Blogging My Autobiography - Chapter 11

Being a teenager is a lot like being an alien. The planet seems off kilter, you are not sure you can breathe the air and people really look funny. Looking back, I compare it to spending time in New York, visiting is fine, but living there would require a serious adjustment. So it was with me. I was an alien in New York and had to adjust.

I was afflicted by various plagues early on during my visit to this new planet. First was the growth plague. By the time I was 14, I was 6 feet 4 inches tall, weighed 200 pounds and wore size 13 shoes. Some folks gave me the name Snake, because I had so much lying on the ground. This plague caused massive rerouting of my neural pathways leading to disorientation and lack of physical control. I would trip over a line drawn on the ground because I was so messed up. Of course there were quality of life issues as well. People looked at me funny and cracked jokes. There is no cure for this malaise. The only people who avoid it are short people. So, would I go through it again, absolutely. It would be terrible to be short and then I would suffer from Napoleon Syndrome and that is forever.

The second plague was acne vulgaris and I gotta tell you it was vulgar. When you have a nose as big as mine and the surrounding tissue swells to the point where the nose begins to disappear, you know you have a problem. I must say that I was unhappy, but more importantly, my mother was unhappy that her son looked like he had been covered with mozzarella and pepperoni then shoved into the oven. It was a nickname I heard around school, “Pizza Face.” I like pizza but I didn’t want to look like one. So my mother sent me to the dermatologist and what did he do? Put my face in an oven! Of course he had to prepare the toppings by lancing, squeezing and popping all of them. He then assaulted me with a miniature cheese grater that was supposed to remove the blackheads so they would not turn into pepperoni or mushrooms for that matter. After that, into the oven, otherwise known as a light booth to bake my face until it was well and truly done. Now, people pay money to go into these booths and get a tan. For me, it was just the old slash and burn. I did have a good tan year round, though.

The third plague was facial hair. Normally this is not an issue, but combined with the previous plague, it was death by a thousand cuts. Shaving over zits with a razor was an adventure to be sure. We did not have cool Turbo Razors in those days. My first razor used a flat blade that you inserted by twisting the bottom until the top opened and then placing a blade the size of two postage stamps in the top and closing it. BIC razors came out later with two blades. That was death by TWO thousand cuts. During this plague, my best friends were tiny pieces of toilet tissues and then Styptic Pencils. The Styptic Pencils stung like a scorpion but stopped the bleeding. I learned that pain was necessary for results from this plague.

Body odor was the fourth plague and it was terrible. When I started sweating for real, my mother bought me Mitchum’s Deodorant. In truth this was actually an early form of super glue. If you put your arms down before it dried, well, it played havoc with your armpit hair. Just think of someone grabbing your hair and pulling it all out by the roots and you have the idea. After using that for a while, I found something a little more manly and less painful, Brut Spray On. Which I used until I found Old Spice which I use to this day. Now I don’t have to dance around the bathroom flapping my arms like a chicken while my parents or brothers pounded on the door yelling, “Hey, what are you doing in there?!” So, why would a 14 year old boy care about how he smelled? Well, because of the fifth plague, girls.

Actually it was two plagues in one, peer pressure and girls. There was a lot of pressure, both internal and external to catch on with a girl. One of my friends, Dave always had a girlfriend. Of course he was relatively short and was not afflicted by the above listed plagues. However, it put pressure on us, his “buds” to find our own “women.” At that age, no girl would have anything to do with a tall, clownish boy with a face only a pizza chef could love. However hope springs eternal and that didn’t keep us from trying, fumbling our way in the dark. In this way we fought the plagues, all of them with the faith of youth in our hearts.