Crunchy Stuff

Crunchy Stuff

So, William, I guess we should start by asking you to tell us how all this began.

          Oh God, as far back as I can remember – maybe when I was about four or five.

Go on …

          Well, I was trying to teach myself how to ride a bike – y’know, my dad was too busy and nobody else gave a shit – and of course I skinned a knee. My mother was more than a bit grouchy about having to wash it and tape a gauze pad over it.

          She gave me a whole lot of shit about me being careless and causing her so much trouble. She even accused me of skinning my knee on purpose just to cause her aggravation – actually made me deny that one, tearfully, a few times.

          Then she loomed over me and in one of her more ominous and threatening voices commanded me to leave the injury alone – not to touch it no matter what, and especially not to pick at it, or it could get infected and I’d lose my leg.

          Figures of speech can play merry hell with a small child’s imagination. I wondered where I should look for it if it got lost – under the couch or something?

          Anyway, by the next day or so it’d stopped hurting and started itching. My mother took the gauze pad off so the wound – she referred to my skinned knee as a wound – so the wound could get some air, revealing a couple of interesting-looking scabs, which my mother, amping up the ferocity of her threats, forbade me once again to pick at. 

          I waited until she was well out of sight before exploring those wonderful scabs with my fingertips and picking at them with my little-kid-dirty fingernails.

          Much of my childhood is kinda hazy in my memory, y’know – I was just five years old; how much do you remember from that age? – but these things are as sharp in my mind as if they’d just been this morning.

          It was wonderful. It was the best.

In what way?

          Well, the actual tactile sensations aren’t any mystery. There’s that millisecond of resistance, and then the sublime crunchy sensation of the of them crumbling up into a bunch of hard little grains of dried blood. Gritty powder to rub between the fingerprint parts of my thumb and forefinger. Either hand. It establishes some kind of neural circuit between my fingertips and the deepest part of my brain, the part that’s the real me.

          Crunch!

          Of course, sometimes parts of larger scabs are so thick or old or something that they actually bend and then kinda snap, not quite like

cleaving a diamond, before getting crunchy.

Sort of like bubble wrap?

          Yeah, I know that some people feel strongly about popping bubble wrap, which I agree does have its benefits, but it’s not the same thing. Popping whiteheads is better, as it produces that split-second painlike sensation, but it’s still not as wonderful as dried-blood scabs. Anyway, I never had acne, and I can count the number of poppable zits I’ve had in my life on the fingers of both hands.

          One of my zits, though – one of them was magic. It was when I was in my early twenties, and came from an ingrown beard hair a centimetre or so below my lower lip. It bled a bit when I popped it, so I let the whole shebang dry clinging to an adjacent beard hair. When it was good and hard to my touch I slid it carefully down its hair and away from my face. It was this gorgeous golden colour, hard and irregular and a bit jagged, and it crunched magnificently!

          The best thing, though, was that when I pulled it away a bit more pus and blood oozed out, and I scratched the spot just enough to produce another doozy. I kept picking that spot and getting increasingly smaller, but still satisfactory, results for a month.

          It was good.

          But that was more than twenty years ago.

Back to your fascination’s early years, then.

          Oh, yes. Yes.

          Well, after that first skinned knee I took lots of risks when I was playing so that I’d have plenty of scabs to play with. I knew, intuitively I guess, that it was best to keep this interest away from my mother’s attention. She bitched enough about having to patch me up, when it got that bad. The thing was that she did have a nasty urge to control me, but she was so self-absorbed that she paid me little attention, only slipping into control mode from time to time – like when she actually noticed me.

          The next winter we had gas heat installed, and whatever it is that gas heaters do to the air dried out my lips, especially early in the morning when I was waking up, so they’d eventually split from top to bottom with a Pop! accompanied by a split-second jab of mild pain – which was a treat in itself.

          I’d press a dozen or so different places on the back of my hand against where my lip was split so that it looked as if it was covered with a red pox of some kind. This amused me. Or else I’d press the same place against the slit repeatedly until I had a dryable, and subsequently crunchable wad of blood.

          Scolding me all the while, my mother kept putting horrible-tasting ointments on my split lips, which I always wiped off as soon as her attention focused elsewhere.

          Then it occurred to me – I can’t explain why – that it might be rewarding to puncture my dry lips here and there with a pin, so I nicked a couple of pins from my mother’s sewing box. I don’t know how the idea got into my five-or-six-year-old mind, but I knew that I’d better sterilise the pinpoints before breaking my skin with them, so I held them into the flame of my father’s cigarette lighter when nobody was looking, figuring that would do the trick.

          It was good, that millisecond when my labial epidermis gave way to the pin point. Pop!

          Of course my mother noticed the little holes in my lips, so she burst in on me when I was standing on my little box in front of the bathroom sink, looking into the mirror as I was puncturing my lower lip. She put on a big show of outrage, of course, and dismissed my reassurance that I’d sterilised the pin point.

          ‘Do you know what you are, Wili?’ That’s how she spelt my nickname. ‘You’re – you’re – you’re a masochist!’ Her tone was highly accusatory, naturally, as well as angry.

          Now, being only five or six, I had no fucking idea what a masochist is, but she made it plain that it’s something really bad, something that really pissed her off, something that meant that I’d best take pains, if you’ll forgive the pun, to avoid letting her catch me poking holes in my lips thereafter.

          When I got older and found out what a masochist actually is, by the way, I realised that I’m not one at all. For one thing, I don’t want any person other than myself causing me any pain at all. Can’t stand it and won’t put up with it. Pain does nothing for me sexually, either, and the little bit of pain from split lips is about all that I can take, anyhow.

          Then, when I was about seven I guess, I discovered that my ears were better for my pinwork than my lips. Just a tiny prick with the pin on the inside part of my ear, near the hole leading into my middle ear – I could hardly feel it at all – would bring up just a small bubble of blood, and if I could discipline myself not to pick at it until it was good and dry, I could crunch it right where it was, and the sound so close to my aural opening, followed by crunching it down into tiny grains that I could rub back and forth along my outer ear’s channel, well ...

          It was good.

So, when did you start to escalate?

          It was after my marriage collapsed. I’d be enjoying my private vice of crunching my dried blood for about 20 years, I guess. I’d given up on pins after a few years – before I made puberty, it was – but had discovered the wonderful possibilities that fingernails offered, especially when scratched against the inside of my ear or my scalp.

          Anyway, I was driving through the park one morning just before dawn – it doesn’t matter why – and accidentally ran over a duck that had waddled right in front of my car in the dim light. I thought, Hey, I bet that duck’s just chock full of dryable blood, so I stopped the car and wrapped the dead quacker in a towel and took it home.

          The duck blood was, well, disappointing, probably because it took me too long to get it home and the surfaces that it dried on weren’t quite right. There certainly was a lot of it, though, and I began to wonder about the possibilities.

          After thinking the problem about halfway through I went to an op shop and bought a cheap wall mirror, which I lay flat on a table in my spare room. I had plenty of spare room after my wife moved out. I did some googling and then went to the high-priced free-range-high-animal-welfare butchery in the little cluster of shops by the roundabout. Right across from the local Pizza Hut.

          I asked the perhaps overly friendly butcher for two litres of pig blood, explaining perhaps unnecessarily that I wanted to try to make black pudding. That was how much the online recipe had called for. He didn’t have any in stock, of course, but said if I’d give him some contact details he’d get some in and contact me.

          I don’t know why, maybe a reaction to some deeply buried childhood trauma, but this made me feel really threatened.

Understandable.

          Anyway, I gave him a phony name and my mobile-phone number, and in due course he called me and I went and bought it. He sold it to me in one of those zip-lock plastic bags. A fairly big one.

          It was okay, but it really didn’t hit that part of me – I call it my ‘soul’, which I know is a ridiculous word – that came alive from crunching my own blood. Crushing the pig’s blood against the mirror was indeed a whole lot of fun, especially if I timed it at the right point in the coagulation process, but that’s all. Pouring some of the pig blood onto my skin, when I had the time to let it dry without going out into public, was much better, and objectively just about as good as one of my own scabs, but its, well, spiritual effect was faint and ephemeral. I’m sure all this was in my mind, though …

But?

          Yeah, I suppose the whole obsession was overwhelmingly more psychological than tactile or aesthetic.

You recognise this?

          Of course, but that doesn’t make any difference.

No, it wouldn’t.

          So there I was. Back to scratching scabs into my scalp and picking at them. Barely staying alive, y’know? And then I got an email from my finally-elderly mother announcing that she was flying here to visit me, and letting me know what her demands would be, and that I was not to assert any resistance to her demands once she got here, and well, you know …

I think that’s all I need from you for my background report. Wait here and D.I. Lotofuatiaifo will take the rest of your statement.