My Beard of Bees

Indelicate as it might be for a prim young débutante like myself to broach the subject: I perspire rather a lot, here in the primaeval ur-walds of the Federated Malay Territories.

Actually, I don’t perspire. I sweat. Like a frickin hog. I sweat like Nixon’s jowls on debate night. I sweat like Lance Armstrong’s handsome, leather-bound Balzac. I sweat like a cold can of soda on a coasterless coffee table. I sweat so much that my droplets of sweat have tiny droplets of sweat. I sweat so much that by the end of the day the salt incrustations on my t-shirt look like a topographical chart of the Grand Tetons. I sweat constantly, from every pore, even when the fan’s on full blast. It pours off me in cascading sheets of salty, gelatinous filth. I sweat on the balcony. I sweat in the kitchen. I sweat in the bathroom. I sweat WHILE I’M SHOWERING. I hate it.

A lesser man than I, a man whose diet consisted of fewer deep-fried poultry appendages prepared according to the receipt of a certain Col. Harlan Sanders, might have lost weight after all this sweating, but I have not. I think I briefly did, right after we moved here, but it’s all back now, and it’s some kind of perverse vicious cycle because the more fatty folds and flaps I have, the more places for the sweat to seep from, and the more I feel like a Hutt under the merciless gaze of Tatooine’s twin suns.

If this keeps up all I’m going to be able to do is loll grotesquely in a rattan chair on some seedy veranda in a seersucker suit and straw hat, impotently fanning myself and grunting for the cabana boy to bring me another Pernod. Now I see how those guys get like that.

Anyway, for the first six to eight months of my Malaysian sojourn I tried to pay no heed to my incredibly amplified dampness. Water off a duck’s back, I told myself. And yet it was not water, and I was not a duck.

So a few months ago I started to develop a fiery itchiness in several key bodily areas, including the crook of my elbows, behind my ears, and – most tragically – the greasy folds of my neck. Was there a fungus among... me? I suspected so. This was more than simple heat rash. As someone with very little interest in bossing about menials and a blinding paranoia about having strangers in his apartment, I have been carrying out the duties of scullery wench this year, and one afternoon after mopping the apartment in an unbearable agony of sweat and heat, I felt as if my entire body were on fire. I itched, and scratched, and on and on the sweat poured like sweet salty honey from a really gross beehive. The next day, I was all red and puffy.

Thus began my long, slow acceptance of my heat rash, or fungus, or whatever the hell it is. I now try not to move at all, in order not to upset the fiery demon that slumbers within my own skin. My neck is especially itchy, and I spent over a month slathering antifungal crème on it – and now I think the only problem with my neck might have been that I was allergic to the antifungal crème. Either way, it’s itchin like the Dickens. I feel like I’m wearing some sort of mediaeval German neck shame chastity belt. When I walk down the street, I feel as if people can see my crimson, pulsating laryngeal hives from hundreds of yards away.

Yet the one time I went to the doctor to ask about my neck, it suddenly turned smooth and milky-white as a marble statue. She looked at me as if I were utterly barking mad. “I don’t see anything on your neck”, she drawled suspiciously, peering at me as if I were one of those Munchausen Neck Syndrome By Neck Proxy patients she’d heard about on 20/20. I retreated in shame, scratching feverishly at my blazingly inflamed neck-flesh.

And so I come to my present sad condition. Do I have a neck fungus? Probably not. Do I have a neck condition brought on by allergic reaction to neckily-applied antifungal crème? Possibly. All I know is that my frigging neck is really, really, REALLY ITCHY. And covered in sweat.