APP 2005 - LAS VEGAS [The Present Tense

PROLOGUE
I’ll be honest: I went into last week’s annual APP (Association of Professional Piercers; BME was at their 2003 EuroCon as well) convention in Las Vegas with a host of misgivings. Spending over five days in an unnecessarily scummy, wholly synthetic pit of a city, trying to glean information about an organization that I wasn’t entirely sure that I had much respect for? There are degenerative diseases with more inherent appeal than this.

Both aspects of the week had their fair share of stories about them: The APP had been habitually accused of elitism, rigid conservatism, and unrefined casino and hotel etiquette — even by Vegas standards. Conversely, the tales of Vegas itself are as old as time: The sleaze, the crime, the lust and depravity — being known as the kind of place where even society’s most morally-fibrous invariably find themselves knee-deep in debt and elbow-deep in a call-girl. If I had small-town sensibilities, they’d have been offended just thinking about the possibilities of moral corruption this week had to offer.
That said, a free trip is a free trip, so with that, I set off for Las Vegas!

* * *
SUNDAY
Accompanied by my employers Shannon and Rachel — the brains and brawn behind BME, respectively — I walked through Las Vegas’ labyrinthine McCarran Airport, and lunged straight into the quadruple-bypassed heart of Bovine America. Truthfully, I was disappointed; I’d been expecting to have cocaine caked onto my sweaty palms after touching banisters and dead hookers strewn freely about the floor, and instead I was met with tour busses full of women from Ohio named Irma who were wearing muumuus and chain-smoking 100s while they played penny slots.
(Basically, City of Sin my ass.)
Rather than take a taxi from the airport to our hotel, we instead opted to ride in a limousine, which I thought set the tone quite nicely for a week in this city. Also, I’d never actually been in a limo before, so that was something of a unique experience for me in and of itself.
(Cue jokes about me also being impressed by the tall buildings, bright lights, and “all them peoples”.)

Vegas, APP style
After driving along the strip and viewing some of the classier and more extravagant venues, we arrived at our destination of the Riviera — the redheaded stepchild of Las Vegas hotels and casinos. From what I understood, if Vegas hotels were historical epics — and the Venetian was, say, Schindler’s List — the Riviera would be The Mummy Returns. That said, the rooms were spacious, if sparsely filled, and I’d certainly slept in worse spots. After checking in, I headed up to my room to peel off my travel-moistened clothes, but got briefly preoccupied with my old friend, television — living in Mexico, network TV isn’t quite what it is on the rest of the continent. With some time to kill, I sat and channel-surfed for a bit, settling on Dumb and Dumber on TBS which, funnily enough, was at the exact moment where Harry and Lloyd had just gone on a shopping spree with a suitcase full of stolen money and showed up at their posh Aspen hotel looking ridiculous — this is basically how I felt. As excited as I was, I felt like an absolute fish out of water; I was about to spend just under a week surrounded by some of the piercing industry’s most talented and well-respected members, and I was coming into it with little-to-no current modification work, dramatically under-developed social skills, and a young-Republican haircut. But even more than that — I was The Press. Yes, I’d technically been invited as part of BME, but I was not expecting to be trusted, much less welcomed with anything resembling open arms. This meant that right off the bat, I was in the closest thing to “attack mode” that I had — which, to most people, is somewhere between “hungry” and “thinking about swatting that fly”.

Me, Ryan Oulette, and Jesse V
Freshly-clothed and notebook in tow, I made my way down to the convention area to check out the scene, brimming not so much with confidence as with reserved trepidation. I was set at ease, however, after running into Ryan Ouelette (IAM:The Fog); we’d never actually met before, but there’s something very endearing to me about skinny white guys with well-defined senses of irony who call each other “pimp” and “player” while wearing black nail polish. I have nothing bad to say about this guy. While in the lobby, I was also introduced to incoming APP Outreach Coordinator Phish Goldblatt (IAM:XxbrucecampbellxX), incoming International Liaison Luis Garcia (IAM:Luisg), and outgoing President Bethra Szumski, all of whom were very friendly and made no attempts to have me escorted off the premises — perhaps my paranoid delusions were a tad extreme? More than anything, they all seemed very glad that BME was there (well, glad that Shannon was there, at least; I could have walked into the building holding a hostage and I doubt anyone in attendance would have been able to pick me out of a lineup).

Derek Lowe and Sean Christian introducing the event
After an hour or so of hellos, my first task of the week began: Sitting in on the Members Only meeting. Seeing as I was certainly not a member and yet was being allowed in, I was feeling equal parts appreciation and apprehension, and I thusly stationed myself in the corner of the room, halfway behind a potted plant in hopes that I’d go unnoticed by the majority.
Now, before I go on, let me explain something: I am a nerd. A big one. From the time I was very young, whenever I became interested in something — from Pearl Jam to the films of Quentin Tarantino — my life essentially morphed into a quest to fill my head with as much useless knowledge about the subject as possible. Well, piercing and body modification certainly fell into this group; while I never ended up getting a job in the industry like I’d always wanted, I still learned all there was to know about the practical aspects, but also about the history and the lore of it all — there was a time when I could rattle off information about piercers and their careers like I was reading baseball cards. So once the room filled up with members, it was a sublime moment of geeky fan-boy paradise for me. Seeing faces like Paul King (outgoing Treasurer), Elayne Angel (outgoing Medical Coordinator), Jim Ward and Jim Weber (IAM:InfiniteJim — incoming Medical Coordinator) all in the same room was a pretty humbling moment for me.
As for the meeting itself, it left me feeling skeptical in some respects. It was shown that the organization had been getting a lot more accomplished than I had previously thought — they were being taken far more seriously as a legislative body in many places, as well as seeing members like Elayne Angel being chosen to speak for assemblies of Registered Nurses, among other things. But, as Winston Wolf said in Pulp Fiction, “Let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks just yet” — just because progress was being made, was this cause for immediate celebration? Could this have been a “too little, too late” phenomenon? There was a clear sense of community and friendship among the people there, but would it translate to the rest of the convention? Would the stories of elitism and information hoarding be shown to be true? That would remain to be seen — my hopes were high, but I kept my expectations considerably lower. As far as immediate impressions went, however, the general candor of the group certainly far exceeded what I had anticipated.
The meeting came to an abrupt end when Paul King began going over the financial numbers of the organization over the past year and people began a rushed exodus into the hallway — you’d have thought he was trying to usher them onto a boxcar to Birkenau. Never one to go against mob mentality though, I too made my way back to the lobby to catch up with Shannon and Rachel, and not a moment too soon — as it turned out, we had dinner plans.

Clockwise, starting at front: Jen, Rachel, Shannon, me, Jay.
With Allen (IAM:Allen Falkner), Jen (IAM:newby), and Jay (IAM:Jay Dead) — none of whom I’d met before — in tow, we piled into a cab and headed to one of Vegas’ many pseudo-Chinese restaurants. Not ten minutes after sitting down, Allen inquired via Rachel if I might have been gay, with the answer being a resounding no — not that there’s anything wrong with that — but I have to wonder what it is about me that gives off that vibe. Are gay guys typically overly polite yet socially awkward and too lazy to shave more than three times a week? Anyway, for those who had money in the pool, my sexuality was first questioned in Vegas at 9:48 PM on May 1st. Enjoy your spoils.
Back at the Riviera, I paid a visit to the Splash Bar — the choice meeting place for APP attendees — and did my best to be friendly with the others, mostly with success. Interestingly though, APP was not the only event being held at the Riviera at the time — the other? A national dart players’ convention. You couldn’t make this up. These were generally the kind of people who would take car racing very seriously and were likely quite upset that their conference was only mere weeks before Toby Keith’s Las Vegas date. Needless to say, the amount of slacked jaws was immense (though that may have just been a genetic thing — I don’t want to jump to any conclusions). In all seriousness though, while by and large respectful — and often curious — there were a number of bad apples in the dart player contingent whose behavior ranged from mild badgering to borderline sexual harassment, all the way to near-assault that required police intervention. Not cool, but sadly, not entirely unexpected either.

At the Riveria’s Splash Bar
I didn’t stay at the bar long; Shannon and Rachel had already gone to bed, and since I literally knew no one else in the general vicinity, I took my wallflower shtick up to my hotel room and fell asleep to the sweet sounds of Rocky V on the USA network.
(That is undoubtedly in the pantheon of the most unglamorous sentences ever written.)

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A recent acquisition from the illustrious, high-profile world of low-budget sporting-goods photography, Jordan Ginsberg is a Toronto native. Born affiliated to the Levi tribe, Jordan renounced his religion shortly before his Bar Mitzvah but still believes he is entitled to a role in the liberal Jew-run media and sees BME as an ideal stepping stone. Votes left, throws right.
Article copyright © 2005 BMEZINE.COM. First published May 17th, 2005 in La Paz, BCS, Mexico. Requests to reprint must be confirmed in writing.