When you live the life of high fashion like I do, you get used to being under the knife. A tuck here, a staple there. Something made bigger, something made smaller; something waxed, something peeled, something rejuvenated through weird scalpel sorcery.
It’s part of the lifestyle. After a while you barely notice.
OK, I’m lying. This was my first time.
I went to the offices of Central Maine Plastic Surgery last week to have something — I think the medical term is “fugly bump” — removed from my face.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: But Mike! What about your blossoming career as a shaving-cream model?
Not to worry, adoring public. While it’s true I’ll have a small scar running down my cheek, these days that’s a positive. Scars are in, bruh. Just like tattoos, piercings and various implements dangled from the earlobes or nostrils.
Scars tell the world that you have a back story. You see a guy with a scar on his face and you think, maybe this dude was in a knife fight in prison and had to shank a guy.
He doesn’t like to talk about it.
Of course, it’s just as likely the dude cut himself with his wife’s Lady Bic, but you can’t know that for sure, so your imagination will just stick with the shanking theory.
Or maybe the fellow just had a fugly bump that the other kids teased him about so he went to a local cutter to have it excised. Which is what I did, in case you missed that. I know how you drift in and out.
Truth be told, my body is a road map of scar tissue from a weird variety of wounds that began almost immediately after I sprang, cat-like, from the womb.
Take a look at the long, jagged cicatrix running along my left inner thigh, for instance. It’s a scar so powerful in its implications, it never fails to send strangers running away in horror when I show it off in public.
“Come here,” I tell them, slowly removing my pants for added drama. “I want to show you something.”
I’m really quite a showman.
There’s a thick scar that runs from the tip of my right pointer finger to the mid-knuckle that has nothing to do with a nose-pick gone awry, thank you very much. It probably has a great story, in fact, but unfortunately I don’t remember it. All I can tell you about this wound is that I was trying to climb something, I failed, and some girls really, REALLY don’t like the sight of blood.
Other than that, it’s a blur.
There’s a scar alongside my left knee cap — it looks a bit like a baseball bat, which is exactly how I planned it — that was the result of a playground scrap that ended on a pile of broken glass. If I recall, that’s the day I learned to swear with gusto. Had to stay after school for a week.
There’s a weird network of ugly scars on my left arm that resulted when I fell through, was shoved through or otherwise lost fights with plate glass windows. In my defense, I should point out that I never lost a fight with a window whilst sober.
Got a scar that looks like a streaking meteor on the back of my left thumb. This one was inflicted while I was helping to tear down an old Puffin Stop store many years ago in Oakland. Now that I think of it, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that I suffered this injury during an incident with a large-beaked aquatic fowl. Delightful.
And there’s a smallish scar along my left cheek that was the result of a puma attack while I was running with the big cats during an African safari back in ought-five.
You see how that works? I couldn’t even make it through an entire column without inventing lies about this new scar. I mean, come on. Plastic surgery? You think I’ll still be telling the truth about that in a year? In six months? By the end of the day?
Scars are the tiny ghosts of old wounds. The only real advantage to having them is the opportunity to lie about their origins. Check back with me around Christmas and see where I go with this one.
Flying shrapnel from a downtown shootout, bruh.
I was shanked, bruh. I don’t like to talk about it.
Crow attack, bruh. It happens.
And of course, if none of that works to wow you, I’ll just take my pants off.
Come here. I want to show you something.
Mark “Scarface” LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com if you want to know about that inner-thigh cicatrix.
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