This then was a final historical threshold crossed in those days, one in which severe, Bukowski-type acne became, like smallpox and the rinderpest, a thing of the past – at least for the middle classes who could afford it. Such an effective cure also performs a different, psychosocial function. It retrospectively redefines a condition as clinical, as no longer the result of moral failing or monkey nuts, but rather as a technical glitch, a malfunctioning part that can be 100 per cent fixed by (in this case) intervening in the body’s vitamin A cycle. After six months of redness, drowsiness, dry lips, aching bones and vivid Roaccutane dreams, my skin began to clear. And clear. Entirely. I emerged with unclouded brow and smooth, noble cheeks – cheeks people even seemed to want to touch to confirm it was true.
With my newfound matric confidence, I joined Johnno for one final return to the stage. We came out of retirement to play the comic duo of Stephano and Trinculo in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the tinpot colonists and drunken tormentors of Caliban who want to make money by displaying this ‘most delicate monster’ back in Naples.
Our drama teacher, succumbing to the age-old temptation to update the Bard, had decided to present the production as an exercise in New Age psychedelia. A ‘tempest’, that is, that was all in the mind, soundtracked by that trance-like, tear-jerking strain of 1990s house music: coruscatingly banal three-note melodies given the full symphonic treatment, long build-ups and epic, hand-raising breaks.
From the moment Johnno entered stage left, the entire centre of gravity of the play was wrenched off balance. Rather than being the tale of arch-magician Prospero, wrongfully deposed king or freedom fighter Caliban, rightful owner of the island, it became mainly about Stephano and Trinculo – and substance abuse. Prospero looked on annoyed at our hammed-up scenes of drunken brawling, of feeding Caliban booze until he worshipped us like gods: A most ridiculous monster, to make a wonder of a poor drunkard!
Somehow, the wedding masque of Act Four (a courtly dance of nymphs and sprites) was reimagined into a strobe-lit club scene of podium dancers – or rather, one podium and one dancer. All through rehearsals Johnno would be bending the sound guy’s ear, telling him to turn it up when that moment came, but, like, really turn it up.
When the smoke parted and the opening notes of Robert Miles’ ‘Dreamland’ tinkled forth, there he was: centre stage on a big black box, wearing nothing except what looked like his Standard Six underpants, weaving his arms like slow, copulating snakes as the music built and built, sticking out his buttocks, styling, spanking, swirling, crouching, cranking, working his way up from a down-and-dirty kwaito crouch until the snares rolled and the high pass filter fizzed like a filling bottle up and up and the bass finally, orgasmically, dropped.
It was the most extraordinary overcoming of bodily anxiety, the most flagrant and glorious throwing of caution to the wind that any of us had ever witnessed at that institution.
Today Johnno is a recovering addict, rehab counsellor and life coach who runs a support group called Man Kind. It is, he says, full of old boys from these ruinous private schools. But, for that moment, there he was, beckoning me from the wings onto the strobe-lit podium, beckoning us all, the audience who were also on their feet now, also raising their hands, entreating us, as if to say:
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
In 2009, Roche discontinued its wonder drug, stating that there were now several generics on the market. But it was more likely due to the lawsuits brought against the company, and the millions that it had paid out in damages. Search the internet and Accutane’s history of adverse reactions spans everything from irritable bowel syndrome to colon cancer, from moodiness to suicide – though there is little hard evidence and lots of speculation.
I still marvel at it. Surely no drug can be that effective? Surely it was some kind of Faustian pact, with consequences that are still lying in wait? Nonetheless, the miracle of the 1990s, for me, was isotretinoin. To echo those on online forums: it saved my life.
For years afterwards I had Roaccutane panics, fears that this magical transformation would not last, that the acne would return, the nodules would begin to form again on my shoulder blades and neck. I have been examining my skin very closely while working on this piece, expecting a sympathetic reaction transmitted like an itch or a yawn – as if the sebaceous glands will resume over-producing, turning into hard, septic little hazelnuts within my body again.
Today the vast communities of the web reveal that what seemed like a disgusting taboo is no such thing really. There are YouTube clips of people squeezing pustules and papules – ‘popping videos’ – that get millions of hits. The disgust has been democratised, alchemised into something else, something that links to the bodily humours, to being humane, or human, in a much fuller, more comic and chaotic sense.
Yet it seems almost more terrifying to live through the metamorphosis of adolescence now, during the final logic of the new world order that we saw arriving along with The Bold and the Beautiful. This was the promise that bodies could be reshaped, customised, troubleshot in every way. Teeth wrenched to order, chests filled out, skin magically cleared. Attention spans rewired, eyes lasered, trauma extracted. The limitless ability to improve the self, which began to reach into every cranny of our bodies, can come to feel like a war against the self.
Perhaps this essay is only superficially about skin, the skin part only skin deep. Perhaps it’s a veiled allegory for other things, miraculous transformations that weren’t so miraculous, or for the truly life-saving drugs that didn’t arrive in South Africa, the tragedy beginning to build under the surface of the Mandela years. Looking back, it sometimes feels as if a complex experiment, a one-off historical clinical trial, was being run on us new members of the international community, but that its hypothesis was not easily discernible and its results inconclusive.
I often think to myself: imagine being sucked back in time now, and having to live through it all again, the youth you only get through because you are young enough to take it. So perhaps this is just to say: look at all the bullshit I’ve been through (been in this shit since ’92). But also to honour the secular gospel of literature – so unflinching, so forgiving, in that order – as well as the book of random kindness that saves some of us from the ultimate form of self-harm. Maybe you got out altogether too unscathed, accelerating away like Johnno over the fields, arms pumping high. Or maybe you never really understood the damage done, and never will.
Image of ‘Milton College’ (1972), courtesy of Dirk Hartford.
1 blind: (1) adj. highly embarrassing; (2) ‘a blind one’, n. an embarrassing moment, a faux pas; (3) to pull blind, vi. to make a fool of oneself, to commit a faux pas. Origin: unknown, possibly from the shutting of eyes when embarrassed.
2 red-beard: n. a term for someone with bad acne (derog.) Origin: acne being likened to a red facial beard.
3 wise: adj. cocky; slack; insubordinate; ‘cheeky’ to seniors (e.g. ‘These Standard Sixes are too wise; they need a spine-talk). Often used in the paradoxical statement: ‘You’re getting too wise; you need to wisen up.’ Origin: too clever by half?
4 2-5 (two-five): (1) v. to masturbate (e.g. ‘He was bust two-fiving last night’); (2) n. someone known for excessive masturbatory habits; one who has been caught in the act. Origin: from ‘two testes’ and ‘five fingers’ and the fusion thereof.
5 rocks: