The Pimple

Some years later, Johnny asked Corey, “Do undergrounders go away?”

They were riding dirt bikes in the shrub oak forest behind the school. Johnny felt they were too old to be doing this but didn’t want to admit it in case Corey still enjoyed it like old times. They were entering high school together now and to Johnny’s distress, though it had subsided and reappeared several times, a cycle he was not easy with but in general had gotten used to, the pimple’s current absence seemed to be stretching into perhaps a permanent, complete -- and therefore terrifying -- disappearance.

Corey squinted at him. “Earth to Kluber: Where does this come from?”

Johnny laughed, pretending to share the joke. “I was just remembering that time when you educated me on blackheads and zits in general.”

“Yes, a remarkably ignorant lad you have always been.”

“So, do they?”

“Undergrounders? I suppose they can subside, though in my very limited personal experience, I believe they usually come to a head. In fact, my cousin Val had one on the side of her nose that actually hardened then came off. Boy, did she have a lousy prom year.”

They did some twirls and skids, routine stuff, falling both and laughing in their practiced I-meant-to-do-that way, their hearts evidently not in it after all. Cracking voices and hair in new places seemed to be dulling the pleasures of too-small dirt bikes in the woods.

“Why, got another beauty?” Corey asked.

“Had one, but it just went away.”

“Aw. You seem sad.” He kicked Johnny’s bike. “Hey. Maybe turn your attention to something you haven’t thought of before, instead. You know, girls.”

The jibe spurred a race off the trails and out of the woods and through the neighborhood.

That night, Johnny probed and prodded and lay awake looking at the ceiling far into the night, wondering where the beloved bulb of private pleasure-pain could have gone. Was it his diet? It had been a few months since he and Corey had joined the school’s track team, and with it adopted a regimen of eating more protein, plus working out with some weights. At the outset, he had been concerned that an increase in the amount of sweat might irritate the pimple, causing him to favor it with his attire and even his gait. He secretly bought ace bandages in preparation. But the opposite had occurred and with the new, marked increase in physical activity, the pimple appeared to be completely gone. It had not even left a void. His fingers could feel no trace of it, his cellphone camera found no sign of it. It was as if it had never been. He ached.

His hope was that it was perhaps like a cancer; that the pimple may have indeed subsided for the present, but that it would recur sometime in the future, perhaps just as it had before, perhaps in some even more aggressive form. This was not a death wish, he consoled himself, but an honest appraisal of a phenomenon which had given him something he did not get from any other source. What that was, he could not articulate. But aware of it he was, and of its absence painfully.

Each time it did come back, ever larger and an ever greater imposition, he felt better, stronger, comforted, game to take on the challenges of school and the minefield of peer relationships. Each time it subsided and remained away, perhaps never to return, he was bereft, withdrawn. Waiting for the next eruption was an agony.

His anticipation of the pimple’s next recurrence, whenever that might be, began to dictate the choices he made in life. It was his first thought: Were the pimple to return, how would it affect x, if I were doing x, or would it prevent y, were I to consider doing y? As high school progressed and academic performance began to matter, what he struggled with most was wondering if the pimple would want him to pursue a career that involved sitting at a desk for long periods of time, or something more physical that had him out and about, moving, walking, traveling? This steered his efforts in pursuit of excellence in subjects that would get him into college programs with suitable potential job outcomes. He was fortunate in that whatever academic subject he put his mind to he did pretty well in. He was not one of those poor saps who got good marks in one subject and struggled to get passing ones in others. He had a reasonable facility for all subjects — and no love for any one in particular. His book was open, and he only awaited the pimple to fill in the agenda. He considered pursuing medicine, likely dermatology, with a shadow of shame. It seemed inappropriately invasive for him to be too interested in his secret phenomenon, his prized hidden visitor. Something there was deep inside himself, rooted like conscience, that told him not to inquire too much, not to investigate. Awkwardly, it struck him as akin to religion. He seemed to be asking himself — no, he seemed to be already convinced — not to look too deeply into his pimple-ness, but to merely accept it, on faith. Faith that, even as its absences seemed to grow longer and longer, stretching now into medical school, the pimple would inevitably return.

Thus it was several years later, as a medical resident, that he one day felt a distinctly luxurious and familiar twinge at the top of the back of his left leg.

“What’s wrong?” said Sheila, who was underneath him, striving, panting, nearly home, legs wrapped around him. “Is someone coming?” They were sneaking a quick one in the anesthesiologist’s bunker.

“No, just… just…” He didn’t know what to say. It was their fourth or fifth time together and he felt guilty as she seemed to be much more engaged than he was, although he found her physically attractive. At least, attractive enough to… well, usually.

“Johnny, what is it?” She tried to look into his eyes but he closed them. So she licked his neck, pulled him in tight, glided her nails up his back, things that heretofore had irresistibly excited him to the point of finishing. But it was all he could do to keep from shouting with joy over something utterly other than her.

This would be awkward. They were both on Dr. Shoengren’s team and spent over seventy hours a week together. Some of the team called them mister and missus already.

But it was hard to care about any of that. For the pimple had returned.

Over time she accepted it and he soon observed tell-tale signs of her taking up with another resident and gradually they had very little to do with each other.

What he had more and more to do with was the pimple. It was back, with intensity.

Dr. Shoengren himself was the first to notice he was walking funny.

“You pull something?” he asked.  

“I think, maybe,” Johnny said. Easier to just agree than to explain the unexplainable.

The doctor suggested Johnny consult a doctor, if he could find one in the hospital. Johnny laughed at the joke. But others noticed the change, too, and remarks were made. He shrugged them off and made no specific excuses, only vaguely that he had indeed pulled something or old sports injury or slept wrong, whatever he deemed the quickest way to end the conversation or change the subject.

He had to get bigger pants, and to do more laundry as there was now sometimes a discharge of serum. Medically, he suspected that it probably needed to be lanced, that it had gone beyond a mere pimple and become possibly a boil or a carbuncle, but at heart he was still the little boy filled with awe and wonder at that warm itchy-painful thing atop the back of his thigh and he did not want anyone else ever anywhere to know about it or to change it, much less to cure it. To cure it would be to kill it and to kill it would be — in some important way that he, again, did not want to articulate -- to kill him. And he did not want to die, not when living meant such richness as this, to lay at night in the warmth and the itch with the pimple, all the rest of the world oblivious and outside, not even knowing what it was missing.

The migration started in the last year of his residency, and he welcomed it. As his accommodative deformity increased, his residency, so to speak, nearly withered. It now appeared unlikely that he was going to get a good position at any major urban hospital anywhere in the country and that instead he should look at regional hospitals in poorer areas. This did not matter to him as much as he knew it should when he noticed with great interest and some alarm that the hard, red, probably fluid-filled head of the enormous pimple had subsided — but that now there was a raised bump on his belly, just posterior and left lateral to the xyphoid process. He noticed this while on a brief suggested leave from duty as he lay in a shaded cabana on a Fort Lauderdale beach, reading science fiction novels. For the previous two days the book he had been reading lay flat on his tummy when he put it down to doze. But now it was sliding off to one side.

“What the…?”

There. A little raised area, redder than the sun-blasted pink of the rest of his skin. No bigger than a pinhead as of yet. But out of acorns mighty oaks grow. He flagged down a beach peddler and ordered two margaritas to celebrate, almost wishing he was not alone on this vacation. But then again, he wasn’t, was he?

Upon his return to the hospital, on the strength of this promising reunion, he recovered his professional stature somewhat over the last nine months or so of residency and headed into the board exams with confidence. By patient observation he determined that the pimple on his chest, rapidly growing in tightness, redness and proportion, was in fact the pimple, thrusting upward and forward from (his) behind, and not a second, entirely separate manifestation. Don’t ask me how I know, he told himself, it just is. I know it.

His parents hadn’t seen him in some time and upon greeting him at his graduation his mother gasped. The enormity atop the back of his left leg having shrunk, there was now a distinct prominence off-center in his chest, making it difficult to give normal hugs.

“Jesus, Johnny, go to a doctor!”

“Yes, son, have that looked at,” his father said.

“It’s all good, all good,” Johnny said and took to side-hugging them both simultaneously by standing between them.

“Is it thyroid?”

“Diabetes?”

“Elephantiasis, for Christ’s sake? Jesus!”

His mother drank too much at the party and left weeping.

He got a position as a consulting dermatologist in Sedona, Arizona. He had never been to the desert Southwest before and it was all new to him, but it turned out to be good for him aesthetically as he took to wearing all dark clothes that shrouded him head to toe, slimming him somewhat, as they say, and he spent almost all his time in air conditioning anyway. He liked the look, and the work was easy. Time passed and his below-the-waist proportions returned more or less to normal, such that anyone seeing him for the first time presumed he was merely obese, or even formerly obese and had lost a bit of weight recently.

Above the waist, the prominence grew, and he spent happy hours studying it right there before him where he could see it clearly, like a big dinner on a platter, without the need to perform awkward gymnastics. In fact, the spectacle was so beguiling that it was some time before he even noticed the other changes. The first clue was a Diamondbacks hat that, upon wearing it for the first time in the new season, folded down both of his ears, with the visor sitting right at brow level. It was an official Major League Baseball hat, not one of those cheap knockoffs with the adjustable hole-punch plastic fastener in the back. No, this hat he had bought at the stadium shop last season at full price, after trying on several to make sure it fit right.

Now the hat was too large. Much too large.

It caused him to look at himself a little more carefully in the mirror. At himself, not Pimple. Now perspective can be a tricky thing, he knew, especially with self-regard. But it seemed uncomfortably clear to him that somehow his head was smaller than it used to be. And not only his head, but also his shoulders. That would account for the fact that the shoulder seams of his shirts had of late moved lower and lower, which until now he had attributed to the emboldening girth of Pimple, front chest and near-center. And not only his head’s size, and the size of his shoulders, but their proportions — these, too, seemed different. Even diminished. It seemed like his eyes were closer together (sunglasses no longer fit), and his nose was somehow less prominent (harder to pick because fingers didn’t fit), and didn’t he used to have more of a chin? And weren’t his shoulders squarer in the past, and not descended in so straight a line from that of his head and neck?

This was very troubling. He bared his chest and stroked Pimple. Its peak was hard, and moderately crusty, the serum discharge easily cleaned away. It was uniformly raspberry-red upon its top, changing as it sloped downward to first ruddy, then rosy hues until it merged with the usual pink-white Caucasian flesh he had always known. But this was to say there was no “head” per se. Nothing to lance or squeeze. It was not just a giant zit. He deduced this with a great degree of relief.

But was it then some kind of parasite? Was it growing, expanding, thriving — at the expense of the rest of his being? And like most parasites, when it, dear Pimple, was through with him would it leave him?

He tried to assess this threat objectively. Its plausibility. Its severity. The feasibility of potential remedies.

The aftermath. The devastation. The emptiness. If he were forced to be without it. What would life be? Whatever this thing that inhabited him, that was becoming him was, it was his and his alone, unique, irreproducible. It was not like he could shop at the store for a new one, were it by whatever means eliminated. Never again would he experience the satisfying wholeness that he now enjoyed, that enabled him to ignore and brush off all the rest of life’s disappointments. With Pimple, there was no fretting about losing interest in love or family. With the Pimple, no despair at professional mediocrity. With Pimple, no worry about the long fruitless years to come of solitary life in an arid wasteland full of stupid people dealing with skin cancer in a place where the sun was just too hot and intense to live.

Without Pimple? What would life then be like? No lover, no love, no family, no friends, stupid job, inhospitable landscape.

There was a new horror movie at the multiplex. He watched it twice. Theater nearly empty, he indulged by unbuttoning his shirt. Let Pimple see. Why not?

He hoped instead it was a symbiote, that they could go on living together in harmony. He stroked the warm hard peak of Pimple. He rolled the little crystals of dried serum between his fingers and let them drop among the detritus of popcorn and candy wrappers, muttering “Never mind,” in case Pimple was embarrassed.