ESSAYS
Stuff I’ve PickedLOS ANGELES 11 June 2009 |
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I lied to everybody except my best friend, Lisa, about how I’d gotten a massive scab on my chin. This was a couple of years ago now, but at the time, I told everyone I’d gotten drunk and fallen on my face, a lie that aroused suspicion in not a single person who heard it. What actually happened was that I’d aggressively made out with a particularly repulsive man whose face stubble had eaten through my skin until it was a bloody mess. Literally, a bloody mess. There was blood dripping down my chin at the end of this make-out session. It took over a month and a half before my face healed.
Normally, I wouldn’t lie about making out with a random guy, but this one wasn’t someone I made out with for fun. He had a split tongue, like a snake, and there was really no way I wasn’t going to make out with him. When a man has a split tongue, you must. You simply must. I don’t know how else to describe it, other than that I didn’t have a choice in the matter.
It was so fascinating that I allowed this making out to go on long enough that he scraped off my skin and I had to live with a disgusting wound that would crack open and gush blood once every three days. What can I say? I smile a lot, and when you smile, the giant scab on your chin is likely to split open. Plus, I’m a picker. I’ll fuck with scabs until they’re raw. I can’t stop myself. When this make-out wound had gone a week without splitting, I went to see a movie with Lisa. I fucked with it through the whole movie, cause the lights were out and nothing you do counts when the lights are out. At the end of the movie, I looked at my hand, covered in blood, and turned toward Lisa.
“Is it bad?” I asked.
“Dude, it isn’t good,” she said.
I actually think the movie was There Will Be Blood, come to think of it, and that’s pretty funny.
There was also that time I sliced the tip of my finger off on a meat slicer in high school. I wrote about it, but I don’t feel like going all the way back in the TNB archives to find it, and even if I did, I can’t remember how to make a link. Anyway, I sliced the tip of my finger off, and I spent many months after picking off the scab that covered the tip-less area, letting it heal, then picking it again. Eventually it healed all the way, luckily for me, in the shape of a fingertip. I don’t know how that worked out so well.
I just recently finished picking off all the scabs on my feet and toes from the scooter accident I was in. They weren’t ready to be picked off, but I couldn’t help it and I fucked with them until they had loose edges. Then I used a toenail clipper to clip off the edges of the scab, but I couldn’t get a close enough cut, so I just ripped them off, painful as it was. Then they bled more, and now there are new, smaller scabs. I’ll be getting at them soon, I imagine.
Another thing I do, another thing I can recognize as remarkably gross, is dig my fingernails into my gums until they bleed. I love this feeling. It’s fantastic. It tingles and throbs, but never hurts. And then there’s blood, bitter, metallic blood, that seeps out over my teeth, and if I look in the mirror, it looks like I’ve been in a fight because my teeth have blood on them. Then I can make up a story for myself about how I got into a fight, what I did wrong to deserve to be punched until there was blood on my teeth. When I’m thinking about that, I don’t have to be thinking about what’s really happening, which is usually nothing, and I hate when nothing is happening. My fingernails are long, especially my pinky nails, and people frequently tell me I have nice “coke nails,” but I only use them for making my gums bleed. I don’t do coke. I do drink Diet Coke, though.
Sometimes I think about things that make me cry, and I like this, too, because crying is romantic. But then, I’ll see my cats, Wetzel and Hege, and I’ll think, I can’t let them see me cry. I have to be strong for them. And this truly makes no sense at all. They don’t give a flying fuck if I cry. And I don’t have to be especially strong for them, anyway. They’re cats. And I’m fake crying , so I’m not even showing legitimate weakness. Rather, I’m just living in a bizarre fantasy land and my cats, little assholes that they are, interrupted.
My friend’s mother just came by my apartment building, because my friend lives here, too, and I got really nervous. I always get nervous around my friends’ parents. There wasn’t even an exchange, but I got nervous anyway. I live in constant fear of offending people’s parents. I once got nervous when I was at this friend’s mother’s house and made a point of telling her “I’M NOT A WHORE!” I wasn’t being accused. I have no idea why I did that. I would try making my gums bleed in times like that, but it’s kind of gross to watch. I know because I’ve watched myself in the mirror.
That guy with the split tongue was always nervous around me, the way I am around parents. The left half of his tongue would get curled under and he’d have to stick his tongue out and unfold it on his lips. He thought he was doing it subtly, but he wasn’t. I suppose this is what a person lives with once he’s split his tongue in the name of some sort of symbolic reptilian transformation.
He had just about everything on his body pierced- yes, including that part, and also parts you didn’t know could be pierced. He had removed his nipple piercings because they bothered him and got infected. He said he picked at his infected nipples for months before they healed, and when they healed, he said he missed picking at them. I understand that. I’m already sad the scabs on my toes are going away. He was a really nice guy. I hope he’s doing well, even though his stubble temporarily destroyed my face.
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