By now, my room had turned into a Medieval apothecary of salves and swabs – but nothing worked. In his memoir Self-Consciousness (another key text in the mini-bibliography of skin ailments that I have built up), John Updike writes about the medication prescribed for psoriasis in the 1940s:
Siroil was … a bottled preparation the consistency of pus, tar its effective ingredient and its drippy texture and bilious odour deeply involved with my shame. Yet, as with our own private odours, those of sweat and earwax and even of excrement, there was something satisfying about it, an intimate rankness that told me who I was.
Siroil, he recalls, softened the silvery scales but otherwise did very little: ‘Nor did abstaining from chocolate and “greasy” foods like potato chips and French fries do much visible good.’ Though, he goes on, ‘as with many palliations there was no knowing how much worse things would be otherwise’.
That was precisely it. You had a suspicion that it was the oily eggs in the dining hall that were exacerbating the problem; or the huge vats of milk from which we filled our cups; or the packs of greenish braai meat that we ate on sports awaydays. But there was no way of running clinical trials on yourself, or of getting accurate data. There was no control; the range of variables was too immense. My body was running as an entirely uncontrolled experiment that I wanted to be left alone with, me and my useless creams, the insinuating odour of TCP and tar-smelling shampoos and carbolic soap – sharp chemical stinks that told me who I was.
‘What the fuck are all these strange potions? God …’
The only person I could tolerate on the subject of my skin was Johnno. He didn’t go in for charity or concern, but he didn’t sugar any pills either. He was more than ready to talk about body issues when I wasn’t (but needed to), discoursing happily about his itching arse (‘Isn’t it gorgeous to scratch, though?’), or his paranoia that one pec had ended up bigger than the other, or the way he needed a whole sheet of newspaper to mop up after two-fiving, you know?4 Who didn’t give rocks about ‘school spirit’ and the motto ‘Quit Ye Like Men’ and these other sacred phrases, because this was the place where he lived, and he saw it for what it was: an isolated rural community of alcoholics (physics), ex-military personnel (geography) and permaculture enthusiasts (biology).5
‘You’re a siff creature, but I love you.’6
Is it stretching it to read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as an allegory for late-onset Acne vulgaris? Sure, but when the unflappable cleaning lady refers to Gregor Samsa with rough affection as ‘You old dung beetle’• – the most humane moment in the whole story – that is the kind of tone Johnno took around me, and I loved him for it.
I would suggest that those who have undergone chronic skin complaints understand something beyond a simple mind/body split. Some kind of deep evolutionary awareness, as you see your skin for what it is: an ill-adjusted interface between self and world, a work in progress – or rather a work in regress. But this is getting too theoretical: having (had) bad skin also means that you are never too ready to engage in speculation that moves too far away from itching and pus and scabs and blood. The whole of analytic Western philosophy – a closed book. Rather give me Coleridge and his journals full of haemorrhoids•.
We can’t, I think, bear very much physiological reality. We can’t hold in mind the shockingly material basis of our existence for more than a nanosecond without blinking, psychically. The disgust turns us away, a mental flinch that keeps us safe from thinking about our dying bodies. But for the sufferer of severe acne who has worn that disgust on his or her face (and back, and chest), there is, I like to think, a deeper flicker of awareness. When I see a badly pockmarked face, I feel this person has special insights: a particular, hard-won consciousness into words made from flesh.
Would Charles Bukowski, one of his biographers asks, have become the cult writer that he did had he not suffered from such severe Acne conglobata? In Ham on Rye, he describes a condition of cystic acne so bad that his ‘boils’ (not strictly accurate) are displayed as a medical curiosity and mercilessly drilled with hot electric needles. They explode on his shoulders during rifle practice and leak through his woollen shirts. Yet Bukowski also registers one of the stranger elements of the affliction, that it is bizarrely engrossing to watch all this happening to your body:
I got through the term but the boils got worse and worse. They were as large as walnuts and covered my face. I was very ashamed. Sometimes at home I would stand before the bathroom mirror and break one of the boils. Yellow pus would spurt and splatter on the mirror. And little white hard pits. In a horrible way it was fascinating that all that stuff was in there. But I knew how hard it was for other people to look at me.
Pus: disgusting enough, but a fairly familiar concept. It is when we get to those ‘little hard white pits’ – these epidermal gallstones, these sesame seeds of God knows what – that a frisson of the shockingly alien body reasserts itself. The father figure in Bukowski’s cartoonish autofiction makes the son apply a brown, burning ointment, then insists that the boy leaves it on for much longer than the instructions advise. The procedure leaves him so badly burned that he has to sit on the edge of his bed rather than lie down in it. ‘That son-of-a-bitch doesn’t want to get well,’ his father shouts. ‘Why did I have to have a son like this?’
By contrast, my acne provided some of the most intimate and touching moments I ever had with my parents. As I lay on the couch in antibiotic languor, my mother once asked if she could rub cream into the spots on my back. It seemed almost biblical to me in its generosity, the equivalent of leper washing. Driving to Zoo Lake and the bus that would carry me from Johannesburg back to school, my father opened up about how painful the boils were that he suffered at school. He put his bad skin down to the fruit shortage after the war, when pupils at that Sussex school were given only one orange per week (the spider-bite argument). But underneath his words I could sense an epidermal solidarity, and a larger acknowledgment of genetic responsibility.
These were the last few years before the internet became woven into the fabric of daily life, and it is hard to remember how scarce information could be. Today there are countless acne support groups online, but back then I had to quilt together a self-help manual from much less abundant and more arbitrary sources. One day I came across a fashion magazine in which a female columnist reflected on how, for some reason, ‘old, healed-over acne, I mean like Richard Burton scarring, don’t ask me why – is super sexy!’ Just a throwaway line, but I meditated on it endlessly: one day I would emerge with a ruggedly handsome face, alchemically transformed into the acme of male sexiness.
From randomly culled bits and pieces I put together my own gospel of skin, a litany of satanic verses and self-help psalms that I kept returning to, holding them close to my chest. It was a Bible of scraps that guided my life in ways far more profound than the droning Anglican services that we were forced to sit through, conducted by a priest whose ears (everyone liked to point out) had been pinned back. Five hundred pairs of eyes were, you see, constantly searching over every body and face, looking for flaws, for points of entry.
A reading from the Book of David, Chapter One, verses two to five:
On the side of the devils:
Do they hurt? I bet they hurt.
Are you deformed or something?
You like monkey nuts, hey?
On the side of the angels:
Why mock him for something that’s not his fault?
Don’t ask me why, but old, healed-over acne is super sexy!
Come on, you old siffbag.
Thus spake Thabang of KwaMashu:
Yoh. They look sore.
Thus