COULD MY ONE bright night under the hot lights have altered the genetic structure of my sebaceous glands? I thought the first impression the benevolent and beautiful girl who had yet to discover my charms would have was that I had ugly abscesses on my face and the second impression she would have was that my tongue was tied in a knot. As we exist in appearance by our face and in reality by our voice and on both counts I was a little too conspicuously marred, there wouldn’t be a third impression. Father predicted the pustules would disappear if I stopped eating so much chocolate and worrying so much about getting good grades, and Mother tended to favor the more general plague-of-growing-up theory, whereas the origin of the problem lay, as with all real problems and all real origins, in family history.
Mother still had pockmarks on her cheeks as evidence of a diseased childhood, with patches of pink skin on her nose acquired in more than one surgery to remove the skin cancer that was her reward for believing, as a teenager, too many doctors’ X-ray radiation cures. In a faded photograph of her brother wearing khaki in Okinawa, his face appeared to be on fire. A doctor at Stanford Hospital told Beth he was the most decorated dermatologist in the Bay Area and there wasn’t a thing he could do to improve the quality of her skin until she was at least twenty-six. Only Father’s face was beautifully clear, though whenever he cut himself shaving or the impress of his glasses left a red mark at the eyebrows Mother would claim that he, too, had a horrible background. They used to have perfectly absurd arguments over who was responsible for the cluster forming on my chin.
It wasn’t only in the cleft of my chin that the rash erupted. It flourished on my forehead and scalp and behind my ears. It made a mockery of my cheeks and troughs of my temples. It burned my neck, appeared sporadically on my foreskin—no neonatal rite performed on this half-Jew—visited my stomach and all up and down my back and buttocks. It was like an unwilling monotonous tattoo, plus variety of type. There were whiteheads on the nose, blackheads on toes, dense purple collections that finally burst with blood, white circles that vanished in a squeeze, dilating welts that never went away, infected wounds that cut to the bone, surface scars that looked hideous, wartlike protuberances at the side of the head. In just the last year I’ve endured collagen injections, punch grafts, and chemical peels. This is what living in L.A. does to one, or such is the depth of my endless, hateful redefinition.
Millions of times Father, exasperated, said, “Jeremy, will you please stop picking at yourself?” Sometimes he’d get impatient and slap my face—as if he were both reprimanding me for squeezing scabs at the dinner table and expressing compassion by striking the source of all the distress—but he was certainly justified in whatever frustration he felt. My hands were always crawling across my skin, always probing and plucking, then flicking away the root canker. The inflammatory disease bred a weird narcissism in which I craved the mirror but averted any accurate reflection. Isn’t that what narcissism is, vanity skewed by huge self-doubt? I retired to the boys’ bathroom at London every chance I got but I’d retreat from the mirror until my face looked fine: just a little red and slightly swollen. I’d gaze at myself in night-lit windows, brood upon the image coming up out of the coffee at breakfast. I became expert at predicting which kinds of mirrors, both in the house and in the oppressive world outside, would soften the effect, and which—it hardly seemed possible—would make things worse.
I started washing with oval brown bars and transparent green squares, soft baby soaps that sudsed, and rough soaps that burned. I applied special gels, clear white liquids, mud creams. I took tablets once, twice, thrice a day; before, after, and during meals. I went on milk diets and no-milk diets, absorbed no sun and too much sun. I believed in erythromycin, tretinoin, Cleocin, Panoxyl, Dioxyl, Benoxyl, isopropyl myristrate, polyoxyl stearate, silicate, colloidal magnesium, polyoxythylene, butylated hydroxytotuluence, hydrox-propyl-methylcellulose. I saw doctors and doctors and doctors.
A doctor in Chinatown who had been recommended by a friend of Mother’s promised three acupuncture treatments would purify me of all imperfections but resigned himself to using more conventional methods when Mother said no, absolutely not, no acupuncture. The first time I visited him he bowed and said, “So sorry. Face is full of uglies.”
He bowed and said, “Mrs. Mandel, a most beautiful lady! A lump on her lip: one puncture; no more lump. But on phone your Ma say no punctures for you. Therefore, I provide scientific American method. Please come in.”
He wore a Mao cap, a gray waistcoat, and slippers. The waiting room had bamboo mats on the floor and black-and-white photographs of Peking, circa 1947, on the wall, but his office was thoroughly modern. He had me lie down on a steel table and immediately started squirting liquid nitrogen into my open wounds. “Freezes face until handsome,” he said with one of the deepest and most reassuring laughs I’d heard in my life. I loved the feeling of dry ice on my skin, the sensation of being only cold. Then he locked me in a closet that had a glass window, placed black goggles over my eyes, and shot ultraviolet rays at my head.
“Your Ma much afraid of radiation. She say not to use. She have bad experience with quack Americans. They not know how to moderate. I have know-how,” he explained.
He dipped my face in a solution of hot water and curious chemicals, pressed a pimple popper to what he called “the spot troubles,” and wiped away the blood with rubbing alcohol. While I was leaving, he handed me an immense plastic bag of sample panaceas and said, “Try all of these. Come back next week and please to tell me which works. Also, go to beach a lot to get sun on face and chase tan girls.”
All winter of my sophomore year I went to Dr. Huang to absorb his liquid nitrogen and radiation and hear his words of encouragement. He said I was showing remarkable progress, but I didn’t see any improvement. He said my advance would be more dramatic if, as he had instructed, I rubbed salt water into my skin and received the reflection of the sun off the ocean. He probably hadn’t been to the beach in ten years; the bay was always overcast and the ocean was replete not so much with restorative salt water as repulsive kelp.
May fourteenth—Mother’s Day, 1972—broke clear without early morning fog. Since Beth was still immersed in reading period in Palo Alto, Father was competing in a Class C tennis tournament for men sixty years old and over at the Pool and Racquet Club, and I’d forgotten to get her a gift, I offered Mother the pleasure of my company during a day on the coast. I gathered all my unguents into one bag like a vacationing egoist committed to the perfect tan, the difference being that the sun god is bent on elaborating beauty until it becomes bronze, whereas I wanted only to look acceptable, to appear normal. Two years later I airbrushed my yearbook picture into virtual unrecognizability, and four years after that my second idea for this project—a family album with photographs—dissolved in my inability to use any pictures that didn’t flatter myself and my subsequent realization that the flattering pictures ended shortly after catastrophic consciousness began—say, when I was twelve. Mother suggested we make a real excursion of it and drive to San Gregorio, the beach where, via a rough voice on the radio, I received the first intimation that San Francisco was going to be a sympathetic paradise no more than Los Angeles had been. For some strange reason I’ve always rather enjoyed returning to places of crisis, so we went. It was the weekend and warm: the freeway leading out of the city was as clogged as I’d ever seen it, but when Mother was in a good mood the world disappeared and all was well.
She opened the sun roof. She kept rewinding and whistling to an extremely happy tape of Prokofiev which, although she found the Russian composers in general a trifle florid, was her favorite piece of symphonic music. In the back seat she had a picnic basket and a binder containing the rough draft of a book on mental illness she was ghostwriting for an illiterate Beverly Hills psychiatrist. Mother couldn’t wait to bury her toes in the sand and start getting all scientific about the dark night of the soul.
San Gregorio was even worse than I’d remembered. It was difficult to get from the cliffs to the beach; I had to carry the picnic basket, the rough draft on mental illness, and my bag of lotions, then catch Mother when she slid down on her butt. And once you got there you didn’t necessarily want to be there. Sand dunes stood at one end of the shore like extremely obvious emblems of human destiny and despair and, beyond them, caught on the rocks, loomed a blank lighthouse. Packs of seagulls pounced upon every scrap of food, every minuscule fish that dared to surface. The sea, the sand, the sky, everything was gray.
Four men banged plastic golf balls against the crags and another dug dirt with a metal detector. A woman sold wilting roses and postcards of the Pacific Ocean. Babies in cribs, boxes of Kentucky Fried Chicken on woolen blankets, adolescent lovers searching for each other in the surf, the smells of beer and pop and pot—Mother and I walked through and away from all this to the empty end of the beach, where the tide came up a little higher and the shore was somewhat rockier, but we had our own cove and that was what we wanted.
Mother was starting to get a feel for the errata of the rough draft, every so often waving her blue pencil in the air and shouting, “The syntax! This guy’s syntax is all wrong!” and I was applying coat after stinging coat of creams to my face when a band of naked colonists descended the trail and appeared before us. No clothes, no towels, only tubes of fat around their waists and, in their hands, AM/FM radios, bags of potato chips, cans of Schlitz. Six men and six women, most of whom seemed to be exactly thirty-eight years old—nearly middle-aged and yearning for youth—standing in front of me and Mother like precursors of a new race.
One of them, a woman with heavy hips and a red bandana across her brow, said, “This section of San Gregorio is nudist. You’ll either have to strip or, like, depart.”
I took her to be sort of the governor of the colony—maybe the bandana was like an official badge—and her warning drew a number of rude observations from the rest of the crowd.
“The old lady’s got a good bod for an old lady,” said a bald man who was at most five years younger than Mother.
“The kid isn’t bad, either,” said a woman with tiny breasts. “Good legs. Real good legs. The face, though: ’tis a pity, the pimples.”
“Kinky couple, don’t you think?” said someone I couldn’t see because he was standing in back. “What would you say? Fifteen and forty?”
This last insult made their fat bounce with laughter, and yet it wasn’t far from wrong. I was fifteen, Mother was forty-seven, and the trend of married women taking teenage lovers was accelerating at such an alarming rate in San Francisco that I couldn’t tell whether the colonists were kidding or whether they actually thought Mother and I were a close-knit couple. Mother was wearing the only swimsuit she ever owned, a one-piece black monstrosity, and I was wearing the red trunks, with blue anchor at the crotch, which I’d bought for Audrey’s birthday party. Mother had seen me naked until I was nine but, except for one purely accidental glimpse of her running from the shower to the bedroom the early evening of February 11, 1964, I’d never seen her. I really didn’t want to because I’d heard severe psychological maladjustments were the inevitable result and I really don’t think she wanted me to, either, because she was a good guardian and a moral woman. There seemed only two alternatives, though—returning three miles to the crowded beach or undressing at the command of our captors like victims in a vulgar film—and neither plan struck me as wholly desirable.
Mother asked them questions: why do you want us to disrobe? Do you ask everyone you meet on this side of the beach to disrobe? How long have you been living here? Do you find the term “beach bum” pejorative? Would you define yourselves as beach bums? As nudists? Does a bare body have, for you, any political significance? Do you have little huts along the coast?
At first I thought Mother was just trying to stall them by posing diversionary issues, but then I realized she was perfectly sincere and genuinely interested in their replies. She was working now as a feature reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and, if this wasn’t the lead story in next week’s Sunday supplement, thirty years’ experience had taught her nothing. She only regretted she hadn’t thrown a camera into the trunk of the Fiat so she could shoot carefully shaded pictures of the subjects in their birthday suits. Mother had a talent tantamount to genius for transforming whatever absurdity she saw around her into just more stuff of her own fame: taking away its terror or ennui by exploiting it.
They seemed to have heard of her when she told them who she was. When she told them why she was asking so many questions, they gathered at her feet. She sat with her back to a boulder and recorded, in shorthand on the reverse side of the rough draft on mental illness, their inane answers. No one was paying any attention to me any more, not to my real good legs, not even to my pitiful pimples, so I slipped away with a blanket and my bag of gels. I settled on a spot in the middle distance between Mother’s colonists and baggy men playing plastic golf.
Every half hour I sprinted to the shoreline and rubbed saltwater into my welts. Other than that I did nothing more strenuous than apply patented cures to my face. I spent the entire day asleep on the sand, with my hair combed back so the sun wouldn’t forget my forehead, that most flawed of all facial areas. The sun, creams, and saltwater seemed to be working together very nicely to reduce the blisters. My skin felt softer and smoother than it had in years. The bumps burned away. Even my forehead felt fine. There was a public cabana standing, in all its indignity, on the edge of the hill that dropped down to the beach, and I felt compelled to confirm—through study of the image in the mirror—my inkling that I had at last found salvation, in Mother Nature herself.
I climbed the little cliff, then pushed open the door to the outhouse, which was a typical beach bathroom in that the smell of urine was overwhelmed only by the fumes of defecation. Centipedes crawled across the cement, flies had a field day around the toilet, broken water pipes dripped, and I had an acute sense of pervasive darkness. There was a bare little bulb above the mirror to illuminate the reflection. I looked, I looked again, and was appalled.
The white of the ointments, the red of the sun, the green of the sea had formed a melting blue of the body. My whole face seemed to be falling off. I looked like a clown—like Bozo—caught between the acts. All the boils were raised to the highest degree and glistening in a terrible blue hue. Suddenly I was seized with the perception that I had a multitude of debilitating personal problems and there was no cure for any of them: not nature, not nurture, not love. When one thing goes, the rest usually follow right behind and, in that stinking dark cabana, all alone at three o’clock in the afternoon, a mile and a half from a nudist colony, I could find no reason to continue. I decided to dive thirty feet off the cliff to the sand. I turned the switch on and off for twenty seconds until a shadow of gray filled the room: wet skin on cold glass. I closed the door. Shutting my eyes and turning off the light, I tried to imagine what broken glass would sound like in the dark.
I bolted out of the bathroom, ran barefoot over pebbles and tough grass to the edge of the cliff, and leapt. Right around the middle of good Aristotelian books, there’s supposed to be an action that reveals the protagonist’s hamartia—in this case, for instance, excessive self-absorption as a function of disfluency—and also transforms the rising action into falling action. But the cause of the falling action isn’t supposed to be quite so literally A FALL. It’s supposed to be a little more metaphorical than that. Still, I can’t alter the story of my life to conform to some archaic theory of dramatic structure. There’s a book to think about, but there’s also the pressure of the past.
The light went out of the sun and the sand came up to greet me. I did one entire flip, so I landed on my feet, but my left leg was bent across my body at an extremely awkward angle and, when I touched beach, the thigh bone of that leg cracked. I couldn’t get my left leg back on the left side of my body. My left foot twitched in the sand like a crab. The femur had broken skin and looked ghastly. The pain was so exquisite I started screaming the worst words I knew, as if incapacitation of the body were the death of language. The ocean kept lapping closer and sea gulls circled above to determine whether I were more coastal litter for a late lunch.
Oddly enough, the first person who responded to my cries was one of the plastic golfers, although maybe he’d wandered over my way just looking for a lost chip shot. “Upsy daisy,” he said and tried to yank me out of my misery, but I couldn’t have moved if a whale had come floating ashore on the next wave. While the golfer went and got Mother, a hundred people who otherwise would have been bored on Sunday afternoon formed an extremely tight three-ring circle around me. The colonists, barred from this end of the beach, stayed away, which was a good thing because the clothed population was fatuous enough. They talked among themselves, and most of them thought I was probably permanently paralyzed. Others thought I would never have been bit if I hadn’t been swimming so far out at high tide.
Mother burst through the throng, clutching her interview notes and saying, “You shouldn’t have wandered away in the first place.” Those were actually her first words. She was very sympathetic later on, but her first reaction was barely concealed indignation.
The men in white coats returned to the ambulance to get a scoop stretcher to dig me out of the sand since my left leg couldn’t fit on a flat stretcher. Mother climbed into the back of the ambulance with me and held my hand. I couldn’t tell whether she was so calm because she knew that was what observers were supposed to do in emergencies, or because she’d already arrived in that beautiful realm she occupied when she knew she had a first-rate story in the bag and nothing else really penetrated.
“You know, Jeremy, Mother’s Day, 1947, my mother threw out her hip on Lido Isle. Isn’t that quite a coincidence?” she asked.
Yes, I said, I thought that was quite a coincidence. I’d never met her mother. The siren started, Klaxon twirled in the sunset, and then I lost consciousness.