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Feeling Crabby

23-dec-2002

After a day and a half of scratching my pantyline a little more than I ever scratch my pantyline, I decided I had crabs. I couldn’t find the little buggers, but when I spend enough time alone in my apartment, I can sneeze and convince myself I’m dying. Also, I quake at the idea of being eaten alive. Sharks, orca, ringworm.

I called my buddy C, the hardcore homo, to ask his advice. He’s one of the men in my life that I know to have had more sex than, well, me. I’d never been crabby before. Surely, I thought, C will know what to do.

When I finished warning him to never trust a young guy with greasy hair who you pick up on the Skytrain, no matter how cherubic his face, I confessed my fear and described the symptoms. C told me I was imagining things.

“If you aren’t scratching all the time, night and day, you don’t have crabs,” he said. “If you had ‘em, you’d be going nuts.”

By that evening, the itching, and the paranoia, disappeared. I decided it was heat rash. A week later, all hell broke loose in my underwear. After a very close examination of my pubes, I found a pale grey creature waving its miniscule claw at me. Hello, hello, it seemed to be saying as the claw clamped open and closed. I was completely freaked out. Little insects were camping in my bush. They were chewing on me.

Panicky, I phoned C again.

“Cookie,“ he said calmly, “shave. You just gotta shave it all off from your face down. Shave everything. And buy Quelada.”

Being a faerie princess partial to her body hair, I shuddered at the thought of shaving. But the itch got the better of me. I reached for the clippers. Okay, I bartered with myself, I only shave the worst of it. I buzzed my short and curlies down to the skin starting above my bellybutton and stopping on my upper thigh. My entire mid–section was hairless. It looked like a landing strip. It was summer. I wanted to wear short skirts.

I raced to the drug store and back, then nearly drowned myself in Quelada, that magic potion. The crabs came crawling out of my skin, reaching for the heavens with one claw extended. Why hast thou forsaken me? they cried, then dropped dead.

My panic ebbed. I breathed a deep sigh, resisted the urge to take an S.O.S. pad to my genitals, and browsed online for more info. There, I found all kinds of invaluable information. It takes about a week after your contact with a crabby person for new eggs to hatch and the privates pestilence to fully begin. Nowhere did it say to remove the hair. Nothing. No clearcut necessary.

Okay, sexy reader, so you can’t take a hardcore homo’s advice any more than you can trust flirty gay boys on the Skytrain. If you have a health concern, find a professional resource or risk looking the fool.