Take the following example. I used to live in this group house called Cambodia1. A good number of people lived in this townhouse. A bunch more people slept on our living room furniture and floor on a regular basis. We were all pretty poor at the time so we liked free stuff.

Anyway, our neighbors were being evicted for nonpayment of rent. Given that they didn’t have money for rent, they also did not have money to move. So they asked my housemate who we’ll call Red Steve2 if he would like this double-bed mattress they could not afford to move. Steve of course said turbo-cool (‘cause that was one of our catch phrases at the time) and moved the bed into his room.

Now Steve was sleeping with this other housemate of mine who we’ll call Sarah3. Not only did Steve and Sarah have sex with one another, but hey had sex with a couple of other people. They also shook hands with and hugged a number of people. They also sat on our furniture.

Everyone in any way connected with Cambodia began to scratch themselves uncontrollably. Scratching, however, didn’t help. Hot baths didn’t help. Cold baths didn’t help. Calamine lotion didn’t help. Cortical steroids didn’t help. Opiate painkillers did help. But they didn’t seem like a very good solution.

Now Steve and Sarah figured that they’d gotten fleas or something from the bed Steve got from the neighbors. They medicated appropriately, but it got so bad that Sarah had to sleep with socks tied over her hands so she wouldn’t wake up bleeding with her own flesh under her nails.

Time passed. Various people we knew went to doctors and got really peculiar diagnoses. One guy I dated who we’ll call Xylophone Vivisect Poindexter4 was told he had some kind of nerve disease or something and would he like a biopsy5. Most of us were uninsured, though, so we just suffered and tried home remedies. Actually Xylo was uninsured too, but he gave the doctor a bunch of fake info so he wouldn’t be able to send a bill. Good thing too. Lousy doctor like that deserves to get stiffed.

And most people did not talk to one another about the horrible itching. Secret shame and all that. I think what finally saved us was that Steve went on a date or two with this girl Nell6 who was from some real southern state. Nell said it seemed to her that we probably had something that in her home state was colloquially referred to as chiggers. Or scabies.

Scabies aren’t really a southern thing either. They are positively medieval. In the Dark Ages, scabies used to be referred to as the Itch and people were said to go mad from it, sometimes to the point of taking their own lives. I believe it.

In these modern times, however, there is a blessed substance called Lindane. Lindane is a neurotoxin, but don’t you worry your pretty little head over that; you want to stop itching, don’t you? This girl Ky-mmm was a college student so she got a prescription for her and her boyfriend from her school health center. We expressed ourselves creatively on a piece of paper which just so happened to contain Ky-mmm’s prescription. So we had a lot of this gross slime to put all over ourselves for much longer than was pleasant and then we washed most of our clothing on sterilizingly hot and we put everything else we owned (including furniture) in plastic bags for two weeks. Apparently, scabies die when faced with either lack of yummy oxygen and host bodies for two weeks or when faced with neurotoxin for just about any length of time. Of course, as we discovered, if human beings apply neurotoxin too many times, they also go into convulsions.

The problem was that we all kept contracting and re-contracting scabies. It was really difficult to get everyone treated at once until we all started talking about it loudly all the time. It was awful, but after a while it became sort of funny awful. And when everyone has the same social disease, no one feels marginalized.

As a result I just didn’t feel embarrassed when this guy I had dated, who we’ll call Adam7, called up to complain. Adam lived in this house called Avalon8 and he told one of my housemates how horrible it was that I had given him scabies. “My girlfriend has even got it! I gave it to her because of Amelia.” My housemate told me what Adam was saying and I yelled back from the living room, “Ha, ha, ha, tell him not to feel bad; he probably didn’t give it to her, ha, ha, ha.”

When we got out of the pit at a Foetus show, we were all a little mortified but mostly amused when somebody screamed, “Oh my G-d, we just gave scabies to the entire DC scene!” I’d like to take this opportunity to say that if you were at the 930 Club Foetus show in September of 1990, we apologize but we won’t be marginalized. Tee-hee.

1. Please keep in mind that, if you ask me why it was called that, I will probably tell you and it will probably bore you.
2. His name was really Steven Ledebur.
3. Her name was really Sarah McKinley Oakes.
4. His name was really John David Pickett.
5. A biopsy is this gross thing where an MD hacks off some of your skin with this tiny ice cream scoop-shaped sharp doctor tool.
6. To the best of my knowledge, her name was really Nell.
7. His name was really Adam Thompson. Or possibly Adam Thomas.
8. No one has any idea why it was called Avalon. For a lot of boring reasons, we all believed that Cambodia was a much cooler name for a group house. Of course, what would you expect from a bunch of Cambodians whose personal slogan was, “We’re the coolest people we know; just ask us.”