RALEIGH -- With his split tongue, a tattooed scalp and earlobe piercings the size of hockey pucks, it's easy to mistake Richard Ivey III for a sinister character with angry, boiling insides - or a chap as peculiar as Queequeg, the doomed Polynesian whaler from "Moby Dick."
But spend a few minutes with Ivey, a bouncer at The Brewery on Hillsborough Street, and the quality that strikes you deeper than the holes in his body, or the ink under his skin, is his peacefulness. Speaking through a bushy orange beard, gazing through round spectacles, he shows the contentment of a cat resting in a sunbeam.
It's not a quality you expect from a 22-year-old who earns his paycheck knocking around with out-of-control punk rockers. But as a minister in The Church of Body Modification, Ivey can find peace at the end of a needle, or wholeness while dangling from hooks. He kills the pain inside by creating more of it on the outside.
"We're not out there for shock appeal," he says over bottled water at Cup A Joe. "I'm just a guy. I live up the street over there. I've got dogs and lizards and a girlfriend. I work at The Brewery and kick a little [butt]. I'm just a regular guy."
These days, Ivey finds himself on national television, explaining the loose tenets of his church to straight society, marveling that his tiny faith is suddenly on the talk-show circuit. Ever since Johnston County school officials suspended Ariana Iacono, a 14-year-old church member, for wearing a nose stud and then suggested she cover it with a bandage as a compromise, Ivey's cell phone won't quit ringing.
"Whoopi Goldberg was talking about something I'm involved with," he gushed.
There is no god in Ivey's church, no weekly Sunday service. Ivey applied online to become a minister, explaining that he chose his head tattoo to remind himself to always face the sun, and adding as an aside, "I'd also like to learn to play the banjo."
But nobody joins this church lightly. Ivey describes rituals as powerful and meaningful as communion or marriage. It's not a tattoo and piercing club. You hang from hooks.
For Ivey, the spiritual possibilities of tattooing became evident at age 18, after he broke with the Jehovah's Witnesses. As a boy in Raleigh, he knocked on doors and passed out copies of Watchtower. But when elders warned him not to contact former Witnesses, or even look them up on Google, he sought them out on message boards and shared his doubts about his mother's faith.
As Ivey tells it, he then distributed unflattering texts about the Witnesses, some of which ended up in the hands of lawyers with cases against the church. Ivey was ex-communicated and estranged from his mother on April 14, 2006, a date that now appears in ink on his body. Across his fingers, you'll find the word "Apostate" in Gothic script - the name given to people who abandon and often renounce a religion.
From the time he was 18, he has added a new tattoo or piercing every two or three months; some you couldn't show off in mixed company. But out on his own, without parental support, feeling a young man's confusion and regret, Ivey endured night terrors and panic attacks.
It wasn't until he tried suspension - taking six hooks in his back and hanging from an isolated tree branch for four hours - that he chased off those demons. He looked down and saw the earth turning without him, then stepped down to rejoin it.
"By subjecting my body to the same trials that my mind and soul had been through, they kind of got it together," he said. "I'm not saying hanging from hooks stops panic attacks and night terrors, but it worked for me."
He keeps one of the hooks on his keychain, and it looks big enough to catch a 5-pound bass. Keeping it close, and remembering the serenity it brought, helps him bash around with angry adolescents at The Brewery, listening to music he can't stand.
He wants to marry, have children, buy a house - all the trappings of normal life, all the wishes of a man at peace.
