Preface

I had really bad acne in high school. It’s not something I’m proud of but it was something that I went through during my formative years. I had it everywhere. My back and chest got the worst of it though; they were desecrated by it. I even got the occasional pimple on my thigh, or even worse, on my private area. Those were the worst.

And these were not your normal pimples. They were the huge, tumor-like pimples that leaked blood and pus. Each one had their own separate whitehead, an exclamation point of sorts.

I was lanky too. Not, hey you might want to gain a few pounds to even out that frame of yours lanky, but more like, holy shit I didn’t know they could train skeletons to walk and talk nowadays, technology must be really advancing, huh?

So picture this skinny, chest enclaved, pimple infested teen running up and down the basketball court with no shirt on. This was a common occurrence. Mr. Johnson, my high school basketball coach, made sure of that. Mr. Johnson either a) hated white people as a whole and wanted to make sure the race suffered through my embarrassment of always having to be skins in our pickup games (which I feel horrible even thinking) or b) saw my plight particularly hilarious and wanted to make sure to milk every laugh that could be had (I tend to lean towards this one).

But only the guys, my teammates, knew really how bad my acne was. Don’t get me wrong-you wouldn’t confuse my raccoon scratched face with a smooth piece of alabaster. But I could cover up my pimples. I’m not ashamed to say I wore cover-up (I am ashamed to say that most of the time it was my mother would put it on for me). And I never got caught (well once, and let me tell you, it was fucking embarrassing). I could still pretend I was your normal teenager who had the occasional bad pimple breakout, not the terrible, acne-infested, experiment gone wrong I was without a shirt on.

But that all changed one day during bio lab. I happened to be talking to one of the hottest cheerleaders in school, Judy. Judy was not like the other girls in high school. She was smart (head of the Debate team); funny (her favorite movie was Dumb and Dumber), and actually seem to have a minor interest in me (God knows why). Anyway, we were talking during lab and she was laughing at everything I was saying. She even touched my arm! And it wasn’t just a normal touch, it was practically a loving caress. Needless to say, I must have had this shit eating grin permanently stuck across my face like a badge of honor. Look at me, bio class! The hottest girl in school is talking to me and we’re not even partners!

It was then, when everything seemed to be going so damn well that this sudden throbbing began to pulsate from the center of my forehead. It was one of my friendly pimples, deciding to surface from its hibernation to bid me a good morning.

At this point, I had become a pro at popping my own pimples. It was a self-hatred ritual, one that would be conducted almost everyday after school. I always received a kind of sadistic pleasure from the procedure. Yeah it was painful and sad, but there was this sudden rush of excitement that would come from just popping the things. It’s hard to explain but popping pimples is just fun. I use to have contests to see which pimple would make the biggest explosion or which whitehead I could squeeze the most pus out of. The cleanup and the aftereffects always scarred my self-esteem, put I always took solace in the fact that I controlled my pimples’ lives and deaths. Simple joys, indeed.

Needless to say, this particular pimple was a renegade. It saw the memorandum that explained the procedure concerning the popping of pimples and shit all over it. That pimple decided its time to walk into the light would be during bio lab class.

Throbbing and pushing, the pimple etched its way out of my forehead. My mind was racing. What should I do? Maybe I should go to the bathroom, run out the classroom, I thought. No. That would look stupid. Some crazy man running through the hallways, screaming bloody murder about a pimple? There’s no way I could live that down.

Before my mind could wrap around the situation, the projectile missle shot outward. Like buckshot, the pimple broke into threes, each piece propelling itself forward to its target, Judy’s face.

It took Judy a moment to realize what had just happened to her. Landing smack across her forehead and exploding within her mouth, my pimple had in fact laid jihad upon her. Her eyes began to water. How could you do this to me, she seemed to ask. I was nothing but nice to you and I might of actually liked you, but you had to go and do this to me? I wanted to explain that it wasn’t me; it was my bad chemicals, my bad genes, hundreds and hundreds of years of horrible skin care by my ancestors in Ireland that caused this. I had nothing to do with this. It was the hand I was dealt.

Before I could explain myself or at least hand her a tissue, Judy ran crying out the classroom. The bio class grew solemnly quiet. They didn’t know what had happened and were too scared to ask. All they knew was something life changing had happened. I offered no explanations. I sat in my chair, hands folded, blood oozing out of my forehead.

Not surprisingly, the school soon would find out about the suicide pimple. It might of taken two periods or so but soon the school was buzzing. Did you hear about Judy? People took the story into their own hands too. Well, Jerome, who was in the bio with them, told me that he just had enough of her bull and just popped his pimple all over her.

What was surprising was how positive people were to me about the situation. I guess Judy had built up a lot of resentment and jealousy within the school but people loved that I had “popped” my pimple all over her. Girls who would never have talked to me in a million years suddenly smiled at me. Random guys would come up to me, pat me on the back, and say, man, fuck her dude, she got what she deserved. I became a cult hero. The wall I built around me to protect me from scorn became suddenly mysterious. I was kind of hot. I wound up taking a cheerleader to prom (who wound up hooking up with her ex during the prom) and being voted “most likely to succeed” in my graduation yearbook.

Judy left the school three months before graduation. I don’t even know if she finished high school.