

“Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity.

When I give, I give myself.” - Walt Whitman

Before I begin, let me apologize for not having introduced BME’s new staff members more promptly. As you may know, at the end of 2004, I ran an “intern search”, looking for a writer to take over many of the duties here in BME/News which were lagging under my workload. The conclusion of the search was a tie, with both Jordan Ginsberg and Gillian Hyde joining the team, as well as Clive Mathias stepping in to handle BME’s new (actually, “reborn”) video division — you know him both as a long-time member of the suspension group iWasCured and part of the core team filming and producing Uvatiarru. All of these three are currently telecommuting from BME’s “vacation offices” in Mexico where they met both me and each other for the first time. Part of working for BME means having access to highly sensitive information about things that people are doing behind closed doors, and thus signing a non-disclosure agreement was part of the hiring process. Jokingly I suggested that to really show they wanted the job, they’d have to lop off their little fingers as well. Obviously this didn’t happen, and I would never make such a requirement!

Gillian and Clive shortly after arriving in Mexico I think to everyone’s surprise — including theirs — a whirlwind romance quickly brewed between Gillian and Clive, as some of you may have noticed on their IAM pages (judging by the spike in hits on both their pages (typealice and rookie), I’d say more than a few people have been vicariously reading those journals). What happened next came as a surprise even to me. Looking rather sheepish, they came into my office, holding hands, and began, “remember that thing you said about cutting our fingers off…?” They’d asked to keep their story private at first but have agreed to let me interview them here about what happened next and share a few of their photos publicly (the full video will go up on the new video site as soon as it’s launched, and a few more photos are scheduled for the next BME/extreme update as well). *** SHANNON/BME:

You know I was just joking about the finger chopping, right? GILLIAN:

Yeah, for sure; it doesn’t have anything to do with you… I think that comment just planted the seed. At first, I thought it was a stupid idea, but the more I went over it in my head, the more I liked it. BME: What made you actually start thinking about the idea seriously? GILLIAN:

I think we wanted to really just experience this important event in our lives fully, and as Clive is fairly knowledgeable about amputations, certainly more than I am, I trusted him. I think I knew the first day we spent together that we were meant for each other, as corny as it sounds. Dipping my feet in the Pacific for the first time with him was really, really special, and I think that’s when it hit us: we were falling in love. We wanted to mark it with something really big. CLIVE:

If you love someone, you want to give something of yourself to them. I don’t think people take that seriously enough, I mean, they say it, but it’s just words… I wanted to show Gillian that I really meant it and it wasn’t just something I’d read on a Hallmark card. Go big or go home you know? BME:

Why not just give her a promise ring or something? GILLIAN:

I’m not dating a ring, and I don’t want a ring. I’m dating flesh, and I want flesh to make a commitment to me. What good is a ring to me? It doesn’t really mean anything. I’ve been engaged before — and look where that took me: Nowhere. I wanted this time to be different. Plus, he’s been previously married, and I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t a repeat of that relationship. I told him if he was serious about this, he had to prove it — and that I was willing to do the same. BME:

That sounds like a threat? CLIVE:

It wasn’t like that, we were just talking and it felt right. BME:

How did you decide what exactly to cut off? GILLIAN:

That was obvious — it had to be our ring fingers. We were both just out of rough relationships, and wanted to both reclaim and be rid of those fingers… this has a permanence to it as well. You can take a ring off your ring finger, but you can never put your ring finger back on once you take it off. It’s something that will last forever — it’s a physical testament to how much I actually do love him. CLIVE:

And if we ever break up we’ll just tell people it’s a permanent shocker.

Think about it… GILLIAN: Shut up. BME:

Did either of you have an interest in amputation before this? GILLIAN: No, and to be honest I never thought I would do one, but I think it’s one of those things that’s hard to understand until you feel it. It just sort of happened, and it feels right. CLIVE:

Like our love. GILLIAN:

Shut up. BME:

I’ve got to say, the procedure you guys used is, well, pretty unusual. Do you mind walking me through it, start to finish? GILLIAN:

We started by putting elastic bands around the base of the fingers and wrapping them tight so there wouldn’t be too much bleeding. Because we didn’t have any anesthetics on hand — I’m definitely not into that much pain — we soaked our hands in ice water for about half an hour until they were totally numb. We poked them with a needle to make sure we couldn’t feel anything. I put my ring finger in Clive’s mouth and he put his ring finger in my mouth with our teeth resting right on the last joint. We looked in each other’s eyes, nodded, and bit down as hard as we could. It was a little disappointing because we couldn’t actually get all the way through, but we did pop the joint open and tear it a little. We cut the rest, just some skin and the tendon, the normal way.

BME: That sounds like a recipe for infection. Did you do anything to make it safer? GILLIAN:

Well, of course we washed our hands first, and gargled with rum to disinfect our mouths as much as possible. CLIVE:

Gargled? I drank it. GILLIAN:

And that’s why you bled a lot more, it serves you right. BME:

Did you bleed a lot? CLIVE:

No, not much, the elastics stopped most of it and even after we took them off there wasn’t a lot of blood. BME:

And did it hurt? CLIVE: It was more of a numb pain, like a really deep ache. To be honest, the ice water was the worst part. BME:

Did you get out of it what you wanted? GILLIAN:

Yes, absolutely, it was intense, especially because we did it at the same time. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work (because really, our front teeth aren’t that sharp), or if the pain was going to make it just suck, but it was amazing. I’ve never felt so close to someone. Seeing someone when they’re that vulnerable is like peering into their soul. We tried to keep eye contact the entire time, but Clive winced a lot. BME:

What are you going to do with the finger joints? Are you guys going to eat each other’s fingers or anything like that? CLIVE:

Right now they’re soaking in Bacardi 151 just to preserve them, but when my hand is feeling a little better and I can work with it again I’m going to skin them and make a pair of amulets so we can each wear each other’s ring finger bones as necklaces. BME:

It’s been about a week now. How is the healing going? GILLIAN:

I’ve had a little skin retraction so a bit more bone is exposed than seems right, but other than that it’s doing okay. We didn’t do much as far as aftercare comes… just packed them with [no-stick] gauze, left them alone, and kept them clean. We try to go swimming in the ocean every day — I think the salt water helps keep the wound flushed out. CLIVE:

Mine is doing fine but I have a Wolverine-like mutant healing factor. Yeah, I always heal well. Just look at my elbow, I took the stiches out while at work and it healed so well you can hardly see it anymore. BME:

Would you recommend this to other couples? GILLIAN:

I don’t know if I’d recommend it, but it was right for us and I don’t regret it at all. I’d do it again. CLIVE: On our ten year anniversary we’re going to take off the next joint, and then the whole finger on our twentieth. BME:

I apologize for asking this, but I have to… What if you break up? GILLIAN:

We can never break up, that’s the wonderful thing about this. CLIVE:

I don’t think that will happen anyway, especially with a kid on the way. If it’s a boy we’re calling him Bob, and if it’s a girl we’re calling her Chopper. GILLIAN:

Shut up. CLIVE:

But seriously, I have always wanted a child, and so has she. *** BME:

Finally, Jordan — I’ve got to ask, living with these guys, what do you think of all this? JORDAN:

Before I came down to Mexico, I was under strict orders from my mother not to get romantically involved with anybody I would be living or working with down here, and I was generally in agreement with that. That said, I hadn’t ruled out the occasional round of drunken grab-ass, but it became quite clear within the first few days here that Clive and Gillian had a good thing going, and I saw no reason to disrupt that. Once they started talking about this amputation business, I knew I had made the right decision… my decision being, of course, to not touch that shit with a ten-foot pole. Maybe I’m just cynical, but I haven’t even had a relationship serious or long enough for a pregnancy scare, much less one where dedication-through-nullification was a facet of it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I generally support just about everything, but when Clive asked me to act as a witness to the “ceremony” — to legitimize it in the eyes of the Lord, perhaps? — I just did my best to claim conscientious objector status and keep my distance from the whole sordid affair. Couldn’t they have just gotten matching tattoos like other shortsighted couples or something? I honestly think it’s just some nasty sex thing — like I really need something else to overhear and get the cold sweats from in the middle of the night. GILLIAN:

Shut up.

“When you make a sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not

to each other but to unity in a relationship.” - Joseph Campbell

More photos of the healing process and procedure will be in Monday’s BME/extreme update and stay tuned for the full video as the new site launches. Thanks to Clive and Gillian for sharing this with us, and best of luck to them in both their healing and their future together. Finally, let me here wish them luck and longevity in their future together. You know what the strangest thing about all of this is? It doesn’t even seem weird to me — it seems right. I don’t know if that means I’ve been doing BME too long, or if it really means they made the right decision. I hope it’s the latter.

Shannon Larratt

BMEzine.com