I came perilously close to going to a two-week Boy Scout camp. My brother had gone a couple of times. It seemed natural that I would go too. I liked swimming, I liked tents and knives, I liked tying knots. But all that stuff about medals and badges, about merit, filled me with performance anxiety.
During the first few meetings I went to, in the school gym, we all stood in line a lot. At attention. We saluted a lot. We saluted no one in particular. The salute was like a toast, To Scouting!
We recited the Boy Scout pledge: “Something something something, brave, clean, and reverent.” One Tuesday night I had to fold the American flag with Mike George. Actually, I had to do it for Mike George. He had rank—I think he was a lieutenant. It was our nation’s flag, deserving of our respect, I got it, but he was so pious and grim about it, glaring at me like the flag was going to be part of a funeral—my funeral if I didn’t do it right—that scouting just did not make a good first impression. Reverent was a reach for most of us in that room. Don’t get me started on clean.
I went to a cookout one Saturday in Wardine’s Woods to earn my cooking badge. (“Cookout” was not the official Scout term. I think Lieutenant George called it a bivouac.) The Tenderfoots—not Tenderfeet—had to use pathetic aluminum mess kits to rustle up grub over an open fire. No hot dogs allowed. I remember looking at Reed Leman’s chow. He was poking at some meat sizzling in the pan. He told me it was turtle.
His brother Glen said, “Yeah, turtle.”
“Where’d you get it?” I asked.
Reed said they’d caught it and killed it, just a few minutes ago. Now they were cooking it.
His brother Glen said, “Yeah, killed it.”
I warmed up some ground beef, gave my potatoes a bath in a panful of not-hot water, and burned my fingers. Mike flunked me on account of the potatoes, while Reed Leman passed with flying colors. His potatoes were covered in savory turtle gravy. His brother Glen said, “Yeah, gravy.”
That February, still a Tenderfoot, I spent one miserable night at Bear Lake, a “polar bear” event. Before going outside to sleep in tents in subzero temperatures, we sat in the mess hall eating chicken neck soup that the dads (“masters” in scout parlance) had prepared. My tentmate, Howdy Richards, had three bowls, spitting out vertebrae like dice as he ate. The masters announced they would sleep inside, in case we needed them. Mike George made ready to sleep in a hole he dug in the snow. When Howdy and I trudged out to our pup tent, all I could think was, What’s good about this?
And now, the summer of my twelfth year, I was going to spend two full weeks at Bear Lake?
That’s when ringworm came to visit.
I was thinking about ringworm the other day, waiting at the gate to get on a plane in Paris, where I had amused my bouche for a week. A twenty-something woman sat down across from me. She had red Lady Godiva hair and a red passport. She wore a gray jumper, black stockings, and knee-high black leather boots. I had decided to stop reading A Movable Feast—figuring I didn’t really need it anymore—and to wait patiently instead. I would enjoy a moment of vacancy and watch people.
This woman took out her computer, turned it on, and began to read. While she read, she groomed herself. She braided her red hair into red rope and threw it over her right shoulder. Then she went to work on her face. She scratched at blemishes on her cheeks, above her eyebrows, and on her chin. Every so often she would purse her lips left, pinch a pimple on her right cheek, and pull a cone of flesh from her face, stretching it, holding it, then stretching it farther, to the breaking point. When the cone snapped back in place, she looked from her computer to her thumb and forefinger, rolling something between them, evaluating each specimen of human matter she had harvested before letting it fall to the airport carpet. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
She reminded me of a boy I used to watch during church services when our kids were small. He picked and scratched at himself through the service. For some reason, his mother favored the front row, so the entire congregation could watch him while he inspected and then ate every bit of organic crud he scraped from his flesh. Before having a bite of Christ, this little manimal served himself himself as an appetizer.
When it was announced the flight would be delayed, the red-haired woman was swatting her left ear. The action reminded me of a duck I’d seen in the yard, whacking its ear with a giant orange foot.
The summer I was to go to Boy Scout camp, I noticed a red spot the size of a dime on my belly. It looked like a sunspot, its circumference raised and fiery red, the interior a crater of glowing pink-orange. It didn’t hurt or itch. It was just there. Then I noticed one on my neck. After a day or two, a few more spots appeared on my arms. When I showed my mother she took me to the drugstore and consulted Fred Gaul, the pharmacist. He looked and thought, looked again, and then said, “Hmmm.”
“And here’s a new one,” my mother said. I felt her tap the top of my head.
Fred said, “Mhmm hmmm.”
I squirmed a little. Time was wasting. I had to make the most of my summer before going to camp.
Fred nodded sagely and said, “I’d take him to the doctor, Alice.”
When we got home from the drugstore, my brother pointed out that the dog had spots on its belly just like mine. At the dinner table that night there ensued a debate between my mother and father about whether I had infected the dog or it had infected me. When I scratched one of the spots on my belly, my father told me not to pick at it and to go wash my hands.
A week passed before I went to the doctor. In the meantime, the multiplication of spots seemed to stop. The ones on my arms, legs, and torso were just there. But the one on my head grew to the size of a quarter, then a silver dollar, then the circumference of a coffee cup. Where it grew, my hair fell out. I began to look like a friar preparing to take orders.
Our family doctor referred me to a dermatologist named Dr. Hand. My mother drove us into downtown Saginaw, parked, and we walked the hot sidewalk to the door of an old building that opened to a narrow stairway. Our footfalls echoed in the stuffy air on the long walk up. I didn’t know anything about doctors, but I was used to brightly lit spaces that smelled clean and alcoholly. What waited for me up there filled me with dread.
There was no one in the waiting room. I sat on a creaky chair and looked at a pile of Reader’s Digests, which reminded me that I should be reading my Boy Scout Handbook.
Dr. Hand was a cranky old guy. He had white hair on his head and tufts of wiry bristles growing out of his nose and ears. When he came into the examining room, he said a gruff hello to my mother and looked at me like I should have been taken to the vet. He examined my arm and belly and scratched some scales off my bald spot with what felt like a glass laboratory slide.
How long would it last? my mother wondered.
“A while,” he said.
Would my hair grow back?
“Eventually,” he said.
The question that interested me was who had it first, the dog or I, but I decided not to ask. Dr. Hand was not a conversationalist.
When we left, he handed my mother a white jar of salve and told her I should keep it rubbed into my scalp.
“Get him a hat,” he said. “He’ll need it.”
She rubbed some in when we got home. The ointment was black and smelled like tar. When I went outside, the summer sun warmed it up, and droplets of the stuff trickled slowly down my neck. The next morning, I pulled a hat on, which contained the melt. By noon the hat was stained black from the salve. Friar no more. I felt marked for Satan.
The good thing was, I had a parasite in me. I might be infectious. Scout camp was out of the question.
Once we boarded, I lost track of the redhead and her busy fingers.
The flight was nine hours. I had an aisle seat in a row of three center seats. There was an empty seat between me and the lady on the other aisle. My hope was the middle seat would stay empty. I wouldn’t have to get up to let someone go to the can. I wouldn’t have to negotiate the issue of who claimed the narrow armrest between us.
“Is the flight full?” I asked the woman. She was French-lady thin, with a French-lady hair bob. She was dressed in jeans and an untucked button shirt that revealed—when she hoisted her bag to the overhead—an ivy tattoo on her stomach, left of her belly button, which disappeared below her beltline. It reminded me of that Botticelli woman with the garland coming out of her mouth.
“What?” She had long, slender fingers. Her arms and hands were tan. On the middle finger of her right hand, she wore four silver rings, on her thumb, a silver thumb ring.
“Do you know if the flight is full?” I said.
The look she gave me meant either I don’t understand your language or “What?” is the last thing you will hear me say.
The next nine hours, she looked straight ahead, French-lady aloof, totally self-contained. She read a French newspaper, watched movies on her computer, and blew her nose.
And it was—there’s no other word for it—a prodigious blow. French lady’s nose blow made a deafening noise, like a spring had sprung open and mucous was squirting/spraying/geysering into her French hankie. On roughly thirty-minute intervals, she blew and blew. Once, I saw her thumb and forefinger pinch a nostril, an exploratory pick.
I would have given anything to make eye contact. Good one, I would have said. You’re one of us. Some people have grotesque black bald spots. Some root out blackheads and flick them on the rug. This woman blew.
We’re all full of bugs and parasites. There’s no escape. We have to be brave.