8 Terrifying Life Lessons From a Former Terrorist
No matter how low terrorists are held in public opinion, they're not going away anytime soon. Those wacky terrorists are notoriously terrible at picking up on social cues. Why on earth would anybody think that bombing innocent civilians is an acceptable career path? No, seriously, that's not rhetorical: We honestly wanted to know. So we sat down with Shane Paul O'Doherty, a former IRA bomber turned pacifist, and asked him about his life. Here's what he told us ...
It Starts in Childhood
In 1916, a bunch of poets and artists launched a revolution against the British from Ireland's capital, Dublin. They were exactly as successful as artists and poets usually are against battleships and machine guns.
The pen is mightier than the sword, but it doesn't fare so well against naval artillery.
The British executed the ringleaders of this "rising," and those deaths inspired a successful uprising against the British that ended with Ireland split in two. Suddenly there was a border, and Irish Catholics on the north side of it found themselves treated like second-class citizens. Shane recalls understanding that he was now an "inferior" class of person at an age when most of us barely understood that the Power Rangers weren't real people.
The only "inferiority" on this kid's mind should revolve around whether to ask Santa for a PS4 or an Xbox One.
"I grew up in a well-off middle class neighborhood, a mix of Protestant and Catholic kids. The first time I realized I was 'inferior' is when a Protestant friend told me, 'My mother said you're a Roman Catholic, and that means you're gonna burn in hellfire forever.' And I asked my mom why we were going to burn in hell. I was only 5 or 6, but I already knew we were second-class citizens in our own country."
The British soldiers were welcomed at first, because when you've got armed gangs of religious fanatics throwing bombs at each other on the street, uniformed soldiers throwing significantly fewer explosives in crowded public areas seems like it might be a step up.
The thing people forget about police states is that they're mildly preferable to regular shrapnelings.
"We went down to the barricades, made them sandwiches and pots of tea, and ran for cigarettes. There was a fantastic welcome initially. But within a few months they came under the orders of the unionist government and barricaded Catholic neighborhoods, took names and addresses, asking us where we were going. We'd go through 16 times a day, saying our names were Mickey Mouse or whatever. There was great contempt, and it eventually escalated to stone throwing and the like."
You've got to admire the self-confidence that allows someone to see armored cars in the distance and go "Screw it, rock."
Shane was 14 when the first British soldiers occupied his neighborhood. At that age, we were playing GoldenEye and sad games of Spin the Bottle (alone, with a picture of Tiffani Amber Thiessen) for fun. Shane was throwing rocks at soldiers with machine guns and body armor. All good times.
And then the shooting started.
Both Sides Feed Off Violence
Shane was just 17 on Bloody Sunday, 1972. A group of civil rights marchers were fired on by British paratroopers. It was as clear a war crime as you get. Fourteen marchers were gunned down. Seven of those marchers were children; five of them had been shot in the back.
"It was a big day to be out, you'd see girls, friends ... nobody expected a paratrooper assault. When they opened fire, we were so close, even my friend McAteer was arrested. There's a picture of him put up on a wall. I was a cross-country runner in school and I got away."
Watching his neighbors get massacred by British soldiers was a game-changer for Shane. We're going to go ahead and assume that seeing children gunned down by soldiers is the kind of thing that prompts some deep soul searching. Shane searched his soul and didn't exactly find happiness and butterflies flitting about in there:
"I realized I could be shot dead for nothing (a rights march) or shot dead for something (trying to change the situation by violence)."
This is not a realization you ever want your teens to come to.
The British government would eventually admit (in 2010) that the shooting was wholly unjustified, but at the time, there weren't even arrests. The British Army couldn't have organized a better recruitment drive for the IRA if they'd rented out the Dublin convention center and started offering to match terrorist's 401(k) contributions.
"When soldiers first open fired on rioters and shot dead teenagers, we had no guns, no means of defense, no government to appeal to. We started screaming to the IRA, where are the guns and the self-defense? And so quickly a half-dead zombie IRA was given a breath of new life. The British were shooting civilians, and we queued up to shoot back ... Kids like me were sidelined. It was eight or nine months before I got back into the action because there were so many adult volunteers."
But the hipster terrorists would always know Shades here didn't get into the IRA until after it was cool.
Shane and his fellow teens would get their chance to fight again, however. Because it turns out ...
Teenagers Are Ideal Terrorists
Adults have jobs, families, and responsibilities. Many of them have had sex and enjoyed the pleasures of beer and gourmet sandwiches. They've met enough people that it's more difficult to convince them that whole swathes of humanity deserve murder. If your job is to recruit soldiers for the IRA or the PLO or al-Qaida, you're going to prefer 17- and 18-year-olds for the same reason the Marine Corps and the IDF recruit from that age group: They've got lots of energy and you barely have to pay them.
Our childhood's only "shelling" came when Mom took us to that restaurant with the baskets of free peanuts.
"I remember at 15 getting a handgun and taking potshots at trained soldiers carrying automatic rifles. Just getting up as close as I could and firing away, then running. I lost some friends who were shot dead by soldiers. And slowly we trained ourselves."
Teens have energy and vigor, and most importantly, they lack the sort of moral compass necessary to question whether firing blindly at strangers is really a solid plan.
"Hey, wait -- what are we doing with these?"
"You can't expect 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds, the main fodder of the campaign, to have a depth of morality beyond the crude teenage desire to get back at their enemy. Get revenge for the murders of their friends. I'm not going to attribute any retroactive moral depth for it. The breakfast meeting for IRA kids at the time was 'How many can we kill before they kill us?'"
At the same age, we had similar sentiments about cereal.
"Here we were, adults giving us boy soldiers small guns and rifles we hardly knew how to use. My friend Lafferty, only two years older than me, got a .303 sporting rifle, and within days of its arrival he went out at night with it, and an hour later he was dead."
Studies have found that the average age of a terrorist is in the high teens to early twenties. In other words, professional terrorism is a little bit like a rave: If you're over 25, you're either the guy in charge of the club or one of those weird dudes who doesn't realize he's too old to be there.
In fairness, Zeke's the shit.
Their Horrific Violence Seems to Justify YOUR Horrific Violence
"When Bloody Sunday happened, it became a serious business -- everybody's aim was to kill British soldiers and send them back in boxes."
In any action movie you've ever seen, there's a low point where the enemy gains the upper hand. They blow up Alderaan or kill Rue or steal Bruce Willis' shoes. Said crime both inspires and justifies the murderous rampage our heroes embark upon in the third act. The Bloody Sunday massacre was that moment for the young men of the IRA.
"Hey, do you guys think maybe all of our problems could be solved by guns?"
"We decided ... what the hell, take to London. Give them the same thing we're experiencing. Ravage the city with letter bombs. There was huge celebration when the home secretary behind Bloody Sunday got blown up and injured by a bomb. When 10 Downing Street got a bomb, there was rejoicing that these crude measures had penetrated security."
Shane found himself working as a terrorist mail bomber by virtue of the fact that he was one of the few people crazy enough to work with explosives:
And the summer he spent co-managing a Sbarro.
"There were so many killed by premature bomb blasts that NO ONE in the IRA wanted to work with explosives. I was one of the few. I was so incredibly passionate and crazed that I volunteered to plant bombs without knowing what they were. I went to the local library and learned about explosives and detonators, there was no Google then. I got a copy of some American 'behind the lines' Special Forces manual. I read about booby traps and started experimenting with letter bombs, having read about them in the PLO conflict in the Sunday Times.
"Eventually someone asked, 'Can you go to London?' ... I flew there with a backpack containing detonators and explosives. Literally flew there with that. I went to a bookshop, found a Who's Who, got the 10 Downing Street address, a list of judges' addresses, etc. So I built a bunch of letter bombs and sent them out. Suddenly it was international news."
In the '70s, "airport security" meant keeping everyone too drunk to start anything.
For reference, 10 Downing Street is the British answer to the White House. Shane had attempted to bomb the U.K.'s Prime Minister.
"I'd hear about it on the radio, see notes on the street about letter bombs. After the first bomb I planted on Oxford Street, I rang the police and warned them. They didn't listen. That's when I realized the police were getting thousands of hoax bomb calls every day. So I called the press association, and the police gave them a code word: 'XX.' If it was a real bombing, that was the code I'd give. I was described then as the Baby-Faced Bomber, which wouldn't be inaccurate. I was 18, but I looked 14."
The War Goes on in Prison
Shane returned home in 1974 when the IRA arranged a cease-fire with the British government.
"One or two of us were told we maybe shouldn't go home, because we were wanted for the bombings. After months, though, I went home. My mom was living in a nice area, not the Catholic ghettos. And when I went to visit her, an undercover police squad arrested me at gunpoint. I was told, 'We're arresting you to wreck the cease-fire.'"
"And, y'know, quotas."
Shane was imprisoned by angry police officers who knew that his arrest would provoke more violence, which would allow them to provide more violence in response. It was an Inception of brutal dickitry. And it worked; the night of his arrest, a young cop was murdered in retaliation. It happened to be the son of Shane's prison warden, because sometimes Lady Fate is an angry drunk.
"... they beat the shit out of me for a couple of days. I was in the cell at the window hearing the dead march while this 18-year-old cop's body was carried from his father's house to a grave."
At this point in the story, we feel you guys have earned a baby polar bear.
Shane was eventually sentenced to 30 life sentences, which some of you probably think is insane for a man so young, and some of you probably consider far too light for a damn terrorist. For his part, Shane (and other arrested IRA men) considered themselves soldiers. And for several confusing reasons, that meant constant nudity:
"I refused to wear a criminal uniform in prison. So I spent my first 14 months in prison naked in solitary. When I came out of solitary, I was really skinny because I'd barely eaten ... I was surrounded by these movie-style 6-foot 4-inch muscle-bound prisoners. Paki, Sikh, Londoners, gangsters ... and they all kept back from me because I was this crazy solitary naked IRA kid. 'This fucking guy's crazy, you know.'"
There's Only One Way to Reform a Terrorist
Shane entered solitary confinement a defiant, naked terrorist. He left solitary a pacifist who wanted nothing more than an end to the violence. Was it the overpowering peace-instilling effect of prolonged nudity? Not entirely:
"What undermined my belief in the IRA more than anything were the Gospels and, hats off to the Brits, when I was an unrepentant terrorist ... not only did two labor MPs visit me doggedly, but Cardinal Basil Hume visited me. There was this British openness to the enemy, and it helped me change my life. And my life helped to change other people's lives."
Martyrs mostly teach one sort of lesson.
Members of the British government -- people Shane had tried to kill months before -- made a point to befriend him in prison. Not to trick him into revealing information, but to convince him they were people, too, and to show him the reality behind the "monsters" he'd been fighting. Long, slow periods of compassion and empathy will never make for a more exciting climax than the protagonist wading into the villain's lair with a minigun, but in real life, they're the most effective weapons against terrorism.
Sadly, it's tough to set "compassion" to a John Williams score.
"I never forget these people who crossed the divide of horror and tabloid criticism. To me that's a heroic story that no one has ever told. I've always felt that the acts of those people, to go to the enemy and listen and learn and engage, saved me. Any time my name was mentioned in the papers, there was this screaming excess. But behind the scenes, these people kept visiting and helping me to grow up out of my teenage fucking horror."
Rehabilitation Is Another Battle
Shane had reformed internally, but that wasn't enough for all the people he'd bombed and attempted to bomb, obviously. He needed to make amends, but sadly, Hallmark doesn't make a "Sorry I mailed explosives to your home" card.
What do you even send with that? A fruit basket?
"When I was in solitary, I read one piece in the Gospels that really burned me: 'If you come to the altar to offer your gift ... go first and be reconciled to your brother.' So I called to the prison chaplain I'd formerly told to fuck off and told him I wanted to write apology letters to my victims. The British Home Office said, 'We're not letting any IRA scum bomber write letters.' So I fought for a year to get the right to apologize to my victims. After a year, they decided to let the chaplain write on my behalf, using my words. That was 1978.
"A few people sold those letters to News of the World, and the story of what I was doing got out. Gigantic headline: 'Anger as IRA Bomber Says Sorry.' Suddenly my secret was out in the open. This caused consternation among the IRA lifers because no one ever said sorry, and no one ever said 'I'm guilty.' I was very much out on a limb here. The press attacked me for saying sorry, some of my victims attacked me for saying sorry, the prison authorities thought it was bullshit. And many old comrades said they'd never apologize; you were damned if you didn't say sorry, and more damned if you did say sorry."
It was one of those "stabbed if you do, stabbed if you don't" situations.
Regardless of the reception or the effectiveness of the letters, the important thing was that Shane was the first IRA terrorist to actually apologize and express regret. And terrorists who live to regret their terrorism are a rare group. But they're an important one, because ...
Reformed Terrorists Can Reform Communities
"I went up on the wing of the prison and told the other IRA guys I no longer wanted to be part of a campaign of violence. These guys thought I'd lost it in solitary. A couple of them sent me word they were considering killing me, lest I become an informer. I assured them that for me the whole thing was a moral question; I questioned attacks on civilians, or attacks that discounted civilian casualties. How did we, the noble freedom fighters, wind up bombing English civilians?"
Repatriated to Northern Ireland after 10 years in English prisons, Shane refused to go to the IRA-controlled wings and instead stayed in a wing mainly populated by sex offenders and ODCs (ordinary decent criminals). He spent years there, and gradually his example led other IRA and Loyalist (the terrorists who hated the IRA) inmates to "defect" and join him in the prison's neutral zone.
You'd be surprised what a shankless environment does for morale.
Keep in mind that the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland mixed about as well as gin and milk. This prison was the first time many of them ever came together in a nonviolent context.
"All young Protestants went to British Protestant schools and learned British Protestant history. And Catholics all went to Catholic schools that taught Irish history, and the Rising. Intermarriage was unheard of through the '60s and the '70s."
As Shane pointed out, this separation made the enemy into an "other," which made it easy to justify murdering them. But once these former terrorists got to hang out in a nonviolent context, they started forming friendships.
Above: the extent of their previous contact.
"Their comrades in the ghettos hadn't had that sharing experience, so when we released the prisoners in the '90s, it furthered that reconciliation. These guys went back to communities where their comrades hadn't crossed the divide, and they were able to do the work integrated schools would have done. And still might in the future."
Reformation is never going to be as sexy as revenge when it comes to dealing with terrorists, but Ireland was once as much of a hotbed of violence as Palestine. And today it's a place where you can safely drink your night away and stagger home at 4 a.m. without spontaneously exploding from anything besides whiskey and half-digested chips. Just something to consider.
Related Reading: Make sure you take a look at bombings from the other side of the conflict. Or see how easy it is to get tangled up in murder. Have a story to share with Cracked? Email us here.
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6 Realities Of Working As A Friend-For-Hire
As we get more and more lonely, the free market has helpfully filled the void. Many websites now offer "rentable friends." Craigslist has its own somewhat creepy section for general hangouts. This isn't some obscure niche anymore. Rent-A-Friend alone has over 600,000 professional friends on call.
So what's it like to be a professional buddy to people who, for one reason or another, can't find friends the normal way? It's weird as hell! At times, anyway. "John" has served over a hundred clients as a rented friend, and he shared some war stories with us.
One Guy Wanted To Play In The McDonald's Ball Pit
It's not that every person paying for friendship is too creepy for normal society, but some of them totally are. "I had a friend match who wanted to go to a McDonald's ... He was in his 40s and had on a parka even though it was in the 70's," says John. "As an icebreaker, I asked him about it, and he said it was to keep him warm. It was bad vibes, but I brushed that aside. Maybe he was really cold."
See, the thing is, lots of people paying for companionship have real trouble getting it otherwise. It often doesn't take long to find out why. "We ordered and he talked. No surprise, because most 'friends' love to talk. It was most about San Francisco, and we shared what we liked about the city. Then he said 'Let's go in the playplace.'" You know, the little play area where customers send their kids?
"Before I could say maybe we shouldn't, he took off his shoes and jumped with a huge belly flop into the ball pit, narrowly missing a toddler. The parents, quite rightly, said he should get out, but he threw a few plastic balls at them. I told him, 'Hey, maybe we should go back to eating,' but he tried to get me to join him. The manager came in after a parent complained and told him to get out. He did, and said, 'You're no fun at all.' We walked out and he sat back down, eating as if nothing had happened, even with the manager eyeing us in a way that said 'Leave now.'"
Well ... maybe the guy's just a child at heart? "When we left, he then suggested that we wear each others shirts. I said no, as kindly as I could, and he said, 'You're no fun.' Then he floated the idea of following around a random person and seeing how long it would take before they noticed and walked faster or ran. I had to say no again, because that is creepy as fuck. Thankfully he said, 'I know the site said we had a lot in common, but I'm not seeing it.'"
Thus, their friend date ended before one or both of them wound up in the back of a squad car.
One Guy Pretended To Drown
That is not an isolated example. Offer your friendship for cash, and you get a dazzling array of folks who just ... don't know to be around people. Maybe if they were wealthy, they'd just be called eccentric?
"A 'friend' said he wanted to go swimming at the beach," says John of another client. "I thought that sounded fun. And it was fun, at first. Then he pretended to drown."
Like, this is a bit he does? To break the ice? "I freaked out, and me and another man pulled him out. He looked dead, and the man who helped him out started calling 911. Then my 'friend' said, 'Gotcha!' and started laughing and went back into the ocean. The man who helped said, 'What the fuck is his problem?!' I told him I didn't know, because I didn't."
It's sad when you meet someone who seems fundamentally incapable of reading a room, but you have to admire the dedication. "Later he pretended to fall asleep at the wheel when there was an awkward pause in the conversation. He acted like it wasn't a big deal and gave me a perfect score, but I told the admin that I didn't want to see him again."
One Guy Used His Bare Hands To Eat At A High-End Restaurant
The French Laundry, despite the confusing name, is one of the top restaurants in the world. It has Michelin stars, and the cheaper meals can run you about a month's worth of rent (or if you're in San Francisco, about five days' worth). So when a client offers to buy dinner for you there, what's the worst that can happen? Then again, you'd think somebody who could afford that place would already have someone to eat with ...
"We got into the French Laundry, and we had a good conversation going. He was mainly talking at me, but it sounded like he needed a release. Then his salad came, complete with special silverware." Specifically, a chilled fork. Yes, it's that kind of place. "He literally grabbed the entire salad in his hands and started eating it like a sandwich." This is an amazing mental image. It seems like you could totally get teenagers to eat salad if you told them this was an option.
"I thought it was a fluke, or even that it was made to be eaten that way, but the next dish was fish and he ate it like that again. Then pasta. Everything. He didn't even wipe his hands ..." John didn't want to piss the guy off, so he waited until afterward to say anything. "He just told me, 'Nah. If they can't accept me like this, they aren't good people.' During the entire meal, others were just staring. Like, Silicon Valley, Napa types ... he kept repeating that every food was finger food, and that 'People who mind it are wrong.'"
We're pretty sure half of you think this guy is gross, and the other half now consider him a personal hero. "It was incredible," says John. "And disgusting."
Related: I'm Paid To Mourn At Funerals (And It's A Growing Industry)
One Guy Needed Companionship On A Stakeout
Other times, it's people who may have friends, but are embarking on activities you really can't invite a buddy to.
"I had a private investigator hire me so that he would have a 'friend' to talk to on a stakeout. We were literally parked outside an apartment building all night because he hated to be alone ... He actually told me that he used to go on his tablet and go on the internet, but he missed having someone to talk to. So that's what happened. He picked me up, and he talked to me for several hours about this and that. He obviously needed to get some things off his chest."
Well, that's nice ...
"But then he said he felt scared sometimes while on stakeouts, so that was another layer ... he told me, man-to-man, that he wanted someone else in the car in case something happened. He specifically said, 'So someone can call my mom for me if I get hurt.'"
Here's where a cynical person could say that the guy just didn't want to sacrifice one of his actual friends, should things go south. "And since we were watching the house of someone deep in debt for some company, it got me wondering whether this situation could get violent, and if that's why he needed someone else. I kept thinking we'd be killed that entire night."
People Keep Thinking It's An Undercover Dating Site
In a world in which you have to be coy about advertising escorts, it's common to find customers who don't know they're renting a friend; they think they're renting a "friend." One woman who insisted on hitting on John kind of wouldn't take no for an answer.
"Even after I told her, she kept trying to be seen and have her picture taken with me on her phone to prove that she had a boyfriend. She also tried kissing me, but every time, I told her, 'Friend rental. I'm not allowed to do that.' She'd complain and call me a prude, but she'd wait until people passed by to hear ... I did everything I could to give a quick goodbye and fast-walk onto the train."
He says he was hit on by guys too. It's one of those things that is probably inevitable with a service like this, but it's a rule they can't break, not even once. Word gets around. "We're actually warned about it. My site is worried about its reputation going from 'friends' to 'friends with benefits,' and we're told not to have a date when we're working. When we're not being paid, we can hook up with them if we'd like, but not during."
It's the kind of thing you have to avoid if you don't want the cops kicking down your door, even if you're just providing a service that lots of lonely people desperately want. But there's always one service they want even more ...
Related: 5 Things You Learn Pretending To Be A Businessman In China
So Many Are Just Desperate For Someone To Listen
In this era, it doesn't matter who you are, where you live, or how much money you make. There's a fair chance that you don't have a single person you can confide in. When customers say they just want someone to hang with for a day, what they often really want is someone, anyone, to help share their burden.
"A 'friend' I was matched with had tickets to a beer festival ... As soon as we met, he started talking about how his business had gone bankrupt and he didn't know what to do. It killed any good feelings I had. He was in a business I knew nothing about, and he kept explaining parts of it to me. It required a lot of importing from China, and he knew all the laws and procedures."
Here's where you get a crash course on how to be a good listener. Step 1: Be there and listen while the person talks. Step 2: Don't worry about Step 2, since most people can't manage the first one.
"He had been in a dark mood, but as we talked about it, he would say, 'Wait, I could do this,' and start writing something down. My ignorance on his work made him go through what he was doing. By the time the festival was closing, we were both drunk, but he had scribbled down plans to make a new company."
John looked the guy up later. It at least appeared that he'd followed up on his plan. He hadn't needed somebody to give advice, or reassure him, or impart knowledge. He literally just needed a working pair of ears. "Other times," says John, "it becomes a confessional, them outpouring all their anxiety and fears and everything. Like half are about being worried about the future ... When I get these, I always know what's coming. It will be drinking and outpouring after a few."
Another time he got matched with a woman for an afternoon, and it turned out she was going to have to give up the pet dog she was struggling to care for. She had to make a gut-wrenching decision, and just wanted someone to be there when she did it. John had to watch her pack up this sad dog and drive it to the shelter.
These are the hard things that can't be done over Snapchat, the low points in life when, above all else, we just need someone to be there. Paying for such a service is less than ideal (some of you probably think it's downright dystopian), but considering how many of John's clients became real unpaid friends later -- about 30 of them, by his count -- maybe this is just the way it is now. There are definitely worse things to spend money on.
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People Dangle Themselves From Skin Hooks (To Relieve Stress)
Even the weirdest behavior starts to make sense if you look at it through the right lens. Every "freak show" is in reality just a bunch of people trying to get by. Take body suspension, for example. That's the practice of jabbing thick hooks through your skin, then attaching those hooks to ropes and dangling from the ceiling. If you walked in and saw your grandpa doing that, you'd probably think it was strange.
But the people who do this regularly swear by it. We reached out to a veteran body suspensionist, the Bond-villain-sounding Tiax Psytiax, about why in the hell somebody would do this.
WARNING: Contains unsettling pics of the thing we just described.
Things Don't Go Wrong Often, But When They Do, It Can Get Ugly
There are lots of ways to do body suspension, but they all involve piercing hooks through your skin and hanging yourself off the ground.
Naturally, this leads to a lot of questions, most involving the word "Why" (the question may simply be that word, screamed very loudly). The next question would probably be, "What if your skin tears?" The answer is that it happens, but not often. We're getting this part out of the way first, in case any of you are about to rush out to try this with the supplies in your garage.
"That's actually a nice feat of the body. Skin is incredibly resistant and strong," says Tiax. "I weigh around 165 pounds, so we usually put two hooks for a regular suicide suspension . So that's 82.5 pounds per hook. And it holds. Twice I held another person in my arms while I was doing a body suspension. And then I asked someone to push us so we would be swinging."
But?
"That all being said, when you have an amateur or inexperienced person hooking you up and they put a hook somewhere where it will not have even weight distribution, bad things happen. (Pros raise you a tiny bit after hooking to make sure it's all good, amateurs do not.)"
OK, if you're squeamish, you may want to bail out now.
"Now, sometimes skin does tear itself, usually because the hook was placed somewhere the skin was too thin (e.g. the forearm or knees). If it happens, depending on how serious the injury is, people will stitch the skin back together using a thread and needle (sterilized, obviously), or the person will be sent to the ER."
Last chance!
"The worst I ever saw was a poorly rigged-up guy having a wad of skin rip up like paper for four inches -- in fact, from over a decade doing this, I only saw two go wrong. But one of my friends in Basel, on a trip to Germany, saw the 'Superman' style (hooks are in your back so you are floating up) go wrong. The hooks on his shoulders failed and he hit the ground from the chest up -- only the hooks were still holding the skin. They rushed him to the hospital, the skin was easily sewn back on, and he was back to suspending within a month."
The fact that the guy didn't immediately find another hobby says something about the allure. We'll have more on that in a moment. But this does require a professional. A Florida man nearly fell to his death during equipment failure in the rigging. Ripped wounds may not close properly, forcing the need for emergency care. Gifted suspenders can actually tell when their skin is tearing and how much time they have until stitches are required.
"It's safe," says Tiax. "It's like flying. People have been doing this long enough that all the kinks have been worked out and we know what to do and what the warning signs are if something is about to happen. It's why it's so rare nowadays. We've practiced it so much. No one has died from this. To us, that tiny risk is worth it for what we get back."
And what is that, exactly?
Related: 5 Certifiably Insane Things People Do To Relieve Stress
It's A Natural (And Mostly Harmless) High
"Body suspension gives you a very strong high for two reasons," says Tiax. "The first one is that having hooks put through your skin and then having yourself lifted using them creates a massive endorphin rush. The second one is that once you're in the air, without any limbs in contact with the ground, you're gonna feel like you're floating. We get some former drug addicts who want that same high, but can't go back to drugs because they are tested for them."
If you know that guy or girl who's full of piercings, they can tell you why they keep going back -- it's that same high, only to a lesser degree.
"I must have got like 20-25 different piercings in my entire life," says Tiax. "I realized that I liked the act more than the final result. At some point, it was more like, 'OK, I'm gonna do a piercing this evening, I don't really care which one.' There was a sort of mild addiction to the small rush you get from having a metal needle put through you skin."
If this was a movie, he'd probably be depicted as descending into a terrifying underground scene of mutilation addicts. In real life, he just got invited to a quiet, low-key affair with a few people doing some suspension under the guidance of a professional. "The place I went to was a small private event ... the whole room was cleaner than a hospital, and everything he used (hooks, needles) was sterilized using an autoclave." Yeah, that part is super important. Getting gangrene from used people-hooks and dying of sepsis will in fact ruin your high forever.
It's true that you can find people doing suspension stage shows over ear-shattering industrial music. There's plenty of shock value for the uninitiated. But that's not what this scene was about. "Those Vegas shows and performances are nothing like how it actually is. It's just regular people being hung and gently swinging in hospital-like settings."
It Hurts, But Not Like You'd Think
We're not going to pretend here. This looks like it hurts a hell of a lot:
It's simple logic: Pain + body pressure = even more pain. But the body handles it in unexpected ways. "Your first time out might hurt a bit depending on your pain threshold (these are, after all, hooks going into your body for a bit), but once you find the sweet spot for weight distribution, there's no pain." No blood, either -- not if it's done right.
Still, first-timers tend to, you know, scream for awhile. Surprisingly, it's not for the reason you'd expect (that is, being skewered alive and hung up like a light fixture). "I saw people who started screaming once they were in the air." Tiax says. "They were screaming just because the sensation of floating but feeling your weight is totally foreign -- not because of any pain that might be there. Screamers usually stop after half a minute. Every single one always says the same thing: 'And then I stopped screaming when I realized that there was no pain.'"
That said, if it's pain you want ...
"The hooks that go in your belly pierce the skin in places with more nerves than the upper back, meaning you have to deal with a much more present pain. This is one of the few methods that have pain of any kind, and that's only because of the hooks on the belly area with all the nerve endings."
Otherwise, "We actually had a few people looking forward to pain come in, and they left sorely disappointed. Movies like Hellraiser show this as torture, when in reality it can be relaxing." In fact ...
It Serves As A Form Of Therapy
Technically, anything can be therapy as long as you get better, so we have choices ranging from acupuncture to emotional support turkeys. If it works, it works, regardless of how others may judge you. And there are plenty of people who swear by body suspension.
"People take one look at this and think to themselves, 'What a bunch of freaks!'" says Tiax. "Well, the first misconception is that body suspension is some kind of 'hardcore' thing to do ... from pictures, it's hard to get a feeling of this kind of very specific atmosphere. But I had several people tell me that after seeing a suspension in calm/private setting, their whole view of the thing was altered for the better."
Hey, acupuncture would be terrifying too if you didn't already know it was a thing. You just have to get past it. "You have 80-year-olds chatting with dudes in their 20s while suspended in nothing but shorts." Tiax said. "Put in a creepy rock background and it would look like a Gary Larson cartoon where two people talk about the banalities of hell."
"We have people walking in saying something like 'I need a form of stress relief' or 'I need therapy for my stress,' doctor's note in hand." Note that the doctor didn't specifically recommend body suspension -- there are few doctors that cool. But the patients don't see it as being much different from yoga (which, depending on the method, can hurt like hell). It's a choice between the one where you can dislocate your scapula and the one where you become your own personal swing set.
Well, there is another factor: Only one of them will probably freak out your family if they find you doing it. Then again, not caring about what other people think can be its own form of therapy.
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