On HPV
♠
It began simply with a dry scalp. I scratched my head in perplexity, and the snow of my scalp fell softly on my darker shirts. When wearing white I had only to screw my eyes up when shaking my head to see the twirling flakes catch whatever light lay around me, reflecting white yellow and gold in the corner of my eye. Motes of white pretty light, so pretty I’d scratch to see them, ignoring the burn of irritation, the itch of healing, just so I could shake my head to see an out of season snow fall to the ground, and melt away as only motes of light can. And to this day I wage war against that desire, to scratch, to itch, to see those flakes fade away in my surroundings.
And when I’d found a cure for the cause, healing shampoo that cooled the skin as it cleansed my hair, I found the pleasure of healing to be in direct relation to the amount of pain caused by my wounding fingernails. So I’d scratch to inflict pain, which in turn would be cooled and cleansed again, and I did so until there seemed no point, for the cure had taken away the beauty of the flakes and it did not snow anymore. Though there was pleasure in the cure, too, for the shampoo smelled and felt nice. Fresh. Clean. And in the place of my one bad habit I put another. I cleaned myself religiously. And the pleasure was almost as good as the pain.
A friend of mine used to tell me, when she’d heard of my daily regimen, that to clean yourself incessantly was bad for the skin. It robbed your body of essential oils, she said, oils designed to draw us through existence like lube in a tube, and we were supposed to pass through with as little friction and illness because of these oils on our skin, so we’d look healthy when we’d die, a sign of an unwasted life. I didn’t believe her, for how could pleasure be so detrimental? how could being clean dirty my life in that way? And yet, my dry skin, perhaps, or my antiseptic hair, maybe, puberty, probably, pimpled me over like a pickling cucumber, bumps and sores all over my face, neck and body. And I picked and plucked and touched them though I knew not to, and pampered my face with salves and lotions, creams and washes, to no avail. My regimen grew more strict, and I tried with all my resolve to dessicate my skin, for I thought oil to be the culprit, and dry is the opposite of oily if you spend any amount of time in the beauty cream aisle.
Of course it didn’t help that I’d picked up smoking, and no matter how clean you attempt to be when you’re a smoker, smoke has a tendency to get stuck in your hair, your eyebrows, your shirt collars, and in the lines of your face (and lines crop up almost immediately), and like sown dragon’s teeth, the zits popped up blood-red, armor oiled and gleaming. Of course it didn’t help that I started drinking early, mixed drinks of sweet things and strong spirits, because sweets, as we know, sweet things are bad for your complexion, and alcohol is generally detrimental for your system (not in moderation, sure, but when you’re a young kid chain-smoking smokes and getting drunk on schoolnights, moderation isn’t within your ken). Of course, add to that the frequency with which I’d neck with other young drunkards—smokers, every last one of them—whose nicotine saturated saliva would leak onto my cheeks, dry out and impregnate a few pores with pimple seeds. Needless to say it didn’t help my increasingly pock-marked face.
Acne dogged me through my adolescent years, and it was only around the time when I arrived at college that it miraculously disappeared. It’s very hard to believe in such miracles, harder still to consider them a part of growing up, so I continued to ply my face with creams and washes and cleansers and salves, partly to prevent even a single pimple from returning, and partly from habit. Now, imagine a butterfly in bloom, wings outstretching from a surrounding thick cocoon… because that’s what it’s like for someone so pimpled to become pimple-free. I felt alive, ready to sow my seed, for I thought I had something to offer (though I didn’t…not yet, not yet) and my newfound and supposed good-looks were a boon to any willing woman. And when I’d wake up next to some sleeping beauty and see where a bit of drool from my mouth had wet her cheek, colored pink and rosy as burgeoning pimples tend to color their surrounding skin, I’d pucker my lips to kiss the affected area, my role reversal complete, and I could sing in my mind the way I thought my adolescent lovers had done. I was a giver of gifts, you see, and they the recipients of not only my kisses, but the irritant that produced the welts on their skin, the nicotine redolent and alcohol saturated saliva from my unclean morning mouth. But you can only give gifts for so long before you’ll have to receive, and receive I did, with open arms, willingly, for when you’re that young you feel the need, the desire, to love and be loved, and the fake Adonis outside belied a weak Narcissus within.
Some gifts are better left ungiven, perhaps, or maybe we can’t know the value of a gift until a few years have passed; regardless, at some point within those first two acne-free years, I fell from confidence and was given HPV. Though I can now say to myself I know for certain who facilitated my fall (or my empowerment… just wait), and though I think at the time I knew then who to blame, my anger was clouded by desire, confrontation was put off to achieve some sort of relationship, which died as surely as my confidence was a lie, and I pursued, first in fact, later in fantasy, the idea of being with the woman who’d slipped me the disease. I remember going to our school’s tiny infirmary and watching in disgust as the nurse burned a wart off my extremity, and I remember her saying, “You’ll just have to find someone who you can trust implicitly, so you can have sex safely, again.” Again? I thought. I remember standing outside her office, smoking a cigarette, still disgusted, thinking, Well, that’s it. No more for me.
Later, with the obsession and drive that is the peculiar province of the sexually afflicted, I did my research (always, always surreptitiously) and I found, much to my elation, that the disease in question was of the commonest variety. So many had it that it was almost a certainty to have it hiding in your body—your skin, really—without your knowing it for years on end; and its effects, though annoying and ugly and marginally painful to remove, were, for the most part, benign. It is a rather wonderful disease in that respect, fully evolved to survive for as long as our race persists in not dying out, for there’s no way to protect against it, save for complete celibacy. And celibacy’s a joke. I was left with a feeling of shame, yet, for all the shame, it seemed silly to think about such a common disease in that way, punishing myself for the possibility of transmitting something as common as a cold. Though I did not actively seek out companionship, if a woman gifted me the use of her body for a night, I wouldn’t decline, though I didn’t feel the need to disclose the one pertinent fact that possibly, quite possibly, if she didn’t already, she might… because that would have just ruined the mood.
I didn’t feel that bad about not telling, and for the most part I don’t think I had sex with enough people enough times to be the ideal carrier (and sometimes in wistful moments I can actually imagine the disease being dissatisfied with me), but when I found out that the disease was in itself a causal factor in cervical cancer—cancer, of all things—I felt incredibly guilty. It’s one thing to pass along a gnarled nubbin as a token of a night passed together, but it’s an altogether different animal, a different organism, that is transmitted when you’re a carrier of a cancer.
Cancer points the mind towards dire thoughts, apocalyptic endings. Guilt welled up in my mind, deluging the past, and I thought apologetically of those charitable women who’d opened their arms only to embrace a viral syringe. It was not my fault, perhaps, I’d reassure myself in the more lonely moments of regret. But, after all, ignorance is no excuse, and an excuse, in any case, would be out of place. I had no intention of letting myself off the hook so lightly, not when, and here’s the rub, one, maybe two, of the women I’d slipped my own version of the disease had meant quite a lot to me. I suppose if I had truly felt guilty, if the guilt had not been couched in a puddle of self-pity, if my guilt did not spur me on to a desire for drink, an alcoholic anonymity of self, I would have called up my ex-lovers and informed them of their peril. But I was sick with guilt, and I was frightened by the implications of carrying a disease within my being, of the implicit trust that would be required for someone to say, I can see past your disease, it’s okay.
That being said, habit still reigned supreme. I’d drink to forget my disease, I’d drink to deaden desire, and yet, and yet, there’d still be opportunities that threatened my celibacy, and instead of doing or not doing, lying or coming clean, I’d allow the drink to buoy myself through the possibilities of a night, and inevitably swallow my impotence like a pill. For I could not tell and I could not do, and my conscience, such that it was, would awaken the next day, angry and annoyed, frustrated and fed up, yet for all that, satisfied that I had not committed any new offense, save for possibly undermining a futile expectation. And I maintained this mean level of guilt for some years.
And then eczema came on the scene. The smooth skin on my face began to flake, a burning irritation reddened the wings of my nostrils, my upper lip, my eyebrows and my cheeks. And I’d scratch and rub and watch the flakes fall from my face, not quite as pretty as the flakes from my head, scaly and heavy, no twirl to catch motes of light, just a heavy fall of dead, ugly skin. And in their place, more scales would cover the skin, bright red underneath, transclucent yet dull and reptilian, and I thought that this was some sort of fitting secret revenge that my skin had devised for me. I’d look in the mirror and pick at the smaller portions, which would grow as I watched, fallen flakes would be replaced by a wider radius of reddened skin, then more flakes, repeat, again and again and again.
Eczema is a mystery to the medical community, caused by or a consequence of a multitude of things. The general consensus is that it’s a fault of your immune system, a hyper-activity of the skin’s natural defenses, and so common facial fungi can cause your skin to flake and redden, normally benign chemicals can make you break it out in rashes, and you generally treat a breakout as broadly as possible. Basically, your skin is sensitive, quite sensitive, to any offense. As such, my doctor prescribed an anti-fungal cream, and at the same time proscribed drinking and smoking, as well as my anti-acne skin salves and creams. If that did not work, I’d go on a steroid regimen.
And, surprisingly, the incentive of getting rid of eczema was enough for me to curb my drinking, cut-down on smoking, even break my obsessive-compulsive behaviour towards cleaning my skin. But it left me aware, painfully aware, that my skin was in revolt, for now a scattering of pimples appeared along with my eczema, and I couldn’t drive away the guilty thoughts about my HPV. The worst of all worlds, essentially, was what I had to deal with.
Ignorance is no excuse, but knowledge is power. And as I thought soberly about the implications of these afflictions, it seemed to me that it all boiled down to one problem, one organ, and that my skin itself was to blame. The best thing to do, in such cases, is embrace your affliction. And so I no longer worried my flaking face or head with my fingers, and I came to welcome burgeoning pimples with disinterest. Warts, when they’ve popped up over the years, I greet and get rid of like old and distant friends.
I drink occasionally, and I get raging drunk only socially, when the demands of desire are strongest. And I still smoke regularly, accepting the consequences of flaking skin as a sign of my weakness of will. My skin and I have established a tenuous truce. And with respect to my sexuality, I quell my feelings of guilt—for those I’ve infected, for those I will infect—with a careful consideration of the meaninglessness of it all, a regulated resignation to a feckless fate. My skin never liked me, seemingly, and so it’s only proper that I do penance with fits and starts, that guilt can sometimes subsume my desire, and that desire and entitlement can erupt and find a fitting and temporary home in another victim’s skin. And I am completely honest about my situation: I lie to no one. And I suppose this makes me a better man.
But there are still those gloomy moments when I lash out at the seeming unfairness of these afflictions. Why am I sentenced to shampoo my hair with a specific product, lather my face with a specific cream, limit my intake of alcohol or nicotine, or be forced to tell the truth? My will has been arrested, shackled to remedies for alleviating painful symptoms, shameful thoughts. And so sometimes I think of HPV as a gift to my pettiness, to my sense of just retribution and rightful revenge. Though I like feeling the victim, of the sense of being more virtuous because of my afflictions, there is a macabre satisfaction in knowing that I can be the villain, that I am able to inflict the same species of painful symptoms to blameless others, a gift of meaningless cruelty, of a virus that mimicks life’s unfairness—of cancer, of all things. And I suppose this helps me feel better about having to be a better man.
—DC