Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World

Hedley Twidle

FIRE

POOL

Experiences in an Abnormal World

KWELA BOOKS

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This is just a glimpse of my Experiences in an Abnormal World. I intend writing a Book if I ever have the opportunity, but medical attention is what I need at present.

Demitrios Tsafendas, Letter from Pretoria Central Prison

A History of Adverse Reactions

‘Oh – you’re the one who wrote the Dictionary.’

I often get this, when I run into someone who went to my school, or his parents.

Yes, I wrote the Dictionary. I have copy in front of me now, not the original but a reissue. It is a photocopied a5 booklet that was put together by a well-meaning teacher, long after I had left the all-boys boarding school where I lived through my body’s 13th to 18th years. This was 1992 to 1997 in world-historical time, so an era of major political and hormonal transitions.

During my final year, I conscripted a team of juniors and sent them out with notepads into the various boarding houses like 19th-century anthropologists, telling them to bring back exotic words and help me type them up. Perhaps because of the school’s physical isolation in the foothills of the Drakensberg (I speculate in the Foreword), ‘a very large and colourful body of indigenous terms has developed among its pupils’. In my last week at Milton College, I printed off a few hundred copies on the sly and sold them. The reissue was produced (I was told) when the one remaining original in the school library fell to bits through being consulted so often.

It is a highly embarrassing document.¹ Not just because the revised edition includes a picture of me (with centre parting) on the cover and several of my schoolboy poems. The Dictionary, which I have only mustered the courage to revisit in preparation for writing this piece, is a deep core drill into a world of shame, anxiety, embarrassment – with generous servings of sexism, homophobia and bigotry. Adolescence, in other words, but adolescence in a particular place, and at a particular time. And the fact that everyone can’t see how embarrassing it is makes the whole thing more embarrassing still. The only time I have raised the matter myself was when I ran into one of my assistants, years after school.

‘Oh, you mean 1001 words for ‘homosexual?’ he said.

I let the subject drop. But now I am writing this to fill in everything between the entries that I so confidently recorded, thinking of myself only as the disinterested observer, when I was in it up to my neck.

Mainly, though, I want to write about skin.

Recently I saw a televised debate on whiteness during which a panellist (the daughter of a rich mining dynasty from Johannesburg) recited a poem called ‘Sorry for My Skin’. I want to take that title more literally, more clinically. I look at my skin and do feel genuinely sorry for it. Pity it, I mean: this organ that has clearly taken, and continues to take, such a beating from just being in the world. Flayed by the sun of course – sun is poison to white skin, if we are honest – but by all kinds of other traumas. For about ten years it felt like almost everything that could have gone wrong with my skin did go wrong. Call it a case of pityriasis, an embarrassing rash to go with all the others.

Eczema, dandruff, athlete’s foot – fairly common. But also: psoriasis, boils, seborrhoeic dermatitis. Scabies, from the Latin scabere: to scratch – nocturnal itchings caused by burrowing mites. Verrucae for which I needed a general anaesthetic to have that cut out of my heels. Even a real outlier like scombroid poisoning, caused by histamine that builds up in bad tuna, a food poisoning manifested not in the gut but in skin that is set aflame, redder than the worst sunburn. Sunburn, the worst, many times. Prickly heat, Dhobi’s itch, pruritis. More itching, ecstasies of itching, that self-worsening phenomenon that triggers the same neural pathways as chemical addiction. Writing some of the most important exams in my life with shoulders sunburned purple and ravenously itching thighs – it made something out of me. What? A materialist, I like to think, in a deep, philosophical sense. And then: acne.

But not just standard acne. ‘Cystic’ or ‘nodular’ or (even the terminology is unbearable) ‘conglobate’ acne. Acne con­globata. Acne vulgaris. A condition that, I contend, has not often been written about, a world-ending metamorphosis that has not found adequate literary expression.

At around age fourteen, trapped sebum and dead cells began to build underneath my skin, creating painful cysts. Not pustules or papules (though I had those too), but nodules. A pustule or papule offers the possibility of being squeezed and its contents voided from the skin. A nodule should not be squeezed: it is too deeply embedded. But at the same time, the longer it stays, the worse the scarring – irresolvable, Catch-22 acne. Acne that those who fret about lone pimples before a date (and isn’t most of the discourse around bad skin along these pseudo-Romantic lines?) just cannot understand.

‘Ah, I’m disgusting. Look at this big boy on my neck,’ my dorm mates would say, fussing around with creams, trying to ‘Oxycute’ the offending zit, going to bed with toothpaste dotting their faces. I looked on stoically, enduring the roundabout insult. Please, I thought. No local or topical remedy for me; no cosmetics or concealer sticks would help. My acne was structural.

To live in your body, to be conscious of your body, to be ‘present’ in your body – this is a good thing, yoga teachers and life coaches tell us. Breathing, being aware of our strengthening backs, large muscle groups aching deliciously after exercise – who would argue? But the kind of consciousness of the body I want to evoke here is something else. It is looking at a fingernail clipping, or the pile of hair on the floor of the salon, or the yellow armpit of a white shirt and thinking: what has this got to do with me? What has this got to do with my lovely brain and my important thoughts?

One of the first nodules appeared right between my eyebrows. I didn’t want to touch it, but I touched it all the time – in Afrikaans, through double maths – trying to work out how big it was, this egg of pain that had announced my imminent demotion from boy-king to red-bearded adolescent.² Was it as big as my fingertips told me (grape), or as big as what I could see in the one small square of dormitory mirror (olive pip) that I crept up to in secret?

But nothing could be in secret; this was a private school with no privacy.

‘Got a rhino horn going there? Are you a fucking rhino now?’

You were forced to live through your body’s changes in full view of everyone, forced to shower together in communal showers where you best keep your gaze above waist height, so as not to be accused of ‘cock-spying’.

‘And if you piss, you piss at the urinals, where we can see you. Not the toilets, understand?’

A difficult contradiction to navigate, given that 1) you (and your cock) should be invisible, because you (and it) were disgusting, but 2) you should also make yourself (and it) visible, available for inspection, at all times. There were many such paradoxes.³ In an institution like this – a strange confection of waspish Anglicanism, sports worship and lip service to academic excellence – trying to conform to one particular code would invariably bring you into violation of another•. On the one hand, insistence on hard work, asceticism, community service; on the other, contempt for ‘braininess’, quasi-religious adoration of the rugby First XV, and, above all, the assumption not only that money and privilege are the things that matter, but also that it is better to inherit them than have to work for them.

I am stealing these insights from George Orwell’s essay ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, in which he spends some 20 000 words analysing his schooldays in a tone of triumphant misery, with a real sense of relish, in fact. He was revising the memoir on his deathbed, as if at the end of a writing life tangled up with the greatest historical ructions of the twentieth century – imperialism, fascism, totalitarianism – it was these school years that offered some of the most formative insights into power, with ‘Crossgates’ becoming a kind of petri dish in which its operations and cultures could be examined most closely.

In my first year at Milton College, seniors would wake us up in the middle of the night and force us to go swimming. While we were all obediently (and nakedly) treading water in the dark, they would alert our housemaster. The next morning they sat on benches in the Main Quad, watching as we each filed in for a beating – a nice night’s entertainment. I ran out and hid behind the saloon doors of a toilet cubicle. It wasn’t the pain but the intense shame that made me cry – a raging, scombroid blush that consumed my whole being.

Right down to its architecture and its lingo, Milton had been modelled on the English ‘public’ (i.e. private) schools of the nineteenth century. But while schools in England had modernised and evolved, ours remained in a time warp, trapped in the colonial lag. I registered this when I attended my father’s (and grandfather’s) old school in Sussex, one of the original prototypes, for a year of A-levels after finishing matric.

It had the same vaguely prison-like H-block of quadrangles, sacrosanct lawns and red-brick chapel, but in most other ways had been slowly reformed. It was coeducational, filled with students from around the world: Korea, Dubai, Argentina. No uniform, sports regarded as a bit of a joke, detailed anti-bullying protocols tacked up on the walls – and all rather dull. A bland place in which I found myself missing the cruel comedy and narrative fertility of my South African schooldays, and regarding myself as a man among boys. Though not among girls: it would take years before I learned how to speak to women.

With the uprooting and transplanting of such cultures to the colonies in the nineteenth century, the contradictions embedded in the English public school system ramified still further. In apartheid South Africa, these bastions of conservatism became the progressive option in some ways – at least for white families – since private institutions became multi-racial earlier than government schools, which remained segregated. So I had left a whites-only (but coed) state primary on the Highveld to attend a racially mixed (but single-sex) private school. Most pupils arrived in Standard Seven, but I had come as a Standard Six – spending a first, academically undemanding year with a small cohort.

There were some ‘day boys’ in this initial year, but the full-time boarders with me were mainly from Zulu and Tswana families. Phila and Lesego, the tall football captains, already well into puberty, were heroic figures to us. There was Thabo, who got spotted as presenter for a new, multiracial kids programme on TV, and Sihle, who taught me how to change a duvet cover. And two Mphos: one who was friendly and one with whom I fought with on the field one day – or at least he just lifted up my khaki-shirt collar and then discarded me, not even bothering.

But that first year was more gentle, a late boyhood idyll before high school proper began. I was in thrall to long fantasy novels and spent afternoons staring at the lawns in front of the boarding house, imagining how various configurations of grass stalks, clover and kikuyu represented a world of different kingdoms and armies. In this epic trilogy, The Riftwar Saga, some kind of gap in space-time had opened up and violent, conquering races were streaming through from another world. Midway through the long afternoons, one of the kitchen ladies would wheel a juice trolley out onto the lawns. Bright orange juice with a sour, sherbety edge – good juice.

Nelson Mandela is free but I am living inside my head. I have escaped the mining town. I am so consumed by this trilogy that I wake up early and go to read alone in the dining hall. The housemaster sees me in his early rounds and smiles at ‘The Professor’. Another of those mornings, we are revising for exams and I remember Thabo explaining to me (on request) about masturbation, using a fineliner pen to demonstrate what one should do to get ‘the feeling’.

How green can one person be? My comrades laugh as they ask me what ‘erection’ means and I explain rather impatiently that it refers to the putting up or construction of something, like a building. Or the Cross, for that matter. I am paraded around, asked to trot out this definition: ‘He reads the dictionary for fun!’ Another time, Lesego beckons us into the moonlit toilets to see the spunk running out of his penis – the first pupil in our year to achieve this feat. We are jubilant.

The black pupils complain about the winter, and how it dries them out. They are forever rubbing in creams with great attention, lathering Vaseline Intensive Care into their skins. Or perhaps that is just how I remember it, since this ritual – this loving self-attention to keeping the epidermis moist – became a marker of strangeness and difference, something to joke and smirk about: ‘Leave that stupid cream of yours, man!’

This whole Vaseline Intensive discourse was a classic demonstration of how ideology works to create a reality that has little to do with the real. A superstructure of values and judgements had been erected whereby it was their skins that could have been seen as anomalous: the skins of the majority of the country’s population, the dark skins that had evolved under these skies, that age so much better than white skins.

‘The so-called white races are really pinko-grey,’ wrote EM Forster. Looking at my skin now, 37 years in, it also seems blue-grey, sometimes even grey-green. So endlessly pitted and pocked, creased a thousand ways, each pore triangulated to about six, seven, eight other of its fellows via a cracked mud pan of rivulets and wrinkles.

As with powerful telescopes, the more vision you train on a segment of this universe, the more you will see: galaxies of freckles and sunspots, the epidermal equivalent of new quasars or other deep sky objects. Scar gazing. Then those singularities, moles: points of dark foreboding poised between melanin and melanoma. Each one of them a potential double agent, a possible traitor; each one diligently photographed by my dermatologist. A ‘mole map’ is lodged on his hard drive: a deeply conservative landscape in which any shifting border might spell danger. But there are many skin marks that have no names, that go beyond the conceptual net of language. Raised, sandpapery patches that don’t quite seem to qualify as warts – what are they? Glassy speckles like microburns from a spatter of hot oil – mysterious. Then the quills of hair, thousands of them; sometimes the odd thicker, more wiry Morgellons-­like fibre twisting out, as if a pubic strand were taking its chances elsewhere: shoulder, eyebrow, upper cheek. You rip it out and out it comes in its neat plastic sheath, its little bulb – a jolt of hot, satisfying skin pain.

‘Does it hurt?’

A year or two later and I am in the snake pit, skin going lumpy with painful cysts that very quickly revealed who was a saint and who was a devil.

‘I bet they hurt. Yoh.’

At the back of double maths, Thabang is taunting me under his breath, despite his own struggle with razor bumps (Pseudofolliculitis barbae). We sit at a twin desk and nothing can deter him from these sotto voce sessions, not even my having memorised the whole of Biggie’s verse from ‘Notorious Thugs’ to try and impress him: ‘Been in this shit since ’92 / Look-at-all-the-bullshit I been through.’

‘They hurt, don’t they? Yoh, yoh, yoh. They look sore.’

Acne, etymologically from the same Greek root as acme: highest or culminating point. Prime, zenith, flower of life; of a disease: crisis.

Turning to the entries on skin in my Dictionary quickly reveals the diabolical ingenuity of human communities as they beget insults, nicknames, neologisms. Given that our Standard Eight history teacher’s idea of teaching was simply to screen and rescreen episodes of Sir Laurence Olivier narrating The World at War, we all knew that Operation Barbarossa (Italian for ‘red beard’) was the code name for the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia. And so the word attached itself to those suffering from the kind of acne that comes on like a red beard.

Bad enough, but it could be worse. This was a world in which you could have the concept of a zit or a chorb – the signified, the thing itself – named after you. Once there was a sufferer of terrible acne called David. In a process of horrifying transference (horrifying for him, hysterical for the rest of us), the word was knocked down from proper to common noun: ‘david’ came to refer to a particularly large facial pimple, viz: ‘I have a david on my nose.’ Another example: once there was an acne sufferer who was spotted surreptitiously feeding bits of his troubled skin into his mouth while on a school trip, and the whole bus took up the chant of ‘Padkos! Padkos!’ – the Afrikaans word meaning ‘food for the road’, the kind of picnic you would pack for a journey. And so within hours you could be said to have ‘a padkos’ on your face – in the sense that you were portaging edible goods.

These registers of experience are revolting, and seldom written about – or, at least, were very hard to find in print during the pre-Google era. I had to wait to discover the literary outlier Jean Genet before finding a rare expression of something that happened all the time at my school: ‘I bury myself beneath the covers• and gather in my cupped hands my crushed farts, which I carry to my nose. They open to me hidden treasures of happiness. I inhale, I suck in.’ But (he goes on), ‘only the odour of my own farts delights me … Even the faintest doubt as to whether an odour comes from me or someone else is enough for me to stop relishing it.’ This literary avant-gardism was part of our daily experience: crushed farts were carried to noses all the time, mid-conversation, mid-meal in the dining halls.

Orwell, Genet: laureates of male revulsion, both drawn to smell•. Orwell describes the school aroma as ‘a sort of compound of sweaty stockings, dirty towels, faecal smells blowing along corridors, forks with old food between the prongs, neck-of-mutton stew, and the banging doors of the lavatories’. Genet writes of spending hours ‘roosting’ on his boyhood long-drop, ‘mysteriously moved since the most secret part of human beings came here precisely to unveil itself’. Both willing to plumb the depths of self-­abasement and corruption; both, at the same time, profoundly liberating writers. This is, I suppose, why I am probing these, the limit zones of disgust: political disgust, personal disgust, but also the intimate and democratic rankness of bodily disgust – in the belief that such an investigation might be a prelude to true metamorphosis, acceptance, love.

Once a year we had compulsory school photographs. We lined up in our respective subgroups: the choir, the Toastmasters Society, the complex hierarchy of sports teams adding to that huge visual archive of maleness that goes back generations. Crossed rackets, crossed oars, crossed arms – trying to fluff up the biceps from below with the knuckles as we stood there in our string vests. When we dressed up in our smart uniforms for the House shot, there would be two versions: the ‘normal’ photo and the ‘fuck-around’ photo. A clever attempt by the authorities to draw off the subversive potential that roiled around at such official moments, to fold