cat abrasion
my Dermatologist, Dr W, a no nonsense Asian woman, checks everything out, Everything, and on each visit. ‘take off all your clothes and put this on, with the opening at the back’. my flounder’s belly white legs stare up at me. i wonder if i wiped properly earlier that morning. would i ‘leave something’ on the paper covering, a human stain? she is non-plussed and orders me about like a Sergeant, squirt freezing suspicious asymmetrical spots with an ice gun. it hurts, but in an ok way. like picking a scab or getting a tattoo. i’m here for good reason, my skin. when i was in Nassau my sophomore year at Yale, on a drunken singing group spree, i got grotesquely sun burned water skiing off Lyford Cay (they were shooting Goldfinger that year). i was darting about on a single ski, whoosh, whoosh, when a shark’s fin broke the surface a few yards behind me. a Great White as i recall through the filter of Jaws and selective memory. i angled towards the pearly beach, flapping one hysterical arm, coasted up onto the sand as the monster slithered back out into the briny deep. that was the half of it. it turns out that the sun, reflecting off the Caribbean blue, carved up my skin like a laser. i grew blisters the size of robin’s eggs. i bled. we didn’t know it then, the latent horrors of Melanoma. my mom needed postage stamp sized patches of skin removed periodically. i notice divots on the noses of customers my age at Doyles. on my last visit, instead of the freeze offs, Dr W proscribed a tube of ‘Carac’ (where do they get these names?) which i was instructed to apply daily for a month. slather it on, rub it in, wait. miniscule homing cels in the sauce would zero in on potential pre-mel- anomas, stimulate anti-bodies and eat up the nasty spot. you itch and you develop lesions the look like Leprosy. you are not allowed dressings to cover them up. you look scary. the hard part is that with this stuff on my arms, back of hands and the upper side of my face, my cat can’t lick me. ‘NO, SOFI, NO!’ i ward her off. the poor girl’s confused and hurt. who knew that a slow shark in the water would have a debilitating psychological effect on my cat 50 years later, to say nothing about the idle kid at the end of the bar with whom i strike up the band. the one who averts his eyes as the pus oozing sore on the back of my hand makes him want to puke.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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