Member-only story
My Balls & Chain
A piercing story about art, love, and genitals
Madonna’s astrologer predicted precisely when I’d meet my husband. Cheryl, a comedian and astrologer, was part of a gal-pal threesome; Madonna and Sandra Bernhard were the other two. When I met Cheryl in 1989, Madonna’s and Sandra’s careers were peaking. Cheryl still had to make a living as an astrologer and decorative painter. The small company we worked for had big clients in the Hamptons. It was there, after days painting faux techniques on every wall, baseboard, and door of a new vulgar McMansion built on a former potato field, that Cheryl read my chart:
“You’re a consummate artist…blah blah. You should also write…blah blah blah.”
I was single, in fact, freshly heartbroken, and wanted some good news on the love-life front.
“You will meet Mr. Right at the very end of 1993!” Cheryl said definitively.
“Fantastic! Wait, it’s 1990. What do you mean I have to wait three more years?”
I whined.
“Sorry,” She said. “You’ll have a few false starts. But Mr. Right doesn’t come along until the very end of 1993. It’s as clear as day.”
I met Doug on the dance floor on Crisco Disco night at the Crow Bar on East Tenth Street, deep in the East Village, on December 29th, 1993. After several sweaty dances, he asked,
“Wanna grab a tea someplace where we can talk?”
Confident he was NOT Mr. Right but would do as Mr. Right Now, I responded,
“Nah. Let’s just go to your place.”
Perhaps the sole reason we saw each other again and almost every day after that was because he had had his penis pierced a week before we met. This rendered his member pretty much out of commission. He had chosen a Prince Albert piercing with a ring of surgical steel with a solid steel ball in the space between the two ends. The ring traveled into his urethra, then out the bottom of the head, the steel ball closing the loop and weighting his junk downward.
While we had sex that night, it was a slower version than Doug was used to, and a version that forced him to consider my pleasure over his. For that matter, it did the same for me — forced me to consider my…
