During a lifetime chock-filled with embarrassment and humiliation I assumed that I had hit rock-bottom years ago, but that was before I sprouted a boil on my lower lip. The boil, which the doctor called a “furuncle,” was the result of an unfortunate face-first collision with a huge spider web and the small hairy arachnid that lived there. The spider, annoyed that I destroyed his beautiful web, bit me savagely, and a boil was born.
It’s never a good sign when a dermatologist looks at your face and gasps. “Wow, that’s huge,” she told me and her assistant, a grim, humorless harpy, nodded in agreement. My boil was the size and color of a small prune and for the 8 weeks it took to go away the people who didn’t avoid me altogether could not take their eyes off of it, generally while offering unseemly theories as to its origin..
The dermatologist told me that I was not, under any circumstances, to shave, for fear that the boil might get infected and turn into a full blown carbuncle, and she suggested that I hide it by growing a beard. This sounded reasonable; I had a full beard in graduate school, and it was a fine beard, thick and dark. At the time I thought the beard gave me an arty, bohemian look (although in retrospect I looked like a young Osama bin Laden,) but now I was sure that my beard was just the ticket to conceal hide my prune-colored boil.
It never occurred to me that my beard would not be as dark as I remembered, and as it grew in I was surprised to see that the color was mainly salt with virtually no pepper at all. Against my new, gray beard my dark boil was more conspicuous than ever. This was reinforced on my next office visit when the doctor looked at her tech, looked at me, and said, “Wow your beard is really gray. Why don’t you color it?”
Taking her advice I went to the drugstore and bought a box of “Just for Men.” The doctor assured me that this was not “dye” but a “coloring gel” specially formulated for beards & mustaches. She told me to follow the instructions to the letter, which I did, and 10 minutes later it looked like I had colored my beard with black shoe polish. The good news was that my boil, which previously was only noticeable if you were near to me, had faded into oblivion; the bad news was that my new black beard was visible from outer space: I looked like GI Joe’s older brother.
I went back to the doctor for a follow-up, and while I waited, the tech came in to take my blood pressure and stopped short. “Dear God,” she said, “what did you do to your face?” I told her my story and she shook her head. “Dyeing a beard never works,” she said, “but I’ll say a prayer that your boil heals and that your beard won’t be as gray.”
My voice scaled up. “You’re going to pray away the gray?” I asked, and she nodded. “With God all is possible,” she said primly, and I nodded, speechless.
It took almost 8 weeks, but my black beard and my boil both faded away, and as the color washed out, my beard came back as gray as ever. The episode left me with a small, permanent scar on my lip, a heightened respect for spiders and a deeper appreciation for the power of antibiotics: God may see every spider that falls, but I doubt my boil was on His radar.