The transvestite frequently sat on the stoop of her tenement building with two of her friends, a woman who might be a dwarf, another in mismatched clothes, with no teeth, and I've watched them from across the street, never joining their conversations, but drawn, in a ghoulish way, to their irregular animations. The imperfections I notice and remember include skin tags, achrochordons, the excess skin or flaps that form on the human body in response to the skin's irritation in areas of friction, heat, and moisture, where a bra strap or a waistband might rub the flesh. I notice moles at the corners of lips, bristly hair shooting from them, or large, flat hairy moles that patch upper arms and backs of necks, which can be removed, but when they aren't, invariably catch my eye. There are some discolorations that can't be removed, some moles or sebaceous cysts also that, if removed, would leave small craters in legs and arms, since they run beneath the epidermis like underground rivers and more than what was apparent and visible on the skin would require removal. A cyst on the upper arm that is nearly flat on the surface of skin may have deep roots beneath and connect to another cyst farther down the arm that may be larger, and it would be a mistake, my dermatologist told me, to have it removed, because the excision's scar would be more unsightly than the cyst or mole. But I don't like moles. Also I notice stooped shoulders, wandering eyes, palsies of every sort, harelips, limps, because, for one thing, I am interested in defective bodies that function anyway. Over the years, my dermatologist has treated me for a variety of nevus, or nevi, birthmarks or moles, which he excised; seborrheic dermatitis; dilated blood vessels or telangiciectasias; benign growths, or seborrheic keratoses; solarkerotses, or sun damage; skin tags; acne rosacea; xeroderma, or dry skin; tinea, or a fungal infection of the feet or skin pads; and nummular eczema, or coin-shaped, blistery and encrusted skin, and none of these was life threatening. I didn't ever mention the pressure or weight on my heart, since he wasn't a cardiologist, and since my internist insisted, after she ordered an EKG and echocardiogram, that there was no physical cause for the pressure, that it might be stress-related, which should have been reassuring but wasn't. Each mark, redness, or patch has its charac teristics, which my dermatologist recognized immediately, and when he did, he said aloud the name of the malformation or minor disease with an intellectual's satisfaction, and I always asked him to repeat and spell it, so I could see its design and remember it. Every imperfection and unsightliness of my flesh, since failures and mishaps are worth recording, he noted, and I watched him write up, in his neat script, each defect, chronic or acute skin condition, dutifully, even lovingly, in his increasingly thick file on me.
After the removal of a nevus, my dermatologist presses cotton soaked in an antiseptic lotion or salve on the fresh wound, then he asks me to continue to press the ointment-soaked cotton against it until the blood stops flowing, and, without looking, only feeling the slight burn of medication against the skin, I do so, even though I easily become nauseated at the sight of blood and on occasion have fainted. I regret fainting at the sight of blood, a revulsion I can't control which begins as revolutions in my stomach, the second heart, and I have often envied my dermatologist's job, which involves blood spurting, but affords him the right to stare with childlike attention, professional concentration and intense pleasure at the deformities and growths, ugly moles, with hairs shooting from them, on the bodies and faces of his patients, numbering into the thousands, and then his expertise in knowing how to burn or cut them off complements his desire to rid the body, or the world, of its abnormalities and threats. When he performs a procedure, I look, if I can, without dizziness, or follow the procedure's reflection on his glasses, though sometimes he takes them off, as the blood rises to the surface of the skin and spills onto the cotton square he holds in one hand, when he appears to trust his naked eye only, and with the knowledge that he has removed some imperfection, some excess that has, in some way, gracelessly defined me, one of his patients, he confidently sprays antiseptic on the wound and covers it with a Band-Aid.
Scars form on areas where people have been badly cut or burned about which everyone has some memory, whose presence never lets you forget the event, which may have been dramatic or even traumatic. I have sometimes touched a trail of dead skin on other bodies and felt its inexpressibility, since other people's scars are different from the ones I have but not in abundance, though mine are more internal, I like to believe, but there's one that's visible, right above my left knee. My dermatologist may have marked it in his file on me. It was caused by my walking, absentmindedly, lost in the promise of a delicious, troublesome boy, angry at my mother or father, sad about my brother, or worried about a best friend, past a car with a broken fender, while I was in summer camp. By that time I longed to go to camp, to escape the place where I lived among people who had more than enough money to be content, though they were not, because money doesn't bring happiness, just its possibility, which is usually squandered, and to escape my parents and neighborhood. The jagged fender tore into my flesh. Blood streamed from a deep cut, or gash, I felt faint, collapsed, and the worried owner of the camp quickly carried me in his arms to his car, to have the cut looked at, cleaned up and stitched by a local doctor. He did a poor job, even though the cut required only six stitches, and sometimes I touch the ugly scar just above my left knee, but I can't remember all that it covers. It is the same leg on which my insane cat tore my flesh, leaving four indentations, the left leg that is controlled by the right side of my brain, which has some significance, especially to people who research and rely on such ideas. The wound was bandaged for a week or two, the raw wound and its secretions hidden, while it healed into an unsightly scar. It hid something terrible, though wounds are not supposed to be obscene.
In the place where I was raised, there was much ordinary obscenity, many girls disliked their faces, especially their noses, and had their noses broken and surgically fixed when they were teenagers. They were bandaged for weeks. I was invited to visit a friend whose nose had been surgically broken and fixed, who had just come out of the hospital and was lying in bed, having a party for her new self and newly straightened nose. It was attended by her friends, of which I was one, though I was much closer to her cousin, who died not long before in a car accident, a traumatic event that changed my life, though there is no visible scar covering it. This girl lay in bed, bandaged and bruised, and happy, though her eyes were bloodshot, black and blue, and her face was swollen, and her skin a fabric of purple blotches. I sat at the edge of her bed, which was covered with a fluffy white comforter, surrounded by her other friends, and looked at this girl's swollen face and bloodstreaked, black and blue eyes. I turned green, I was informed later, in a disparaging way, and fled the room, raced down the stairs, to the front lawn, which was covered in a fresh, light snow, and fell upon it and fainted. For a while, I rested in the snow, cold, relieved, dizzily unattended by my friends, not caring then that they may have thought I'd been insensitive to the girl with the purple, swollen face. But I was never again invited to such an event in a place where girls regularly had their noses broken, straightened and thinned, because they saw their noses and themselves as imperfect and ugly, inadequate, in part because of the religion into which they were born, whose clannishness produced certain facial characteristics, which they wanted to abolish while remaining tribal, though they wanted also to be accepted into the larger society by looking more like it.