Blogged

Skin as biography

By Phil Barron ⋅ December 15, 2005 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

Melissa of Shakespeare’s Sister fame has an interesting question going today: Got any cool scars? Not the kind of topic that comes up often, and yet it’s eagerly discussed whenever it does arise. Scars are at once common to all and intensely personal and individual, artifacts of having lived. The comments on Melissa’s topic make for good reading. You may also be interested in a short 2004 QuickTime video by Harrell Fletcher, If I Wasn’t Me I Would Be You, previously shown at the Christine Burgin Gallery in New York.

Ah. Me?

I have a one-inch testament to clumsiness on the back of my left hand, a scar shaped like the numeral 1. I earned that by jamming my hand into a pocket of a pair of jeans; the edge of the tiny metal rivet at the corner had been bent upward, God knows how, and zipped a strip of skin right off my hand. Good times. I’m thinking of getting a matching numeral 2 for the right hand.

At the age of thirty-one, I came down with chicken pox. Never enjoyable, adult chicken pox. It left my face as pockmarked as the far side of the moon. Those scars have all faded and blended in except for three stubbornly dark craters in the neighborhood of my left eye. They’re small, though, so it’s cool.

A brief and intensely uncomfortable bout of hives - brought on by stress - left me with scarring across the right rib cage and on my back. Those have largely faded away. I learned that if you don’t have a topical antihistamine to apply to your skin while suffering hives, taking an oral antihistamine (as in an allergy medication) works just as well to combat the itching while avoiding allergic contact sensitivities. Consult your physician, please.

My prize scar story involves a burn scar an inch-and-a-half square on my right bicep; it’s shaped vaguely like South America (if you pull Chile and Argentina somewhat to the west). There is a smaller burn scar on the left bicep. Those came to me on my first day of work at the steel mill in my hometown. It was the summer before college, and I’d applied for a scholarship but was unsure of my prospects. The steel mill was by far the most lucrative opportunity for summer work, and I had an uncle-in-law who worked there and got me in.

On my first day, my foreman directed me to work the loop layer. This was a long track over which traveled great lengths of red-hot (literally glowing red) steel wire. My job, and that of my coworker, was to use long-handled (very long-handled) cutters to snip the steel wire at certain intervals.

I’d arrived at work wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and steel-toed boots. I was assigned a helmet and clear faceshield, gloves, and cotton sleeves that I could pull over my arms in order to cover them.

My coworker was wearing a green “asbestos jacket,” as it was called, in addition to the gloves, helmet, and faceshield.

It was incredibly hot up on the loop layer, and the cutters were somewhat unwieldy. I managed to cut two or three sections of wire before I noticed that my coworker had stopped working and was simply staring at me. I looked back at him; he pointed at me. Specifically, at my arms.

I saw that the cotton sleeves had bunched up as I worked, so that they had pulled up above my gloves and dropped down below the sleeves of my shirt, exposing my skin. That exposed skin - on my biceps and my right forearm - was burning, blistering. I want to say that it was actually bubbling - that’s always the image that comes back to me - but that can’t possibly be true.

I promptly left the loop layer.

I reported to the foreman, who directed me to the plant nurse. She winced more than I did as she dressed the burns (including one on my neck, which I hadn’t noticed earlier). I again reported to the foreman, who reassigned me to an area further down from the loop layer. I was to operate machinery whose nature I hardly recall now; the purpose was to further cut and separate the steel wire which was still very hot, if no longer glowing.

It took about forty-five minutes of this before I admitted that I was in pain. The foreman was gruff and unsympathetic. “I need you to work,” he said. “You can’t work, you might as well quit.” Which is what I did, some three hours or so after I’d begun my steelworking career. I have to admit that I was pretty glad to be going home, but not happy about the sudden loss of income.

My uncle-in-law had been out of town on business that week. When he returned to find what had occurred, he was outraged. Sharp words were spoken at the plant, and I found myself reporting to the mill every morning afterwards - not to work, but to have the dressings on the burns changed. The nurse (who was terribly cute) hissed aloud on seeing how the wounds were healing. “Keloids,” she said. I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I did some reading and familiarized myself with the concept.

The foreman got suspended for a time. I wound up going back to work at the mill, assigned to areas far removed from anything hot. I probably wouldn’t have made enough money to cover any significant college expenses, but the scholarship I’d applied for came through in July. The following summer, I sat with a board of old guys from the mill and they cut me a check for my time and suffering. I didn’t work that summer.

Over the years, the scars shrank to their present dimensions. The ones on my neck and forearm are all but invisible. The scars on the biceps are another matter. They’ll never fade and never go away, nor can I have them removed. Keloids are stubborn that way. I hardly ever think about them, though, unless someone else brings them up. That usually happens during the summer months - t-shirt season - though not so much in the last few years.

Once, a while back, someone asked me if the scars were tattoos.

I remember staring blankly at the guy for a moment, then laughing.

Sphere: Related Content