face (thing)

There has always been something wrong with my face.

"Look in the mirror, Stevie," My mother said, holding me up so that I can see my face. "See, there's Stevie."

The little ears stuck out. That was the first thing I noticed. Two ears. And though the hair was pasted down suave, and brushed neatly into a regular boys hairdo, a few stringy locks had popped loose. Curly hair. Ahh.

The nose was a pale blob of cold putty. Had the police already gotten to me? No, I was born like that. At two, my face already looked like the face of a convict. But the eyes and chin were pretty. Pretty.

When I was four, I got polio. I was paralyzed from the neck down. I could barely turn my head. My flesh withered. I didn't see my face again until I was five and a half. The cheeks had collapsed. A young death's head. Taut, bony, unlined forehead, the chin had turned hard like a frozen lily. The eyes glowed the color of green figs. I opened my mouth. A blood-soaked bird's nest, in which the mother bird had been killed and her fetal offspring left to die in their unhatched eggs. A mouth full of meat and feathers and tiny white coffins. A fat pink worm snarled from the red gash in my face. I watched my tongue moving in the mirror, enthralled.

Red was my favorite color. I took a tube of my mother's red lipstick and made big red X's on all my dad's business stationary. My father hit my in the face, hard.

I always wanted a red face and black hair. Straight black hair, dark crimson face. Instead, I had curly mouse hair and bleached pink face. I thought of cutting my face up with a razor and pouring shoe polish on my head. Slicing off my ears. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror: the blood was a pathetic little dribble. I cried.

When I was six, I got glasses. The glasses' temples pushed my ears out even further and made them swell and blush a painful pink. Other kids made fun of me. I was the scrawniest kid in the whole school, too. I walked with my toes pointed in because of the polio, and I had to wear big bulbous orthopedic shoes. My face mirrored my self-consciousness and embarrassment, probably even in my sleep.

All through my school years, I was one of the ugly kids. My mother bought me a pair of stylish black horned rimmed glasses. They only enhanced my pallor. Other kids' faces turned brown in the summer. Mine looked like a cheap mask of blistered pink rubber from a joke shop.

In the fifth grade, I proposed to a girl named Denise Johnson out on the lunch court. White globs of seagull and pidgin shit rained from the sky. Denise said she wanted me to propose properly between the gym and cafeteria after school. I combed my "regular boys", and wiped my modern glasses. At ten after three, I met Denise between the two buildings. I was shivering and my mouth was dry and tasted horrible. I got down on my knees on the shit-splotched black top in front of Ms. Johnson. My mouth was just level with her groin. I looked up at her pretty brown face and long, straight, black hair, she looked down at my damp cheeks and smiled benign.

"Denise, you are the prettiest, smartest girl in the whole school. Will you marry me?" My insides chattered against each other as I spoke the words. My face was livid and silly. I could feel my eyeballs bulging in their bone-sockets. My knees ached.

"HAHAHA! You're too ugly. You look like you've been whopped with an ugly stick. Hahaha!" Her face had changed to a contemptuous snarl. Misty lavender donuts of shame appeared in front of my eyes. Suddenly, a mob of snickering boys and girls jumped out from around the back corner of the cafeteria. They surrounded us, laughing and jeering. I stood up, wobbling, a lump in my throat. My asshole pinched tight. Denise joined the circle of snapping, cruel children; she stood next to Rudy Stoltz, the handsomest, most popular guy in the school, they held hands.

"Fuck you, Jew ass burn-butt," said Rudy. I put my huge clumsy hands over my face. A cantaloupe skin hit me in the ear. I could hear the kids wandering away, giggling and guffawing. When I took my hands away from my face, I was alone. There was a thin white and green line of seagull shit on my tan jacket. I walked home through a network of alleys.

Finally, because of my face, I quit school in the eighth grade. I spent my days hiding out in the dark humid garage, doing chemistry experiments and writing in secret code. Sometimes I'd sneak out the side door, walk to the nearest storm drain opening, squeeze in, and crawl around in the complicated black maze of tunneling underneath Los Angeles.

There were rats and black widow spiders down there. I imagined myself dead from spider bites, my face being chewed off by rats. I derived a mysterious feeling of solace from this prospect. No one would ever find me down there, and even if they did, I wouldn't have a face anymore.

My mother to some psychiatrists. They agreed that I was a very disturbed young man. I had taken to wear a red-hooded sweatshirt with the drawstring on the hood pulled tight so there was just a little hole, like a squinched up anal sphincter muscle for me to peer out of. I wore a black Beatles wig over the red hood. I ate my meals alone in the garage. My mother would sometimes stand in the doorway crying. Finally, I threatened to cut her throat with a butcher knife and smear her blood all over my face if she didn't stay the fuck away from me. I poured a pint lacquer on my head, and had to have my scalp shaved. I hadn't bathed or changed clothes in months.

The doctors felt that I needed to be hospitalized. My mother signed some papers. There was a brief court hearing, during which I was declared insane and my custody handed over to the state of California. Nearly bald, laughing hysterically, and muttering. I was handcuffed and delivered by the sheriff's department to a gruesome state hospital in California's Citrus Valley. There I discovered there were people with far uglier faces than mine. Some of these people were so ghastly; I couldn't look at them without retching. After a few months, though, I got used to it.

Still, I couldn't make peace with my own dreadful visage. The doctors put me on medication, they talked to me. Nothing did any good.

Six months was the longest they could hold me legally. I was released and immediately hit the streets. I took up with faggot Dadaists who didn't believe in faces. I tried make-up. I tried turning into a woman. I straightened my hair and dyed it black and wore a monk's cowl so that all I could see was the sidewalk and no-one could see me at all.

I never returned home. Never went back to school. Never saw Denise Johnson or Rudy Stoltz again. Over the years, because of my face and my unfortunate attitude towards it, I have had to be institutionalized several times. I became a drug-addict, alcoholic, and criminal.

When I comb my hair, I wear a blank paper mask with eyeholes. I shave with an electric razor and no mirror like a blind man. You have seen more of me already than I will ever see of myself. I hope you aren't as alarmed or as offended by my face as I am.

"Look in the mirror, Stevie. See. There's Stevie."

I stand there sometimes in secret, looking. There will always be something wrong with my face.

-- Steven Jesse Bernstein's Prison Album. Punctuation is most definately incorrect, but I've never been able to find an actual book of his.