Foot child
2003-11-03 | 5:55 p.m.

From Margaret Cho's Diary:

10/8/2003

My Feet...

My feet are fucked up yo. It was really bad. I mean really fucking bad. I think that my athlete's foot had gotten to some type of chronic level. There had been worse times in my foot life. For years, I had a plantar's wart on my right foot, and it had grown so hard from the shoes that I wore daily, steeltoe monkey boots that weighed about a pound each, and I walked the world from the south of England to Korea with them on. The patch on my foot was thick and nearly made a tap shoe sound when I walked, so it was possible for me to do a box step barefoot, to entertain friends and relatives at Thanksgiving and Christmas. My feet were surrendering to negligence, and a kind of violence. I had no thought of an antifungal cream, there was nothing I could do, that was the way things were those days.

When I was twenty, I was engaged to a young television writer, who now is a big gangsta at Saturday Night Live. My midnight foot scratching would wake him up. The scraping of nails to dry, flaky, baklava skin caused a sound that would haunt him for long after we parted. He loved me so, and he'd said those nights, he would watch me sleep, and the scratch became a love song spontaneously occurring in nature, like summer crickets and the sweet slippery near silence of long kisses, a rhapsody of fungal and lover's bliss. But I was bad. There was no skin between each toe, creating a corned beef affect, like I was smuggling the meat in them to snack on later. On each toe, the tearaway skin would hang loose and white near the nail, saturated in sweat and in turn brittle and resilient. My heels were like two hard biscuits, badly in need of gravy, powdery and baked. Then of course the wart, for which I procured a corn slicer from Germany. This device, much like a cheese grater, would scrape across the errant sole, and shave off a neat layer of skin, which would be shiny underneath. I would cut down until I had reached a point where a tiny drop of blood could be seen just under the surface, dead center like a nucleus, and it was painful, but satisfying. Of course I went too far here and there, and the blood would spurt out of my foot with a pulsing heat, and no amount of gauze or cotton wads would soak up the carnage.

I had heard of depressed people who cut themselves, and perhaps that is what I was doing, but there was no sadness about my task, just a little self surgery. My friend told me that his mother would lay out a newspaper to collect the skin and turn on Chinese TV and go at her feet for hours with a razor blade, until the soles were like mirrors, shiny and reflective. He'd look at the pile of foot shavings, and for whatever reason, he cannot bring himself to eat the kind of Caesar salad you get in fancy restaurants, with the Romano cheese cut into large flakes that sits on top of the greens.

Another friend, a very famous Canadian comedian, told me that he once rented a cabin in Banff, where he locked himself in and wrote a very important screenplay. He was a genius, but was not immune to cabin fever, and he also had a large plantar's wart. Comedy and our feet were the subjects of long conversations over expensive dinners, and we were locked in a conspiratorial embrace, two self surgeons, foot outlaws, comparing notes. During the time in the cabin, he had taken a bottle of vodka and many pre-rolled joints of high grade marijuana, and went at his foot with a pair of dull scissors, a steak knife and a small set of nail clippers. He managed to pull the wart out of his foot, roots and all, and he said he thought he would die, but he survived, and the film went on to massive success. There was a post partum depression that followed the removal of the wart, and he had a sense of emptiness, that there would be no more callus play, no more sharp objects to go into the hard shell of the sole. He felt that he had lost more than a wart, but a large part of his being.

I could not face the frontier surgery like my brave friend, and finally made an appointment with a podiatrist. The doctor was gruff and gentle, like a Rottweiler well behaved and eager to be patted on his velvety head. He was a big fan of my work, and performed the surgery with relish and enthusiasm. There was no judgement about how I had maintained my feet. He merely stated he had seen worse, and he had seen better, and he wasn't very expensive. There was an injection of novacaine into the bottom of my foot, possibly the worst pain I had ever felt, and then I watched the process, with my head tilted up, as I could not miss this historic moment. It looked and felt a lot like the cork of a wine bottle, as it was pierced with a long, sharp instrument, and basically screwed out. It went deep into my foot, almost as if it had been growing up inside my leg like a vine on the trellis of my calf. A large gaping hole was left in its place, and I asked for the wart, to put in a jar with formaldehyde, my aborted foot child, stillborn and silent. The good podiatrist laughed it off, and took away my wart. I was not able to walk properly for several weeks, but the hole filled in with new skin, however the ghost of the wart remains, a small callus, undetectable by anyone but me, a reminder of a growth long gone.

Now, my feet are beautiful. I wear gel socks at night, and every shoe transaction requires a film of thick cream. Pumice stones and exfoliant gels are the toothpaste and toothbrush of my feet, and I am religious about the practice of brushing after every meal. My monkey boots were traded in for Marc Jacobs Mary Janes and Gucci pumps, for I will not put anything on my feet that cost less than $500, which is quite extravagant for I despise the expensive things that are purchased merely for the sake of conspicuous consumption. I am not a lavish spender, but it is merely that I have grown to stand tall on the earth, no longer crippled by the neglect of self, the destruction of my stance and the lack of confidence in the world and the possibility that I could have it at my feet.

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