Before I gave him scabies, Steven was just some dude I met in the Marigny. It was around Valentine's Day, and the same day I attended Eve Ensler's V-Day celebration at the Superdome, which instilled in me a fear of both clitoral circumcision and people in vagina costumes. Naturally, I needed a drink to mellow out my man-hate, maybe find some frat boy to knee in the balls. I found Steven instead.
I knew from my previous mistakes that bar relationships tend to go up in flames. That didn't stop me from returning the stare coming from the end of the tapas bar and sending over my half-eaten salmon canapˇ with instructions for my bartender.
"Tell him to eat my pussy," I ordered, and the creep ate it, licked the plate clean, never taking his eyes off me.
Minutes later he wandered over with a large cucumber shoved on the end of a knife.
Finally, I thought, a guy who really gets me.
"For your Pimm's Cup," he said, handing it over.
I told Steven he could sit down as long as he promised not to talk about Bukowski like every other bar dude who wants to create the illusion he actually reads. I noticed then that he was not in his late-twenties. More like late-thirties.
"Forty-one, actually," he said. "I'm a musician."
When he asked for my number, I ordered him to carve the cucumber into a squirrel. Then I bit the head off the squirrel and promised to do the same to him soon.
I didn't know I would ruin his life in record time. I hadn't ruined anyone's life in a while, not since leaving my ex in North Carolina. He'd already abandoned me — and reality — to live online as a Star Wars Galaxies Jedi Master. Since moving to New Orleans, I'd only had time to ruin my own life, rooming with a gay dancer obsessed with the Spice Girls, and taking a job at a cheese shop so that I could smell like ass, as well as look like it, thanks to the acne-causing power of birth-control pills. Abstinence through ugliness.
I'd only been on one date in a year, with a Jack White doppelgänger: an unpublished novelist who wore black electrical tape over his staph-infected finger. We went to a touristy seafood restaurant in the Quarter. After spilling his pre-dinner cocktail on me, he said, "It's been a long weekend. I need cocaine if I'm going to make it through this date." It was only Saturday.
While he met his dealer on Decatur, I sat alone, downing our scallop appetizer. I'm not one to judge. Not even after he told me he was from Georgia and couldn't swim. I suggested we go for a dip in the Mississippi. Instead, we wound up drowning in a dive bar, where he took my hand in his, rubbing my palm with his rotten finger, and recited from memory whole stanzas of Evangeline.
We took a cab to his house. Thankfully his power had been turned off, so I couldn't see the sea of trash we waded through to get to his bed. When I peeled myself from his mattress the next morning, I resembled a well-used Swiffer pad. I was pretty sure this counted as sex about as much as the time an elderly couple at Mardi Gras handed me a playing card of a naked man masturbating.
So I was surprised when Steven actually called me. We went to shows on Frenchmen Street. We bought rain boots at Wal-Mart. We ate crawfish pies at the Truck Farm. Then came the invitation to come over and watch a movie. Of course, I thought. The spaghetti westerns, the John Cassavetes, the Point Break/Roadhouse double-feature: They're all vessels to lure you into a den of molestation. But Steven didn't try to put his penis in me.
"I like to know who I'm sleeping with," he told me. Lately, he'd only been sleeping with Xanax.
I let him get familiar with me. I told him that for the past ten years, my body had been punishing me for my unfortunate attempts at sexiness. One night you're naked in a hot tub in a heavily wooded area, the next you're dabbing Cortisone all over your chigger tits. One night you're screwing in the ocean, the next you're soaking in an oatmeal bath with a sea-lice infestation. Sorry, I told him, I will no longer have sex in the water.
My body is against sexiness in general. Still revolting, perhaps, from the day I turned eighteen and got my first tramp stamp: a purple hibiscus from a wax ad in Surfer magazine. See, I used to have fake nails and sculpted brows. I used to tan at Planet Beach, and place a Playboy Bunny sticker near my pubes so the skin would stay perfectly white while the rest of me turned into a clay tennis court. I was flat enough to be one. It was Florida, mind you. By the time I left college I had obviously changed — into what, I don't know. An MFAhole with a Diet Coke addiction who resentfully threw out all her thongs. But it was too late to make up for my previous skankiness. My ability to spawn was ruined. Not from STDs — I was totally clean. Just from the abominable choice of dick I'd allowed in me, which caused such nausea and corporeal despair that normalcy could never be restored.
"So, what does that mean?" Steven asked. "You can't have children?"
"I'm sure I can. I just don't want to, the little bastards."
The smile on his face then — either amusement or horror — remained there the length of our relationship, a couple of months.
A few years ago, my ovarian cysts erupted and caused a pain akin to appendicitis, bloating me out to f.u.p.a. proportions, which set off a domino effect of tests and screenings, my favorite being an ultrasound for which I was instructed to drink four glasses of water but DO NOT URINATE. My bladder and I cried in the waiting room, only to be laughed at by the nurse, who looked like the world's best softball player. There was no doctor. There was just this nurse. She put me in a paper gown, then lifted it once I lay down on her table. She rubbed cold gel on me. She looked like she'd rubbed it in her curly hair. She inspected my tattoos. Cats on ice skates. Weird, she said, like her prefabricated home full of pitbulls was normal. Then she slipped a large technological dong into me, so my world-famous organs could be viewed on a television screen.
"I bet you like that," she said in a joking voice. "Girls with tattoos are usually into the freaky stuff, huh? The shaved ones too. I see a lot of your type come through here."I thought I had the wrong room, the one marked Lesbo Porn Audition.
"Relax," she said, sensing my tension. Then she pointed at the screen. "See that? It's the urine filling up your bladder. It blocks the view of anything else." It looked like a hurricane on the Doppler radar. I wanted to tell her that, when threatened, my bladder fills up with a poison that I could shoot at her face and blind her.
"Go to the restroom. Again," she said impatiently.
I got up and hurried to the toilet in an odd walk of shame. When I came back out she sat there lubing the dong, getting ready to put it in me again.
"Now you really know me," I said to Steven after telling him all of his. "Let's get it on! Bang a gong!"
"Let's just take things really, really, really slow," he said.
Before the scabies, we were like most normal couples are after they've been married for about seven years. We ate a lot of sushi, watched a lot of illegally downloaded movies, lay in bed without doing it and held each other unenthusiastically. There were things about him I found a bit strange. He got offended when I asked him why he had a picture of his ex-girlfriend on the fridge. He kept thousands of dollars of weed in his dresser and all his clean clothes on the floor. He enjoyed baby-related humor above all other types of humor. I didn't hold that against him. He was a cancer survivor, and an exceptional musician with a successful career or two under his belt.
And there were fun nights, like when we'd put ELO on the jukebox and proceed to make out in the bar while I fisted his balls and spoke in a fake French accent, which still never led to much in bed. The sex was sort of non-existent. The sleep, on the other hand, was mindblowing. He was perfect for me in this way. I began to think he might be my soul mate. His reproductive organs seemed to enjoy punk rock as much as mine. Especially the Dead Kennedys: "Too Drunk to Fuck." Despite this, the parasites took note, overlooking the absence of water and hell bent on destroying my pathetic sex life.
The scabies came off of my roommate. The scabies maybe came back with my roommate from his vacation in Florida, the U.S. capital of parasitic infestations (think Lou Pearlman, the Hogans, etc.) But seeing as an infestation can take a while to discover, most likely the scabies came from the guy he'd been fooling around with a month before.
Funny story about how they got to my bed: My roommate was a severe alcoholic. The type of guy who'd vomit in his own bed and get up and sleep in yours instead, because you're, say, sleeping at your boyfriend's house. I can see him under my covers, talking to my cat, petting her belly as she latches onto his arm and bucks the flesh into strips of raw bacon. Then he falls asleep, holding his wound, scratching his balls, his pits, his knees, because he is itchy. Why is he itchy? The itchy gets worse. The itchy won't go away. A week later he gets drunk and falls down the stairs, and when he wakes up he is still itchy. He goes to the doctor, comes home with a bottle of permethrin cream, and texts me to tell me to stay away from the house until he washes our bedding. Too late.
I broke the news to Steven with one of those STD e-cards: Dear Lover, You might have noticed how itchy you are lately. I'm sorry for giving you crabs/scabies. Love, Gwendolyn.
"Scabies is an STD?" Steven said.
"Oh, come on. I sent that as a joke."
"I have a right to know if what's on my face came from your roommate's crotch."
"Well, probably not just his, sweetheart."
I'm so thankful I didn't take it to the face like he did. When it happens, when the itch comes, the only thing you can think about is strangling the person who gave it to you. Steven didn't strangle me, but I had to rub lotion all over his body, in every unholy cranny. Since we were both too scared to sleep at home amidst the infestation, we got wine and strawberries and chocolate and checked into a ritzy hotel in the Quarter. I thought it was kind of romantic, even tried to cuddle.
"Just don't touch me," he said, nudging me away and scratching his eye. "I can't right now."
We lay in bed like brother and sister, watching a Marvin Gaye documentary, separated by the valley of personal space. Around the time Marvin's father shot him, and our lotion had suffocated most of the parasites, I realized our relationship was dying as well. I felt bad for us, but worse for whoever had to sleep in the room next.
To prevent the reinfestation of scabies, you have to set fire to the unsanitary life you've been living. You have to burn that shit down. That's why after washing all the clothes on your floor, the sheets, comforter and pillows, the favorite shirt your ex-girlfriend gave you — which only reminds you that you took her picture off your fridge for the scabies girl, which only reminds you that maybe you shouldn't have broken up with her in the first place — you have to get rid of the source.
He didn't break up with me scabies-face to face. He did it over the phone. He had many reasons. His band was going on tour all summer. He wanted to go fishing. He was still itchy and it was my fault. I was laid up in my new apartment — had just eaten shit on my bike, my knee swollen like a botched breast implant — because that's how everyone should be for their breakup: wounded and in severe pain. I didn't really care though. I was glad it was over. Or, kind of over. Here's the real kicker. After treating scabies, the itching can last up to a month, causing great paranoia that it will never go away, like a girl you break up with who won't stop calling. Sorry, Steven. I'm not that girl. I never call again. I erase your number. I don't want to ruin your life, but I can't help it. This is the life of a social parasite.
Now show me some skin.
n°