because we were investing more and more of our time into helping Scott build a business that could be taken from him too easily if he was caught. We also wanted to move out of the basement. There was no airconditioning and with all the machines running and green waxy polish all over your face it could be fairly uncomfortable. Scott said he was working on it, but we saw very little of Scott and it was hard to figure out just what he was working on.

It turns out Scott was working on opening a piercing studio. Sub-Q was now official, at least the piercing aspect of it was. Scott worked in the studio most of the time while Mike oversaw production, still under the house and under the table. Summer passed without anything changing in our basement sweat shop. Electric and propane heaters glowed and we wore longsleave shirts bearing burn marks, sometimes in the shape of a smiley face.

I asked for a week off to go to southern California and see my family. Scott was fine with the week off. I asked him when payday was and I scheduled my trip accordingly.

As the week got closer I reminded Scott that I'd need to be paid on that day so I could get my bus ticket and go. Scott assured me this would be no problem. Well the day came and Scott did not show up at the piercing shop despite the hours being posted on the door. I stood outside in the cold and waited, calling him from the nearby payphone to leave loud voicemails urging him to wake up, open his damn shop and pay me. Finally I gave up, having alraedy missed my bus and I went home. I chewed Scott out over the phone that night and he told me to come get my money, which I did. I was on the bus early the next morning.

I did the family thing and came home to find out I'd been laid off, nothing personal, just not enough work. I went into the shop fuming. I asked Mike what was up and at first he tried to see Scott's side of it. I told him the story of my angry word's with the boss and I pointed out that there were now people in the shop with less senority than me. Mike called Scott and asked him to come to the shop.

We all had a seat and Scott tried to feed me the same line of shit he'd fed Mike. "We just don't have enough work. If it picks up in the summer you can come back."

"Fine. Lay off Jeremy. He's only been here two months. Or Simon. Lay off Simon. Or let Simon and Jeremy both go to half time. It makes no sense to cut me."

"Okay Keith. I have to say it. You're the weakest link. Your work's not as good as their's."

"Great. Grab a drawer of their rings and an drawer of mine. Show me where mine's lacking. I'll walk out here happily."

I had him. He refused. "Keith, you're not working here anymore. I'm sorry you don't accept my answer but I don't owe you an explaination anyway. It's my shop and you no longer work in it."

"Fine. Unemployment should be fine."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm going to go apply for unemployment. That should help."

"You can't collect unemployment, we don't pay in."

"Well I'm going to go apply, I'll see what they can do for me."

I wouldn't come out and say that I'd turn him in. I would just go after what I needed, if that meant he'd get busted it wasn't my concern. He didn't need to worry. I would not have done that to the rest of the guys working their, but I must have bluffed well. He bought it. Unfortunately so did the guys.

"Okay Keith, what do you want."

"I want unemployment while I look for a job. Give me $500.00, that's one week's pay by conservative estimation. Call it severence pay or a Christmas bonus."

"So you're going to blackmail me?"

"Blackmail? If you'd gone legit like you promised I could get unemployment. If you'd told me you were going to lay me off a fucking week before Christmas I could have skipped my trip and my present buying and saved my money to pay my goddamned rent. Blackmail? No. You fucked me, right up the ass, and now I'm just asking for a little respect in the morning."

Sometime durring the speech I rose to my feet and raised my voice to a yell. Scott walked out.
Mike looked at me with a confused look of sadness and anger.

"Would you really turn him in." he asked me.

"Mike I really don't want to do that. I just can't roll over and let him kick me though man. My dad's an old union man. It's just not in my to let someone treat me like that."

"Let me talk to him."

Mike got me $200.00. I accepted it but I kept on Scott for the rest. I was on a mission now. Scott let me know that he'd hired a private eye who said this looked a-lot like extortion. I told him that I was done. That I would just go seek unemployment so I could pay my rent. I couldn't stick around and be made to look like an extortionist when all I wanted was my rightfull severence pay. I was carefull of my wording though I had trouble believing he'd hire a private eye over $300. Scott made some thinly veiled threat and I asked him to repeat it. I repeated it and asked him to confirm what he was saying. I stood to walk to the door.

"If we're to threatening each other I'm going to go call my dad. He's great at that shit. I don't think 300 bucks is enough to want to get all nasty but hell if I'm going to be threatened I'd better protect myself."

"I'll give you the money tomorrow."

"Do what you want. I'm done fighting with you. Tomorrow I need to secure my rent and get some groceries and that's what I'm going to do."

That night I went out drinking with Dave and the alcoholic boy's club. We met up with a friend of Dave's who was spening a large insurance settlement. He bought us drinks and then gave us a ride home in the car he'd hired for the evening. He was lit up from a day of celebrating with good food and cheap booze. I knew I could get money out of him. I knew I could spend a couple of days helping him spend his money. I knew he was blowing it anyway, pissing it all away and I knew that it was worth so very much more to me than to him. As the car stopped in front of our house I leaned over and talked to his ear.

"Go home. Please, you'll be glad you did. Just go home."

In the morning I found a shoe box next to my front door. It was full of change. I had a good laugh. Bryna and I rolled up the coin and found we had three hundred and fifteen dollars. Scott had gotten me good. I doubted that he'd included the extra fifteen bucks to cover the hour it took us to count it all, but I appreciated it.

It was maybe a year later when the boys in the basement took most of Scott's equipment and a good share of his customers to the new shop they'd opened in a nice little building with windows and air conditioning. They paid their taxes and they called themselves Revolution Body Jewelry.


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