How Having a Grotesquely Scarred Face Might Have Its Perks

Riding a bike along the Mühlendamm Bridge in Berlin looking for a quick lunch, a kielbasa or a bratwurst from a street vendor, I soon found a retaining wall upon which to quickly consume the meaty thing.  Just a few paces to my right sat a well-dressed gentleman at an untended café table.  His face was grotesquely scarred, the kind of face a woman would instinctively recoil from.  But in the respectable way he was dressed you could tell he wasn’t a derelict of society.

After I finished my scanty lunch, I gathered up my bike, needing to avoid staring at him.  I picked up speed as I threaded the side streets of Berlin, navigating around the Alexanderplatz, pushing along the FriedrichStraße, faster and faster, as if trying to get away from something.  I was sure he didn’t notice me staring––I’ve always been invisible.  Just a photograph, a snapshot.  That’s all I needed.

I didn’t want to know more about him.  I didn’t want to read into what his life might have been like, nor study and interpret the condition of his shoes, or how carefully the laces were tied, nor the state of his fingernails, little tells into his life behind the suit, the decent haircut.  I didn’t want to know how the barber, who turned him toward the mirror and asked, studying the back of his head, “How would you like it today?”  I didn’t want to know how he would say in response, “Why, yes, thank you.  Today I would like it to not have a scarred face today.  Is that something you could do for me?”  And of course the barber has no choice but to say, “A little off the sides perhaps?”

I pedaled on, dodging pedestrians, trying to stay ahead of the city bus now moving out from the bus stop and careening its way onto the avenue like a lumbering whale.  I couldn’t get away fast enough.

No, I didn’t need to linger.  I couldn’t afford to wonder about his life.  I already knew.  I already knew what I knew about myself.

I wanted what he had.  I envied him his scarred face, unimpeachable, undeniable in that no one would dare be caught stealing a second glance.

I wanted the opposite of attention.  I truly admired the man’s unwilling and involuntary condition.  He would always get a wide berth, wouldn’t he?  There was a space around him, a gravitational orbit.  Not the naturally attractive pull of a blue planet, but rather more like the whirling suck of a black hole, the very cosmic entity you did your damnedest to steer clear from.  You know instinctively that once the hems of your sleeves are clutched by the horrific curiosity that compels you, there’s no going back, there’s no going home anymore.  But also just like you stare across the street at the tenting homeless man, envying him his freedom, you want to know what’s on the other side of social death.

The man with the scarred face was almost me––except my face appeared perfectly intact and presentable.  It could even be considered handsome in a boyishly-cute kind of way.  Just a liability!

My so-called handsome face has never done me any good.  It has been the source of many problems, perhaps was even at the root of them.  As a faltering teenager at parties, my face attracted looks from young girls.  They wanted to know me, my looks inviting them to ask, “What can this face offer me?”  But when they came close, either with team support or after my stilted attempts at an introduction, they soon––all too quickly––changed their minds.  Something about me repelled them.  Something ugly and scarred on the inside.  The pretty girls could see it, and they quickly shirked away.  I’d have gladly changed places with the scarred gentleman just so I wouldn’t have to find out why.

It’s one thing to be a repellent outcast who knows not to raise his hopes.  But in those moments––when a girl draws close, both of you recognizing that quick and shy glimmer of hope––it’s too painful!  It’s the kind of pain that makes you never want to hope again.  You could live your whole life in a wet and musty hole in the ground and be happy.  You could be a Quasimodo lurking in the bell tower, haunting the hopes and dreams of the normal people crowding the town square below.

When they look at me, what do they see?  My brain hums with ideas––beautiful and wretched––but it’s also the humming brain of a homeless derelict, babbling to himself over the curdled residue of a discarded yogurt container pulled from an alleyway dumpster.  How could I explain to a girl at the high school dance that I’m the product of a broken marriage, just the issue from two lonely people who should have never met.  Or how could I explain this to that movie executive at a pitch meeting?  How could I justify this grotesquely unscarred face, this boyishly-sweet face girls are drawn to like a flashing comet in the sky, then gone?

Forget girls.  Forget love!  There’s still the hope of a nice suit and a decent haircut.  You could still have dignity.  That’s not too much to ask.  Just the right to live?

I am deeply, and utterly ashamed.  I take up too much space at the party or at the meeting.  It’s no wonder I spent so much of my ailing adolescence trying to be invisible.  It was much better when I was just a pair of roaming, floating eyes, just watching but never truly existing.

I pushed further and faster through Berlin, hoping to find Nowhere.  Hoping perhaps the lumbering bus would outrun me and reduce my face to boiled mash.  Then I would be free.  Like the tenting homeless man.  But better, the scarred gentleman.

Perhaps someday, if my face should become scarred in a horrible bus accident, you might envy me the way I envy him?