So there I was a young man… well not really a man, more like a deranged LSD freak who was living such a debased lifestyle that I got scabies . This is an infestation of the skin with a microscopic mite. It itches like hell and makes your skin smell strange and sourish as well as giving you tiny pimple like blisters that when you pop them oily stuff come out of which is actually full of the eggs of the little bastards.
When you get warm, like in bed or in the shower the little scabies wake up and start going crazy. Which itches like mad and you can get no sleep.
When you are in the shower the site of the infestation shows up as a red rash. What you thought was just a few on your chest is actually a fully harsh PLAGUE of them up and down most of your body. Making you feel like a degenerate dog, a social outcast and a festering leper. Which is pretty much what you have to be for these little mongrels to get hold of you.
Anyway the reason I was writing this story is that I have been getting my memory back lately and I was thinking back to some bad drug trips I had experienced. These gibbering nightmares were often characterized by the feeling of bugs crawling all over my skin.
It was one such time when I felt that my skin was crawling with bugs, this did not cause me undue duress as it was hallucinogenic drugs as usual. THEN I REALIZED THAT I WAS ACTUALLY CRAWLING WITH BUGS.
I experienced a freak out of Jurassic proportions. I went into itching my skin off overdrive. Then I went into the shower to scrub with every liquid in the stall and the harsher ones under the sink. Then my dick and eyes started burning and all the cuts from my harsh scratching started fizzing from the brutal cleaners, and I started thrashing about, weeping and screaming quietly as there was a party going on in the lounge.
I turned the shower on cold in a desperate effort to drive them into hibernation and lay at the bottom, a tripping, shivering hyperventilating, wigging mess.
Then the cold killed the itching and I some how got out dressed and dried. I made it back to the party, chain smoked marijuana cigarettes, put on a happy face and just rode it out like the trooper I had trained myself to be…
Later that week I was staying at my girlfriends house and she couldn’t sleep. And she felt very itchy. I calmly told her that she was now a festering scabies hosting dog like myself, and there was no hope for us. She got up to have a shower but I dispassionately informed her that a shower would just make the little cunts come alive and start chewing and that her best hope was to go and smoke a huge joint and down three mouthfuls of the clear highly flammable liquid I kept on top of the fridge for when the plastic bottle gin ran out.
She crawled into a little ball on the edge of the bed and cried for a bit, whimpering out “Im crawling… “ to herself and then she left me there in the scabid darkness and went to cry to her friend in the next room about it.
By morning I was a TOTAL outcast. My festering little parasitic secret was out. And I was banished from the house.
I holed up at my friends winery spending most of the next 5 days in a numb dreamworld from nibbling poisonous toadstools and washing it down with bad white spirit made from Kiwifruit.
I got a call to come back as the girlfriend had the cure and the entire flat were gunna knock the bastard scabies on their heads as they all had it now.
Apparently one girl had got it from sleeping in our bed while we were away. Why? Because she liked my smell and enjoyed sucking the white patches off the sheets I guess.
She had given it to a guy in the house through sleeping with him and the grot transient who lived on the couch in the lounge got it from using everyones towels.
So that night I smeared it all over me and lay back to enjoy the final death throws of my microscopic chums. It burned me like napalm. It burned my eyes and willy worse than the Draino I rubbed on myself to try to kill the bugs in the shower. I thrashed about and screamed a little but you weren’t allowed to wash it off. The shit reeked like Zyklon B* and I was dying a poisoned death.
The girlfriend was sleeping on the floor of her friends room by now and I could hear muffled crying and thrashing about from both girls. And I don’t think it was because of some crazy Lesbo sex romp because I heard them both puking out the window around midnight.
The next morning we got rid of all the bedding we had and washed all our clothes in hot hot water and dried them on a hot hot cycle – which the doctor she went to said kills them.
I traced the source of the scabies back to an old mattress that I had found on the side of the road and I had been using for quite a while… I gave it away to a guy who had stolen dope from me.
Now I think back almost fondly to my little time as the owner of a festering scabies infestation. I was good host and probably would have let them stay until I peeled the flesh from my bones.
* Zyklon B was the trade name of a poison used in Nazi Germany to kill millions of people. It was a powerful pesticide.
Destroying Minds and Reaping Souls: Or how to create a sane stable relationship based on trust and full of love.