I just watched a Glen Powell movie. I agree with the internet: that’s one handsome cat. Me-ow! And hey, fine by me. Whenever I watch a movie where a hot guy plays a cool dude, I believe for a few precious moments that I am equally hot and cool. Everybody wins! At least until a treacherous mirror inevitably finds my face and harshes the vibe.
This delusion reminds me of my childhood belief that watching a karate film instilled me with the ability to expertly perform martial arts. I’d watch “Sidekicks” starring Jonathan Brandis1 and Chuck Norris and I’d be certain that I could take down a fleet of ninjas with roundhouse kicking given the opportunity. I think we all do this. You see a car chase in a movie and on the drive home you’re pretty sure you could jump your Hyundai off a drawbridge onto a passing ferry if called upon.
But then you remember who you are: a kindly citizen who obeys traffic law; a clumsy child who will never advance to whichever belt comes after “white”; a 39-year-old man who, after finishing a Glen Powell movie, looks in the mirror and sees that his face-eczema is the worst it’s been in years.
The eczema presents like this lately: huge blotch on the right side of my nose, slightly less huge blotch on the left. These “blotch brothers” as my dermatologist calls them have been coming and going for years and I’m used to them. But lately the space between my eyebrows has been getting in on the action, providing the top point of a crimson triangle of hate.
There is no rhyme or reason to the eczema. I have no idea what exacerbates it. Perhaps I always look this bad, but it’s just easier to spot after watching hot people in a movie playing characters who exercise while on vacation.
My eczema2 used to be much worse. When I was in 7th grade a girl name Tara who sat behind me in math class drew a picture of my face. She did not use much color in rendering this portrait, but on either side of the nose she drew a blood-red half-circle. When she proudly presented the drawing to me, I pretended not to notice anything insulting and returned to my calculations. This did not satisfy her. She began whispering, “Brad…Brad…”
When I ignored her, she leaned forward to position the drawing in front of my face.
“Did you notice the red?” she asked, circling the red half-circles with her pencil like a doctor highlighting the cancerous areas on an x-ray of a patient’s lung.
Was she a major jerk-ass motherfucker for doing this? Certainly. But so what. I’ve done jerk-assier things to people, I’m sure. But usually, after doing mean things, I feel terrible and try to smooth things over. Tara simply went on living her life, married some boring asshole, had a boring-as-shit baby, and probably joined a tennis club. But she was only a kid then, so let’s relax! Her mom was probably a total bitch! I bet Tara took her drawing of me home that day and was like, “Check it out, mom.”
Her Mom: “Oh snap. Who dat?”
Tara: “Some ugly-ass boy who sits in front of me.”
Her Mom: “Haha, got his ass.”
By 7th grade, it is no longer socially acceptable to tell on your classmates for being mean. I looked up at our oblivious algebra teacher, Mr. Troy, wishing I could silently communicate to him that Tara was teasing me, and not in a fun, flirty way that might result in us one day getting married. Even if he’d heard my thoughts, he likely wouldn’t have cared—Mr. Troy was a young man with horrible acne that made his face into an angry purple-red storm-cloud.
Put some cream on your face and you’ll be fine, he probably would have thought back at me. You think I can fix MY shit with cream? I wish! Look at me. My face is fucked! Get some goddamn cream from your fucking mom and put that shit on the sides of your nose and stop wasting my time. And perhaps it was that very night that I told my mother I can no longer exist with this embarrassing (and painful) redness. She procured me some magical cream. It came in a little tube. “Use it very sparingly!” she demanded. I remember the bottom of the tube broke and we had to put it in a ziploc bag. This cream seemed very hard to come by, and I worried that I would run out and not be able to get more.
It didn’t matter. By high school I didn’t give a thought to eczema as I had way worse problems: HUGE CRAZY NOSE ZITS. I’m talking seriously insane, unpoppable MFers. I wanted to cut my nose off. Or just die! Why the nose? The frontmost part of my face! I looked like Rudolph.3 Man, high school fucking sucks. A girl tried to console me one day, saying “I used to get zits on my nose like that, Brad, but then I started blah blah blah some stupid bullshit.” I would have preferred she’d shown me a mean picture she drew of me and said nothing.
My eczema has calmed considerably since I began writing this and I’m not as angry at my face for being a complicated, unpredictable human face as I was over the weekend. But next time I’m feeling not so sexy, I’ll stick to films starring actors who don’t trigger my feelings of inadequacy, like Jonathan Brandis or Timothee Chalamet.4
DID YOU KNOW: Jonathan Brandis was the Timothee Chalamet of his generation? It’s true! Indeed, the parallels in the respective careers of these Hollywood boy darlings are shocking. Both dapper fellows began their careers as mere baby boys, Brandis a 4-year-old, Chalamet a 14-year-old who looked 4. Both actors were very popular with female fans (it’s true!). And the similarities don’t stop there: one of Brandis’s biggest films was the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Ladybugs and one of Chalamet’s biggest films was called Lady Bird and “ladybird” is what they call ladybugs in the United Kingdom! Sadly, both actors passed away at 27, Brandis by suicide, Chalamet by getting food poisoning at one of his trademark Arby’s beef binges! (Timothee lived fast, but preferred his beef slow-roasted.) RIP to both of these men.
And by the way, I don’t even know if it’s actually eczema as no dermatologist has ever called it that or even examined it (when I said my dermatologist referred to my eczema blotches as “the blotch brothers” I was only trying to be humorous!). But for my money, if part of your skin randomly appears red and then becomes (very slightly) less red with the application of hydrocortisone, you’ve got eczema, bitch!
The author may be referring to “Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer,” the character from the Christmas-themed song of the same name who famously led Santa’s sleigh during a particularly dark and stormy Christmas night.
Prior to the Arby’s Cheddar Beef bonanza that resulted in his untimely death, Timothee Chalamet was widely acknowledged to be one of the most physically repulsive people to ever live.