NEEDLING

BURNING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

In a week, I’ll be done with my job. My psoriasis has come out full force. My right hand is bright red with white liquid oozing out of the top of my hand and forming a crusty little shiny crust. Not pleasant. When I was a teenager I was a among other things a dishwasher at the local steak-house. All the soaps et cetera were murder on my skin. Whenever I would get a bad attack of this stuff, the inside of my arms looked as if I had used a metal brush on my skin several times, oozing blood from where I scratched myself, and white stuff from my body trying to cope.

There was a waitress with whom I talked a lot. She believed every silliness I told her. When my arms got real bad, I would tell her there was nothing to worry about, it was merely a rare and relatively armless variant of leprosy. That you couldn't get contaminated, only if I touched you with the "infected" sections of my arms. Then I would chase after her around the restaurant with my arms outstretched. A bit like a zombie. I thought it was real funny. But then again I was fifteen years old.

I didn’t have too many friends when I was a teenager, other than other unwanted surly and or bizare individuals. My best friend when I was a senior in high school read physics books for fun – we had decided to build a laser gun to kill all the other high school people… we never got around to it thank god. He was very tall, big shouldered, awkward, and worked for a short time as the delivery person for the same restaurant... but somehow, he managed to get lost in our little town everytime he'd go out for a delivery, half the time coming back to the restaurant with the food an hour or two later, after the clients had already called back to complain and somebody else had already had time to deliver and come back to the restaurant. He was a good guy and I’ve unfortunately lost touch with him.

Every time I look at my right hand, I see a dead lobster just out of the boiling water instead of seeing my hand. That’s what’s happening, I’m cooking from the inside out. The burning sensation is so strong at times, I have to imagine that my hand is not part of my body, that it is an foreign limb momentarily attached to the rest of my body and that I should not feel one bit concerned.

All those poor lobsters I grabbed from the bottom of their aquarium just to throw them in the boiling water when I worked at yet another restaurant, the one in Lincolnville, Maine, on the rock coast… how many lobsters was that? Lots of them. I have taken a lot of lobsters to their death.

You grab them after rolling up your sleeves. Two pounders. One and half pounders. One and quarter. You got to tell them apart more or less. Not the same price. Grab them right under the head from the back and pop those thick rubber bands from their claws without getting snapped. Place them in the boiling water asking them forgiveness… forgiveness to feel better about yourself whenever you hear them scream from inside the pot.

Sorry little lobsters… so sorry about that… but god damned, do you have to taste so good? Is it our fault that your flesh cooked just right and served with some melted butter is so damned fine to eat?

I look at my hand and wonder, if I stuck my hand in a big pot of boiling water, then took myself to my table and lay my right hand on my plate to pick at it with my left hand… then to bring it up to my mouth and eat it after dipping my fingers in a pot of melted butter… suck on those fingers to the bone, crusty skin… steamed potatoes to go along with that, and some horseradish sauce…

How good would that be?