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Gross Yourself Out Sunshine, when we were eight years old, taught me a trick for grossing yourself out that had a huge effect on me. First, bend your fingers as much as they will bend -- but don't make a fist. Then, hold your hand away from your body and squint at the back of it. Eventually it will look like your fingers are just little stubs that stop at your first knuckle. Mutant hand. Creepy, huh? Of course there were far grosser things we could have been doing. In truth, we did them. Charity, who always had a blue ribbon of mucus hanging out her nose, could gross out a whole lunch table without even trying. There were boys who continually had to have time outs during science workshops because they kept eating the bacteria. Barf-o-Rama had yet to be invented, but jars of fake snot and books on how to eat fried worms were available to those who saved their allowances, and we made avid use of them. Our class play, which I am proud to announce I wrote single-handedly, climaxed when six of the characters disappeared down a giant toilet. It was 1976 and they let us perform it in front of the whole school. I was as preoccupied with excrement and other disagreeable things as the next kid. But the mutant hand was really more interesting to me. Even today it makes me feel funny inside. It has something to do with seeing my own body as a foreign object. It is my hand, but it doesn't look like mine. It looks congenitally deformed, and not very usable, the hand of someone with a very different life than I have. Whereas squeezing pimples is a fantasy of eradicating filth and disciplining rebellious flesh, mutant hand is a fantasy of owning a unique, misshapen body. It's about imagining a permenent state rather than a sudden event like vomiting. And most important, mutant hand involves thinking about outward deformity rather than inner malignancy. There was a kid named Mink in the classroom next door who had a sunken chest. He used to lift up his shirt at recess and we never got bored of it. One of our teachers had webbed toes which she would show us if we nagged her. I would never have asked the boy who had polio if I could look at his legs, though. At eight I found people with disabilities sad and a little frightening. But Mink and my teacher were in perfect health, and their physical anomalies were fascinating: icky and somehow not altogether safe. The mutant hand experiment allowed me to try the same thing on myself, giving me a momentary empathy with bodies that strayed from the norm. |
