Piercing Your Back with Giant Hooks: “What?!”, “How?!” & “Why?!” [NSFW]
By Erica Stratton

(Credit: Photo courtesy of author)

When I signed up for an energy pull, the last thing I expected was to have to wait in line.

Despite never having more than my ears pierced, I had been sneaking looks at websites like Modblog at work for years. I’d marvel at the aesthetics of hook suspensions (in which a person is suspended in the air by tethered hooks pierced through the skin) and temporary piercings (in which rings or needles serve as anchors for balloons, ribbons or feathers).

Finally, I found a group called Cloud Nine was putting on an beginner’s piercing event that would guide people through an “energy pull,” which involves being pierced with tethered hooks that are then pulled — a lesser hook suspension, of sorts.

And that's how I got here. But now that I finally have a chance to have my own hooks put in, I’m discovering that 20 minutes of waiting in an auditorium are all it takes to crumble my resolve. Part of it is that this is nothing like I imagined. Piercing events like this, I’m learning, are often an opportunity for people to create their own milestones, ordeals they can pass through and hopefully come out from with new confidence. To that end, many people have their partners or friends with them for support. No one I asked to come along showed up, so I’m in this alone. I’m afraid it will hurt so much that I’ll just break down and that there’ll be no one here to comfort me.

The other issue is that 30-something people — triple the amount that had taken part at similar events in the past — have signed up, overwhelming the five-person team of piercers. Seeing the length of the line, they assign us all numbers and have us wait, sitting in padded chairs as if we were at the dentist’s office. While we’re waiting, a storyteller invited by the organizers starts to tell an African folktale to set the mood.

I struggle to remember even a word of the story. In theory, the story might have helped me to feel braver or less bored. Instead, every third or fifth person on the piercing tables would let out a moan, sometimes building to a shriek as the hooks were put in their back. There’s hardly any story in the world that can compete with that.

An energy pull (Credit: Image from Wikimedia Commons; used with Creative Commons license)

Long before I’d even begun thinking about getting an energy pull, I was in a chat room dedicated to body modification when the moderator asked people why they performed hook suspensions. Immediately, my screen was full of people talking about how they were ex-Army, scuba divers or Everest climbers — basically the kind of people who would roar “I live for this shit!” right before they jumped out of an airplane.

“I do it because I read,” I wrote. “A lot.”

I’m not athletic. I’m afraid of losing myself, so I barely drink alcohol and I’ve never done drugs. I spend a lot of time inside either dicking around on the Internet or writing my next article. And though I’m usually pretty happy with life, sometimes I’m sure that I’m missing something.

So I made friends with people who knew how to set other people on fire, and I discovered that the whole trick was that the flame’s heat was closer to plum pudding than blowtorch. I got pierced with small-gauge needles, and I discovered that they were akin to a prick at the doctor’s office, riding painlessly in the skin once they were properly placed. Each time, I felt like I had discovered a magician’s trick: You don’t have to be incredibly brave or even physically tough to do “extreme” things.

Back in the auditorium, I’m trying hard not to listen to a girl getting her hooks set. Before the first one is fully in, she’s shouting “Fucker!” Moments later she’s outright screaming, kicking her feet against the table. She finishes with deep, loud sobs, her shoulders heaving for long minutes, and when she gets up again, one person has to support her on either side. Naturally, my number is called soon after.

I lay prone on the massage table, feeling the coolness of the sterilizing spray the piercer uses on my skin. Then there is the daub of a marker on my back as the piercer marks the spot where the hook will enter. I’d been told the hooks were the same kind used to angle sharks in deep sea fishing. I brace myself.

To my utter shock, it feels exactly like I hoped it would: A sharp pain as the first hook pierces my skin ... then nothing ... then another pain as the same hook exits my skin an inch or so away from where it entered. “Do the other one!” I gasp, so flooded with relief and triumph that I feel like I am going to float right off the table. My piercer laughs.

“That’s what I like to hear!”

The second hook goes in with the same rush, and then I am carefully getting off the massage table in order to take my place among the newly pierced. I feel very, very present in my body: The hooks make me conscious of every tiny movement of my muscles. Just like my long-ago piercing with much smaller needles, these hooks ride in my skin without causing the constant agony you would imagine.

It’s before I’m getting a length of thin nylon cord threaded through the rings at the end of my hooks that I get a good look at the back of the girl who had gone before me, and I realize why she screamed louder than the rest of us combined: Her hooks are enormous, three or four times thicker than mine. I hadn’t even realized that different hook sizes were an option.

Feeling much less badass but no less elated, I follow my attendant to have myself tethered. The auditorium had been set up with metal arches specially built for hook suspensions and the like, and the attendant tethers my cord to one, leaving me about an arm’s length worth of slack.

This is the reason I decided to try an energy pull as opposed to a full hook suspension: I have more control over it. Only two hooks used, I never leave the ground, and I alone can dictate exactly how much pressure to put on them. As I explore the new limits of my body, experimentally tugging on the hooks and feeling the edge of pain, I begin to feel a little punchy, the same kind of hazy love-for-the-world you feel after your third glass of wine at a great party with friends.

By now, at least a dozen people are tethered to the arches or each other. Some are in a trance, some delighted, some just enduring. One person starts shaking and is wrapped in a blanket by two other people who tend to him. Another, eyes fierce with concentration, goes through a series of martial arts moves. Two women who had their ropes tied together are pulling against each other with blissful looks on their faces, laughing while a third person teasingly plucks the taut cord between them.

Also like that third glass of wine, I don’t realize just how endorphin-drunk I really am until an acquaintance of mine, Rachel, comes up to me. Though we don’t know each other well, in my memory she is outlined in an angel-like halo of good feelings — I wasn’t going to have to go through this alone after all.

Though Rachel’s only there because her boyfriend is one of the piercers, she knows exactly what to do with a person high on endorphins. Smiling, she leads me in a series of dance moves, our limbs echoing each other. I felt connect to her and to everyone in the room in a way my semi-solitary life usually doesn’t allow for. I’ve pushed through my fear in the most absurd way possible and still come out alright on the other side. Once again, the magician’s trick has been achieved.

Erica Stratton is a D.C. freelancer who has crashed a parade and rowed a Viking ship. She also rants about sci-fi and fantasy on Twitter under @meanderingwhale.

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