When What You Love Decides to Kill You, Part One

It can be a very brutal awakening.

What can I say? It’s heredi-scary. (New word?!)

They’re going to scrape me.

They‘re going to burn me.

They’re going to bombard my cheek with virulent chemicals that will cause my skin to bloom blood-red, buckle, toughen, and peel off like an embarrassed rattlesnake.

They’re going to carve out a chunk of my upper lip and send it for analysis while I wait in my car for 45 minutes. If this first carve-out didn’t catch all the poison, they’ll call me back in and carve deeper, wider. This can happen up to five times.

And those are just the basal-cell babies. The one down on my leg, with the squirmy moniker “squamous-cell,” is a precursor to deadly melanoma. That one will get hit with all the many barrels of current dermatological expertise.

Could any of this have been prevented?

I come from a short line of California-born sunseekers.

In the forties, my mother basted herself with a mixture of olive oil and lime juice (you read this right) and rotated her bronzed body over whenever it was time to flip the Frank Sinatra vinyl. I did the same thing as a teen, but my soundtrack was Fleetwood Mac and the medium, cassette tapes. Known as “Legs Legere” in her prime, mom wore a skimpy bikini beside her kidney-shaped Brentwood pool, daily, into her late seventies (in those later years, this look was perhaps best left unlooked-upon).

This apple-tini will fall far from that tree.

Mom, still going for it at age 55.

In all the chapters of my life, through three marriages on two continents, I have sought the sun, basking in its sustaining goodness. In high school, I ranged the red rocks of Sedona—and the Grand Canyon—with scruffy pals, browned skin limned with red dust, long hair often rubbed with olive oil to keep it from drying out (supple skin felt like a forever-coating then, not as now in need of constant coddling). In college—at Monica Lewinsky’s alma mater—I chose a six-month academic stay in Malaysia over all other options because I imagined it would involve generous beach time. On the school breaks, with a different gang of (this time, highly intellectual) scruffs, I camped out in Death Valley; we loped the barren flats, naked but for the sunglasses and binoculars, sustained only by bourbon, cold beans, and confidence.

This was before sunscreen.

During my Wall Street phase, I sunbathed on the roof of a 5-floor walk-up at 91^st and Third, dousing my hair with Sun-In and massaging my body with that weird orange goo, Bain de Soleil. Then-new sun-bed technology seemed tailor-made for my indoor-centric office-job life; during an early session, I left on my lacy undies, then delighted in the lace-etched butt-tan. Days before a twenty-something’s wedding—the social event of the season—the Sun-In ran down onto my forehead and interacted fiercely with the Bain de Soleil, causing an un-hide-able outbreak reminiscent of the Himalayas. Not my finest hour. This might have been seen as a portent, but somehow was not.

In the early eighties marriage led me to London, where there was—at least then—no sun. (The British people persist in planning for the outbreak of sun, in matters of home and garden design, dining and entertaining, and sports events. But the sun never appears.) In a pasty approximation of my former self, I stayed for seven years. In Europe, investment banks are generous with vacation time (four weeks per year), but we never once went north. I missed out on Ireland, Scotland, and the Lake District, instead becoming a familiar denizen of France, Italy, and Spain.

Then, a scandalous financial miss-step on the part of my first husband led to ignominious exile from the staid world of banking. With few choices, we took the road routinely traveled in those days: off to sunny Spain.

With Wiggy just days before leaving Spain—before sunscreen or self-tanners.

Eureka! I blossomed, browned, and became the bread-winner, forming a catering company to serve the indolent and disaffected northern European population of the Costa del Sol. He, on the other hand, shriveled and moped. At about this time, I made a concession to the dangers of my friend the sun, and stopped exposing my face to its rays. But the body was still fair game for another half-decade. In those days, I bought six new bikinis every summer because they were virtually my constant costume.

In the early nineties, there arose an unwelcome and urgent need to permanently leave Spain. Of the three choices socially and economically viable at that time—New York, London, and L.A.—it’s clear that sunshine was uppermost amongst my motivations: I settled in Venice Beach. When the huge shipping container finally arrived at my little bungalow just off Palms Boulevard, the first item off the truck was my favorite sun-lounger.

You are sensing a theme here. Cue the cute montage: Age 5 to 10, naked-wading in tide-pools at the Hollister Ranch; at 26, getting engaged on a Greek island. And the tide rolled on.

It’s been quite awhile since I actually sat out in the sun, choosing instead a rigorous regime of sunscreens interspersed with self-tanning products, about which I’ve become a connoisseur. But, like a sleepwalker, my knee-jerk response to the concept of vacation has always been: Go to the sun.

A good friend helpfully suggested the Arctic Circle.

Next Time: When chilled adult beverages decided to kill my husband.

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Tidbits For The Week of September 16, 2024

Brigit’s What I’m

CURRENTLY LOVING ➡️  This gorgeous, sunny September in Central Coast Wine Country
THINKING ABOUT ➡️ Mortality, and the need to roll with the punches (and punch-biopsies)
LISTENING TO ➡️ "Tanya Tanning Butter" from "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood....(It's also on the Spotify playlist I made for readers of my memoir, Rottenkid; A Succulent Story of Survival.)