I am 52. The passing years have relieved me of most of the horrors of adolescence—seething wrath against the parental entities, the almost carnal need for "he said-she said" exchanges performed in front of personalized lockers, fruity lipgloss—and although I do have small breakouts from time to time, they are mostly associated with the dwindling occurrence of menses. I got my first pimples in the sixth grade, and from then on the nightmare of teenage and then adult acne ravaged my face, shoulders and back, leaving me with what a gentler friend described as "ritual scarring." The condition was worsened by keloidism, and as the acne raged on, the scars and pits peppered my countenance until it was really more of a landscape than a face.
When the acne drug Accutane was introduced I was first at the dermatologist’s. I endured the monthly blood draws and continual badgering questions: "Are you pregnant, thinking about getting pregnant or perhaps pregnant without your knowledge?" Ha! You need a sexual partner to get pregnant and with a face like mine that was oh so unlikely. But the drug was a fucking miracle, I’ll tell you that. Within a week all of the zits had dried up and disappeared as if they had never been there. I could go two days without washing my hair. My skin hadn’t looked this good since my Terrible Twos. By the end of the regimen I was pretty much free of the painful, ugly, disgusting eruptions and I have remained mostly so all these years.
There have been exceptions.
Today, now, at this moment, I have a zit on my chin that I could describe as huge, but the words "tectonically induced" seem more appropriate. It began the usual way, as a small, reddish, slightly tender spot on the right side of my chin. I know not to fiddle with the damn things as this only makes them—yes my mother was correct—worse. But as the several billion souls who live along the Ring of Fire know, it is only a matter of time before you see activity from volcanic features not known to be active by even the most wizened of villagers. "No," says the typical denizen, shaking his or her greying head, "the mountain has never spat fire as long as we have inhabited this place. The gods have smiled on us and kept us safe." Well no longer, aged tropical village person.
"Zit." It sounds so miniscule, like the pitifully microscopic pinpoint on the peach-faced teen in the Clearasil ad. By day two the zit could be called a pimple. By last night I was addressing it as "Princess Carbuncle" and by this morning I was considering going to Insta-Care to have Her Highness escorted off the property. This thing is big, really big. It is an SUV of zits, the Goodyear blimp of boils. I have hot-packed it, padded it with witch hazel-soaked gauze, slathered it with healing balms and unguents to no good purpose. The dogs seem confused by it, as if some kind of hideous insect has landed on my face and I won’t do what any canine would do: brush it off, attack it playfully and then eat it. While lunching with a friend today, she steadfastly and I might add skillfully avoided looking at it but I did catch her glancing out of the corner of her eye at it. Honestly what could she do? It would have been like not looking at a bad wreck as one drives by. One might as easily have avoided staring down a kraken.
I’m not really sure what to do other than hide out for a few more days and hope that the thing eventually runs it’s pimply course and dries up; but I can’t help but think about Harry Truman up on Mt. St. Helens. What a shock when that thing blew.