dr. putz and the tool of torture

"It hurts, Dad."

"Stick your head out the window. Let the breeze hit ya."

I rolled down the window and the cold night air numb my inflamed face. From the moving car, I was nothing more than a blur. I closed my red-rimmed eyes, soothed by the knowledge that no one could see me. My face relaxed as I breathed in the scent of snow. I waited for the fat flakes to tumble out of the thick gray clouds hanging overhead. I wished they would stick to my face and bury me in a soft white carpet of cold.

"Ya know, it could be worse. There are other ten-year-olds with cancer, hair falling out and tumors sticking out of their chests."

"I know, Dad."

"Some kids, they been in fires. Got no skin at all. No eyelids either. Everything just burned off. You should be thankful."

"I am, Dad."

"Had a lady in the cab the other day. Thought she was carrying a football wrapped up in a blanket. Know what it was?"

"What was it, Dad?"

"Her baby. Ain't got no arms or legs. Just a body and a head. How would you like to be that baby?"

"So, I should be thankful I wasn't born a football?"

"Exactly!"

This was the lecture I heard every Monday night on the drive home from Dr. Putz's office. It could be worse, I had my health, I should be thankful. Think about babies with no eyes, boys with no feet, girls with no tongues. On nights like this, I wished I had been born with no ears.

In the beginning, Mom took me to my appointments. That was before Dr. Putz became a cutter. At first, he prescribed creams and pills. The creams burned my skin and turned my face crimson. Then, my skin flaked and fell off like the crust of a croissant. Hot pokers of pain shot through my stomach from the pills. Dr. Putz stopped the creams and pills. There had been no improvement anyway.

Next came the ultraviolet treatments. Every week, I baked under the orange lights as the rays soaked into my skin. Little black goggles protected my eyes from the brightness. I pretended I was a beach bunny roasting in the Caribbean surf, warm ocean water lapping at my toes. I liked this treatment, though it didn't help my skin one bit. It did, however, cause blinding white spots to blur my vision for several minutes afterward. This prevented me from seeing the stares of other patients as I exited the office. The pity in their eyes was like a punch in the gut. My father was wrong. Maybe it wouldn't have been so terrible to be born blind.

"You're not responding to the usually prescribed treatments. We're going to have to try drainage." Dr. Putz declared after three months with no improvement. I looked at Mom, who had started dabbing her forehead in fear. Too afraid to actually ask what drainage entailed, I laid down on the table and squeezed my eyes shut. The paper beneath me crinkled as I squirmed under the bright table lamp poised overhead.

Metal clinked against metal and Mom gasped. My eyes shot open and I jumped up, bumping my head against the low-hanging lamp.

"Settle down now,' Dr. Putz said as he tried to shield me from what he held in his hand. But it was too late. The metal rod pointed towards me like a witch's wand. It was shiny with a circle at the tip. The circle was a little bigger than a pinhead. Black spots danced in front of my eyes as I envisioned what would be done to me.

Dr. Putz's firm hand pushed on my chest as he guided me back down onto the table. My breathing was shallow and jagged. Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes and trailed down my cheeks. The damp coolness felt good against my hot face. I tried to squeeze my eyes shut but they kept shooting open as I sensed the metal rod creeping closer to my face. Wet, smacking sounds escaped from Mom's lips. I strained to hear the prayer she was saying for me.

Stars danced across the darkness of my closed eyes as a scorching pain seared through my face. Dr. Putz pressed the circular tip of the rod deep into the largest pimples on my face. He grunted with the effort of it. The metal tip dug into each pimple until there was a pop and blood and pus oozed onto my face. He repeated this six, seven, eight times. No pimple was safe. He attacked blemishes on my nose, chin and cheekbone. The ones on my nose were an exclamation point of pain. It felt as though the flesh would tear from my face.

When he finally finished, he sat me up and stared at my face.

"Much better!" I looked at Mom, whose mouth was covered with a tissue. She nodded a lie at me.

"I thought you were never supposed to pop pimples?" I accused, woozy with pain.

"You're not. I am." He smiled, wiggling the wand of torture at me. "See you next week."

I didn't see my face until we got home. Deep potholes of dried blood littered my skin. Angry welts were rising around the explosions. Shame burned my ears and anger tore at my throat.

"How could you let him do this, Mom?"

"You want to get better, don't you? He's the doctor. He knows best."

There was no fighting that logic. Before going to the doctor, I had already tried everything imaginable to help myself. First, I went on a diet. No chocolate, no fries, no pizza, no soda. Two months later and six pounds lighter, my skin had not improved. Fifth grade was not the fun I had hoped it to be. Although I was starting to fill out my training bra with something more than Kleenex, my skin still took center stage. The acne started a slow descent, marching across my neck, shoulders, back and chest. The medicine cabinet was bursting with anti-blemish products: there were creams and rinses, masks and mists. I consulted all of the authorities: Seventeen Magazine, the Avon lady, even a palm reader. I begrudgingly heeded unsolicited advice from strangers on the street.

"Ya know whatcha need, kid? Get yerself some toothpaste and slather it all over them zits. Bring 'em right to a head."

"Oh, sweetie. I know just how you feel. Hot compresses soaked in chamomile tea. Hot as you can stand. Lay them over your face. Draws out all the toxins."

"Orange peels. Vitamin C does it. Eat lots of oranges. Lay the peels on your face."

I tried it all. Almost. A sweat-soaked bus driver advised me to dip a rag in the first piss I took in the morning and lay it across my face. The morning after I heard this advice, I stared into the bowl, clutching a washcloth. My hand hovered inches above the yellow water. I chanted, do it do it do it! As the cloth almost skimmed the surface of the bowl, I flushed in disgust and stormed out of the bathroom. I may have been a zithead, but I would not allow myself to become a piss face.

Shortly after Dr. Putz started digging into my face, Mom stopped taking me to my appointments. Instead, she said, my father would come home early on Monday nights. Dad never came home early. This was momentous.

"Why?" I asked.

"I just can't bear to watch what he does to you."

I had my own theory. During one of my appointments, Dr. Putz turned his attention to my mother. He stared at her sitting in her usual seat, and approached her like an animal in the wild. Mom sunk deeper into the chair as he swiped her long bangs away from her face.

"Mom. Up on the table please. That needs to be removed." Dr. Putz guided me off of the table and took my mother by the elbow.

"What? No. Leave it. It's fine."

"It's not fine. It's disgusting. And it's coming off. Now."

"It" was a large pom-pom sized mole that hung in between Mom's eyebrows. She had kept her bangs long her entire life to cover it up. Sometimes, when her bangs got pushed aside, I saw it jiggling like a Christmas tree ornament. It was not my favorite part of my mother.

I leaned up against the wall as Mom looked at me pleadingly. I shrugged my shoulders and felt some amount of glee to be on the other side of this routine. Mom's damp hands left dark imprints on the paper that I clung to every week. There was a quick snip of a scissor, and the pom-pom was resting in Dr. Putz's palm.

"There. Done."

"Ohhh." My mother crooned, looking green about the gills. "Thank you!"

The next week, Mom came back to Dr. Putz with a new haircut and my brother Chris, who was seven. Chris had acquired the nickname of "Hindu Dot", thanks to a similar mole centered just above his eyebrows. Unlike my mother's, Chris' was flat. For some reason, Mom had not afforded Chris the same protection of long bangs and insisted on keeping his bangs short.

The teenaged boys on our block chanted "Hindu Dot" whenever Chris passed. He kept his head hung low and bit his little lip to keep from crying. Mom caught them in the act one day.

"You little punks! Think you're so brave pickin on a little kid? How 'bout I get his older cousin to come and kick your asses?"

I giggled on two accounts. One - my mother had said "asses", though she did cross herself as soon as she uttered the profanity. Two - the cousin she was referring to was older and larger than these boys. However, he was a virtual shut-in at twenty. He rarely left his room, and never left the house. I pictured Mom pulling these bullies by their ears and leading them to my cousin's dark cave of a room and saying, "Kick their asses!"

Mom had decided that Dr. Putz could put a stop to the Hindu Dot. Chris sat on the table under the blaring light that I was so used to. I watched his little legs shaking and my heart crumbled. At that instant, I wished it was me up on the table. I would take all of the bullying if they would just leave my brother alone.

Chris squinted his eyes and clenched his jaw as Dr. Putz injected a needle around the mole. I then watched him slice a neat circle around it and blood pooled in the spot where the mole had been a second ago. He placed a band-aid over the hole and patted Chris on the head. Hindu Dot was dead.

Dr. Putz seemed to enjoy the scalpel and had plans to mine my mother's body for more moles. Shortly after the death of Hindu Dot, Mom begged off of her doctor duties and sent my father in her place.

This, however, did not sway Dr. Putz from his scalpel obsession.

"You have suspicious moles that need to be removed" he informed me.

"Suspicious?" Dad asked.

"Yes. Cancerous."

So began the excavation of suspicious moles. Every few weeks, Dr. Putz would numb me up and slice me open. I felt like a turkey being carved for Thanksgiving, except no one moaned "yum" as he sawed into my flesh. Most of the moles were on my back. The cold blood ran down my back after each incision, and I felt faint from the thought of my blood leaking out.

The moles were usually teeny tiny and didn't require stitches, just a band-aid. One stubborn mole, however, was deeper and larger than the rest. It was to the right of my belly button and Dr. Putz said it had to go. The hole left behind was cavernous and needed several stitches. The bandage bulged visibly through my shirt. The next day at basketball practice, Bobby Kimmel stared quizzically at my stomach.

"What happened to you?" he asked, face scrunched up.

"Got stabbed in a street fight." I responded with a steely gaze.

"Are you all right?" Bobby's dim eyes shimmered with wonder.

"I'll live. Other guy didn't." I strutted away, too tough for words. Bobby was left in a fog of wonder.

Months passed in a similar fashion. Dad drove me to my weekly torture sessions with Dr. Putz, and he squeezed the life out of my pimples. We drove home, and I suffered the lectures about my lucky life. Dad insisted on stopping off at the supermarket every week. I begged him to take me home first. The treatments with Dr. Putz left me bloody and puffy and exhausted. I couldn't bare the disgusted glares of other people. But Dad refused.

"Can't let anyone make you ashamed. Show your face. Be proud. You look fine. Besides, supermarket's on the way home."

I tried to keep my chin up like my father said. The fluorescent lights of the supermarket bit into my face. My skin was dry and cracked from the scabs already forming. Eyes strained to stare at me, then shot away when I caught their glances. Little by little, my head dropped lower until all I could see were my own shoelaces.

I found refuge in a book display for young adults. The books were a warped child's version of trashy adult romances. The titles read: "Too Young To Die", "I Want To Live", "Why So Young?" The covers depicted tragic young girls with sallow skin and sunken eyes. They were all dying of leukemia or heart failure or some romantic jungle-borne illness that was slowly eating their brains. They were each wasting away in the prime of their lives, and they looked beautiful doing it. Boyfriends who were football captains and class presidents were being left behind. I wanted so badly to be one of those girls! True, they were dying, but they were so pretty and popular and their boyfriend were so cute. Plus, no one made fun of a dying girl. If a boy could love a girl with brain rot, why couldn't he love one with a few blemishes?

I hid amid these stories until my father came searching for me.

"Dad," I would whine, "some woman called me gross."

"Yeah, well. You're not. And she's an idiot."

"D'ya think I could get a book?" I batted my tear-stained lashes.

"Yeah, yeah. Grab one and let's go."

It wasn't exactly a lie. Some woman had called me gross. Maybe just not that night. Those books were my best medicine. It made me feel better to read about other people's miseries. There might just be hope for me yet.

I became more feisty regarding the harvesting of my moles. One night, while waiting in the bleach-and-body-odor-scented waiting room, I spied a brochure about skin cancer. It detailed the appearance of suspicious moles - bigger than an eraser head, multi-colored, jagged edges. None of my moles had had any of those features.

That night, Dr. Putz zeroed in on a mole on my right cheek.

"Yep. This one's gotta go," he nodded.

"No way. You're not scraping anything off my face." I protectively covered my mole with my palm.

"But it could be...."

"It's not. None of them have been. You're not doing any more."

Dr. Putz sighed in exasperation, looking to my father for support. Before Dad could speak, I handed him the brochure I had swiped from the waiting room.

"Look, Dad. These are cancer. Mine doesn't look anything like that." He looked at the brochure and nodded. I held my breath, waiting to see whose side he was on.

"Let's leave that one alone for a while, Doc."

"But it could...."

"Yeah. Thanks anyway. She's good for now."

Dr. Putz stored away his scalpel for the next victim, disappointed that he wouldn't be able to practice his carving skills that night.

It happened a few weeks later. Dad and I walked into the exam room and were met by Dr. Putz's gleaming white teeth. I had never seen them before. They were unnaturally large and unnerving. I understood why he always kept them hidden beneath a scowl.

"Hello! Good to see you! Listen, Dad. How about you wait outside tonight? I'm going to try an extra long treatment with the UV lamp. Go on out. I think the game's on." My eyes attempted to keep Dad in the room, but he nodded reassuringly, heading towards the television.

My stomach shook and my chin quivered. I didn't trust Dr. Putz. As soon as Dad left the room, the sour scowl returned to his lips. The UV lamp clicked on and its hum filled the room.

"Up on the table, please."

I reluctantly slid under the lamp and folded my hands across my chest. Sweat pooled in my palms as Dr. Putz placed the goggles over my eyes. I kept peaking out from under them. The light from the UV lamp was blinding. Dr. Putz had his back to me, but I could see his busy hands preparing something. Glass canisters clicked open and objects were dropped onto a metal tray. I was about to sit up when I felt the pressure of his palm heavy on my chest.

"Stay still now. We're just going to remove that pesky mole."

"No!" I shouted, and kicked my legs up in the air. My foot knocked the UV lamp away from the table as I struggled against Dr. Putz's needle-baring hand.

"Don't tell me no." Dr. Putz was determined.

"Dad!" I screamed loudly as I dug my nails into Dr. Putz's hairy bear claw of a hand. He let out a yelp of pain and dropped the needle. He backed away from the table just as Dad swung the door open.

"What the hell's goin on in here?" His jaw was set and his fist was balled as he looked from me to Dr. Putz clutching his hand.

I didn't wait to explain it. Running past my father, I fled the building and out into the dark night. Leaning against the car waiting for Dad, I wondered if the pretty, dying girls in my books had doctors like this.

The car ride home was quiet. I wasn't interested in the version of events Dad had heard from Dr. Putz, and I wasn't in the mood for a "lucky" lecture. Dad didn't even put the radio on. My head throbbed from the effort of holding back my tears. We drove past the supermarket without stopping.

"Dad? The supermarket."

"Not tonight," he said.

We pulled up in front of the house and Dad turned off the ignition. He stared straight ahead, his hands on the steering wheel. I kept my feet on the dashboard, staring up at the two stars I could see through the windshield.

"You never have to go to him again."

"I won't."

"I know."

We sat quietly in the car for a while. I could feel the words my father wanted to say. His eyes darted back and forth. I was grateful for the silence, and the dark. Cars and people passed us by. I watched them and wondered about their lives. I could see them without being seen by them. I wanted to stay there forever.