BAD SKIN by Mark Wisniewski
I’m one of those people with faces so scarred by acne you have to look away. You know who I’m talking about. You don’t see us often, but you see us. And the rarity of our scars is why you look away. Or at least that’s my hope. My hope is that, if you or anyone looked at me long enough, you’d begin not to mind the scars. You’d grow comfortable with them, see behind them – all that stuff my mother used to tell me.
My mother never had scars, which I’ve always hated about her. Neither did my father. So the question is: How did I get them? When I was fifteen and there was very little chance I’d grow out of my acne without my jaw looking as if it had been mauled, I paged through all of the photo albums my parents’ parents had kept, and no one surfaced I could point to and blame. Which increased the likelihood that my mother had cheated on my father with some guy who’d had acne, which raised the question of why she would have wanted to sleep with a guy like that, the answer to which probably was her drug problem, something I knew about for sure because I lost a pet grass snake and looked for it in the forsythia in front of my parents’ bedroom window, and there, in the dirt between the trunks of two of those bushes, were these all-but-finished joints. There were also all-but-finished joints on the sill of their bedroom window, which I took to mean she’d hid them there after she’d smoked and exhaled out of our house to keep the smell from my father and me despite the fact that, at times, you could smell it on her clothes. I never found the snake, but six days later an old lady three houses up the hill screamed in her rose garden, so I knew it had made it out of our house okay.
The snake, I mean. My life was a different matter. It was never easy knowing your mother smoked pot secretly, maybe even secretly from your father, and that this secret possibly explained another secret of hers: she’d cheated on your father after she’d been so stoned she didn’t care whether the guy she cheated with had bad acne or acne scars and that he wasn’t using a condom – or using it properly.
He was her drug dealer, the guy she cheated with. And she did it with him not only because she was stoned but because she had no cash to buy more pot, leaving no choice but to go without or pay him with a little action. Or at least that’s the story I usually told myself. Because it made her sound fairly rational.
And because it made me feel kind of in the right when I began smoking the bits of pot left in her all-but-finished joints. Which I told myself I did to get over losing the snake. The snake had been something I’d wanted but didn’t get until I’d almost outgrown my desire for it. I’d wanted it for years before the acne hit but couldn’t have it because snakes were supposedly for bad kids and I wasn’t supposed to be a bad kid. Then, all at once, my mother and father both said I could have a snake, which meant I could go with the kids my mother had formerly called bad to the railroad tracks in the cemetery just outside town to catch one. Which was illegal because there was a fence on either side of the tracks and a no-trespassing sign and rumors about railroad “detectives” who walked along the tracks and hid behind boulders looking for people to arrest for trespassing.
That’s what the bad kids called them, “detectives.” I pictured men wearing trench coats and those kinds of hats spies wore in comic books. But when I went to the tracks to catch snakes, I didn’t see anyone of that sort. It was only the kids my mother had formerly called bad and me. And the kids my mother had called bad wouldn’t look at me, or at least not for very long, because my acne already had dug itself in. It was as bad then as it would become, but far worse than anything an average kid my age, good or bad, had seen on anyone else. The kids my mother had called bad pretended to have their eyes peeled for snakes on the tracks, but I knew they were watching the rails mostly to keep their eyes off of me. They said the snakes would be coiled up on either of the rails, trying to absorb warmth the rail had absorbed from the sun, but that was all bullshit. Or so I suspected from the start, then knew for sure when three kids ran off the rail bed to follow this sudden and frightening motion that began in a patch of grass beside one of the fences. That’s when I learned you don’t find snakes. The way it works is: snakes find you. And, if you’re brave enough not to mind diving face-first onto the broken bottles and rusted cans in the long grass snakes hide in, you might lay your hands on one. And if it doesn’t break in half, it belongs to you. Or anyone you want to give it to.
It could be the kid with really bad acne you want to give it to. Which you might do because you feel sorry for him because you know that, for the rest of his life, his neck will look like the rusted wheel well of a ’69 Ford Fairlane. You might not consider that, at some point in his life, it won’t much matter how he’ll look because hardly anyone will want to rest eyes on him. At least not for more than a moment or two anyway. Still, you might pity him enough to hand him the snake.
Maybe your pity for him lies deeper than how you feel about his skin. Maybe you, too, believe his mother gave birth to him because she must have cheated on her husband because neither she nor her husband had bad skin or scars or older relatives with bad skin. Maybe you know she cheated with a drug dealer because you smoke pot also, and you buy your stash from the same drug dealer, which can happen easily in a town with a population of 987, and the drug dealer once told you, when you and this drug dealer got stoned together and you were looking away from his scars, about the time he’d slept with her.
The drug dealer laughed about that sexual activity of his, and so did you, the formerly bad kid with good skin. It was funny to picture the kid with bad skin’s mother kite-high and naked and having sex with the pock-marked drug dealer, even funnier when you yourself were kite-high.
Or at least that’s how everything seemed to me. Especially after I’d finish an all-but-finished joint I’d find between the trunks of the forsythia bushes after my snake escaped from the cracked aquarium my father had found beside an alley one morning before the garbage truck came. Or after I’d smoke two or three of the all-but-finished joints I’d finally begun to take right off of my parents’ bedroom window sill. Which was frightening because there was always the possibility a neighbor would see me and think I was spying on my parents’ sexual activities, though not as frightening as the first time you see a snake trying to escape beneath grass. Seeing that snake was worse because, once I was sure my mother had cheated on my father, I figured our neighbors probably figured my parents probably no longer had sexual activity to spy on in the first place. At least if I were my father and my wife and I had good skin and everyone we were related to had good skin except my only child, I would have figured my wife had cheated on me, and therefore I never would have felt like doing the deed with her. Now and then I might be tempted, but then we’d kiss and I’d smell the pot on her breath and picture the pock-marked drug dealer who supposedly sold only gasoline and kerosene and beer and soda and candy bars and cigarettes doing it with her, and I’d stop. “Good night,” I’d say, and I’d turn off the lights, and that would be that.
And that last part isn’t my imagination or just me being stoned all these years later and letting my mind go. My father would say “Good night,” then turn out the lights, and that would be that. Which I knew from after I began not being able to fall asleep without at least two or three all-but-finished joints, so I’d tiptoe out of the house through the aluminum side door kitty-corner from my room to see what I could find in the forsythia bushes. It would take a while in the dark to find even one not-so-good all-but-finished joint, and while I’d grope through the cedar chips and peat moss, I’d hear their bedroom habits. Or lack thereof, I should say.
While I’d grope, I’d realize I was looking for something without being able to see much at all, and this would remind me of how kids in my class – I was a junior in high school then – would talk to me without looking at my face, and when I couldn’t find an all-but-finished joint for too long and therefore wanted one bad and my parents weren’t having sex but just lying there and maybe dozing off after that stupid, flat “Good night” by my father, I’d think about how me looking for some minuscule amount of pot without being able to see it was a lot like some kid at school maybe trying to get to know me without wanting to look at me, and this comparison would piss me off because, in both cases, you had a very inefficient and generally doomed process, but there was no way I could see the joint, whereas there was a way kids at school, if they wanted, could see me: if they liked, all they had to do was look. But that was the catch. If they liked. But of course they didn’t like. So they didn’t look. Which meant they’d never see behind my face and get to know me – whoever the I was then or might be someday – and that therefore they’d never hear me tell the story about that old lady three houses up who, all at once while she was pruning those roses in her garden on that Saturday morning, let out a scream so loud her husband came running out of their house and tripped on their uneven sidewalk and broke his fibula so completely the old lady fainted and was out so long my father had to call two ambulances, the second of which skidded to a stop over the gravel in the alley but not until it had rear-ended the first, which caused all sorts of insurance people to wind up arguing and cussing in our alley one sunny evening to the point that one of them had a minor heart attack, which brought back one of the very same two ambulance drivers in one of the very same ambulances, which stopped extremely gradually just short of that same patch of gravel in the alley, the presence of which led to more arguments among even more insurance people two weeks later, which wouldn’t have been a bad story to tell if someone were willing to listen to it the way people listen to stories that make them laugh – that is, when they listen and look at the person telling it. And no one tells a story as complicated as the one about me, the snake, the old lady, her old husband, and every single one of those insurance people – and does that story justice – if the person supposedly listening refuses to glance over at least once or twice, because when no one looks at you, the last thing you want to do is drag out an encounter with another human being by saying a word, let alone by telling a story. And no one with bad skin wants to make anyone smile, because if you see someone smile you tend to smile yourself, which only makes your scars look worse.
At times I suppose there could be an ambulance that would rush to the house of a guy with bad skin, and that it could whisk him away to a clinic where doctors could fix the kinds of scars I have, not the kind you can have worked on nowadays with dermabrasion or some of these other recent treatments, but the really bad scars on the kinds of people you glance at no more than twice.
Like the other day. I was at a stop light, one of those long ones. And this couple pulled up in the lane to my right. They were one of those good-looking couples, not with perfect skin but with the kind that might have allowed pimples for a while when they were teenagers or maybe even a few now and then despite the fact that adolescence is well behind them, but their kind of acne doesn’t mar the overall brightness or spontaneity of their expressions. The kind of couple who like to look at each other when they talk to each other, the kind that tell entire stories to each other, the kind that leave the lights on when they make out, the kind that, even after they’ve been married awhile, still make love. And the guy’s eyes wandered toward me and noticed my Corolla and the side of my face, which was all he needed to see before he looked straight ahead, as I was more or less doing. Then he glanced back at me again, which people generally do only to make sure I’m not looking at them when they’re about to tell someone else about my skin, and which I noticed with a glance of my own. Then he told his wife or whatever, “That guy has like the worst skin – Jesus Christ, take a look at it.” Which I knew he said because, when you have skin like mine, you get good at reading lips. And she looked over to check me out and caught me looking at her. Or I guess I could say I caught her. Then she also looked straight ahead and pulled her head back to try to hide it behind his, but I still read her lips to say to him, “I think he heard you.” And he said, “How? All of our windows are shut.” And, still looking ahead, he took his left hand off the steering wheel and used it to make sure his driver’s side window was all the way up, which I knew he was doing because I saw how his shoulder moved.
You get good at reading body language when you have bad skin. This is becoming a lost art in a time when medicine has a cure for just about every skin problem under the sun, including cancer. Another fairly lost art is how you part ways with someone you don’t like, especially if you’re a kid. Kids these days, I notice, are very mean to one another, verbally and nonverbally. They make no bones about who they don’t like and whether they want another kid to get and stay the hell away from them. It doesn’t occur to them, I don’t think, that you might swallow your discomfort just long enough to let someone with bad skin have a toke of your joint to sort of soften him up while you conjure some supposedly legitimate reason to leave his company, which is what kids used to do to get rid of my face during my senior year of high school and the year I went off to junior college before I learned junior college wouldn’t work for me. Or, if you’re younger, young enough to want to hang out at places like forbidden railroad tracks, that you might give a kid a snake or whatever to satisfy his motivation to hang out with you, so he’ll leave and you won’t have to think about his skin or yours or anyone’s. A gesture like that – giving a guy something he’s wanted for so long he’s almost outgrown his desire for it – can come off as pity, but it’s not. There’s a big difference between pity and disgust, which I guess I first learned the day my parents finally allowed me go to the railroad tracks. Disgust was all at once everywhere that day: in the shouting between my parents after my father accused my mother of cheating, in their eyes when they allowed me to trespass with kids they no longer considered bad, in the way those kids told me to keep my eyes on the tracks so all of us could avoid troublesome thoughts about my face. Actually you could say I learned about disgust that day but didn’t realize what I’d learned until now that I’ve taken a decent amount of time to tell the story of the old lady, the old man, the ambulance drivers, and all of those insurance people. Because it’s hitting me now that, from my point of view, it might have been nice to tell as much of that story to someone face to face, with mutual eye contact and laughs and maybe a joint shared between us as a supposed afterthought, but that, at this point in my life, I understand why it’s best for all concerned that I smoked alone to forget about bedroom habits or lack thereof, then sat down and wrote what I have of that story rather than cornered the newest woman in town to try to tell her as much out loud. Because this way, disgust barely affected anyone at all. This way, I can lie in bed tonight, or on any given night for that matter, and help myself sleep by telling myself that, if nothing else, at least one story I’ve known long enough to want to tell received something along the lines of what you and I might be able to call justice.
Mark Wisniewski is the author of a collection of short stories, All Weekend with the Lights On, and his novel, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, is in its second printing. His fiction has appeared widely in literary journals and won a Pushcart Prize in 1999. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.