Today would’ve been my dad‘s 81st birthday and since I had written this already I felt like he was inappropriate day to post it. I miss you Dad..
In another post I talked about my dad’s work schedule when I was growing up, and I mentioned how he used to pick up an extra shift at Rikers Island on Wednesdays to earn some additional money. That was one of his side gigs. But he had another one that was even more unexpected, and this one happened in the early nineteen nineties.
To set the stage, my dad was a trained physician assistant. A physician assistant is not a doctor, but at least in New York State at the time, you went through two years of medical training and then did about ninety five percent of what a doctor could do under the supervision of a physician. Or at least that is how my dad always described it, and it sounded close enough to the truth that I never questioned it.
He worked in trauma, and he was calm under pressure, steady handed, and very good with anything involving scalpels, needles, or anything sharp.
Which brings me to his second side hustle: piercing.
And not ear piercing. He specifically described it as “below the neck” piercing. That is all we are going to say here.
This was the early nineties. Piercing culture existed, but it was nowhere near as common or mainstream as it is today. My dad somehow got connected with a jewelry shop in the Village in New York City. It catered to a particular clientele who wanted this service, and the fact that he was medically trained, used sterile equipment, and could offer local anesthesia made him the right person for the job.
He only worked by appointment and only on Sundays. He would drive into the city, he never took public transportation (except once for me that may be another story), and set up in the back of the shop. He had the same portable television he used to bring to Rikers. This was before phones, before streaming, before anything digital, so that little TV was his entertainment. If it was winter, it was football. He would do a piercing, then sit back and watch the game, then another appointment, then more football. A very strange rhythm to imagine now, but that was his Sunday routine.
He told me once that almost no one ever used the anesthesia. He always offered it, had it ready, and every time the person said no. Apparently people just wanted to get in, get it done, and get out.
I remember once, when some college friends were visiting, we stumbled across his instructional video. Not his own tape, but the training material he was given when he started. Let us just say it covered a very broad range of below the neck locations. We did not watch the whole thing. We did not want to. But it definitely confirmed that my dad’s side gig was… let us call it unique.
He did that job for years, purely for extra money. It helped when my sister was in college and then when we both were. When he no longer needed the income, he stopped. He never seemed emotionally attached to the job. It was work. It paid well. It did what it needed to do.
Today, piercing is everywhere. You can walk into a studio in almost any city and find people who specialize in it. Back in the early nineties, though, it was niche, edgy, and far less common. Which means, in a very unexpected way, my dad was absolutely ahead of the trend.
At least in that particular area.