By Greg Woehler
The Western Front

An evening spent at Langley, British Columbia's China Beach nightclub is usually torturous enough.

The combination of seizure-inducing strobe lights, Jay-Z's latest opus cranked to eardrum-rupturing levels and over-priced, watered-down drinks is enough to make most anyone beg for mercy.

For Tim Cridland, also known as Zamora the Torture King, it still wasn't nearly painful enough. Zamora, with his feats of self-mutilation, pain endurance and the help of his exotic and frightening assistant, Slymenstra Hymen, fascinated, shocked and horrified the eager China Beach crowd the night of Nov. 9 .

Actually, Cridland said he doesn't like the mutilation label.

"Some people like to throw around words like 'self-mutilation, he said after the show.' "It's not like that. If I were hurting myself when I push the skewers through my muscles, I couldn't do it night after night."

More on those skewers later.

Cridland is an alumnus of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow that toured with the first Lollapalooza. He also has appeared on FOX's "Guinness World Records" and "Ripley's Believe It or Not" TV shows.

He is a small, pale man with a long ponytail. He has permanent dimples on his cheeks from being pierced so many times and a slightly forked tongue.

On stage, he is a polished showman, hyping himself and his exploits. Off stage, he is subdued, understating the risks he takes.

Zamora started the show with some impressive, though not particularly shocking fire-breathing tricks.

Things continued in a tame, if increasingly kinky vein, as Slymenstra, a member of the band Gwar, demonstrated her prowess with a bullwhip while prancing around the stage in skin-tight shorts to the tune of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walking."

Zamora then upped the ante with the help of a bucket of broken glass. He poured the shards onto the stage and walked across them, holding the microphone near his bare feet to capture the crunching.

"Now we're getting somewhere," one audience member shouted.

"It's fake," another insisted.

"Dude, don't do it!" exhorted yet another.

Zamora told the crowd a person would have to be nuts to jump up and down in the glass. He then jumped up and down in the glass.

Still not done with the glass, he called for a volunteer from the audience and had her stand on his bare chest and jump while he lay in the pile of fragments. When he got up, his scarred, tattooed back showed many marks and indentations, but not a single cut.

Next came light bulb-eating and tricks with a rusty, razor-sharp knife. He also lay on a bed of knives while Slymenstra broke a cinder block on his chest. Zamora again showed his back to the crowd, revealing a row of knife marks, but no cuts.

Zamora and Slymenstra then took a short break and encouraged the audience to buy a drink or two to brace up for what was to come. He said what the audience had seen so far was merely a warm-up for the second half of the show.

"Oh my god, I can't believe he did that," Carolyn Sapach of Surrey said. "I didn't even want to look at some of that stuff."

Reminded that Zamora said the worst was yet to come, Sapach winced.

After the intermission came what one audience member described as "the most fucked-up thing I've ever seen."

Zamora told the crowd he needed to floss to clean out the glass he'd eaten in the first half of the show. He cut a yard-long length of string and swallowed it, inch by inch, until it disappeared down his throat.

Next, he took a scalpel - a real scalpel, no tricks - and made a small cut in his abdomen, about six inches above his navel. He slowly pulled out the string, hanging Christmas ornaments on it for an extra flourish.

Audience members stared, slack-jawed at the stunt. This was no joke or illusion; a man had just cut himself open and pulled a piece of string out of his chest.

He wasn't bleeding and he didn't appear to be in any pain. He talked to the audience the entire time; he wasn't even breathing hard.

Zamora appeared to be the calmest person in the room.

The next stunt seemed almost routine in comparison - the venerable bed of nails. Zamora added his own flair by placing a board on his chest and having four very large audience members stand on it.

It may have seemed ordinary compared to the flossing routine, but Cridland later said this actually was the most dangerous part of the show.

"I always think that whenever I get somebody from the audience on stage it's dangerous because you never know what they're gonna do," he said. "I know a sword's gonna do what it's supposed to, but a human being, what are they gonna do?"

Now back to those skewers.

For his finale, Zamora used three foot-long metal rods, about the diameter of guitar string, but stiffer.

He drove the first through his right forearm. Not just through the skin, but clean through the muscle.

"Sometimes I scrape against the bone, but not usually," Cridland said.

The next spike went through the left bicep muscle. Unlike the first, which slid through fairly smoothly, this one began to bend as Zamora stabbed it into his arm.

With a clenched jaw and furrowed brow, Zamora struggled with the stubborn skewer, all the while continuing his narrative.

"It's twisting up like a corkscrew," he told the crowd. Several in the audience grimaced and bit their lips.

Finally, the skewer worked its way through. Again, Zamora was not bleeding and didn't appear to be particularly uncomfortable.

He plunged the third into the space beneath his tongue and pushed it downward until it poked through below his chin.

Cridland later said the one through the bicep had in fact caused some distress.

"Yeah, that one was a little uncomfortable," he said. "Nothing that hasn't happened before though."

Cridland said his worst injury happened a few years ago during a stunt where a board was broken over his back.

"It was this sort of kung fu thing I did and I think I broke my rib," he said. "But I went on with the show," "I learn from mistakes. I looked back on that and learned that I was breathing wrong."

Thursday at China Beach was just another night for Zamora and Slymenstra. Friday they were in Victoria, and then in Vancouver on Sunday. They will be on a Canadian tour for the next three weeks, performing five to six nights per week.

Just as long as Zamora keeps breathing right.