Marked Man

For some time now, I've noticed that women can't keep their eyes off me. On the street, I watch their heads pivot as I pass; in elevators, I can feel their sidelong glances fix. Even sitting at my desk in the office, I notice my coworkers turning to stare, and turning away, and then turning and staring again. They think I have something amazing, something larger-than-life and rare about me, and they're right.

Unfortunately, what that something is is the most flaring, glaring, glabrous, inflamed, swollen and purulent cyst any of them has ever laid eyes on. For the past week it has perched about an inch west of dead center of my forehead, on a patch of scalp vacated some years ago by my hairline. I look like a treasure map: the thing is like a geographic landmark. If it were in New England, it would be called "Ruddy Knob" or something; out west, it might be called "Flaming Promontory National Wildlife Refuge."

When an editor called me aside just before Thanksgiving to discuss a book review I was working on, I noticed his eyes drifting northwestward in awestruck wonderment. "The opening paragraph... umm...the opening paragraph...umm..." The next day I was at lunch with a Senate aide, and he was telling me about the postelection changes on his subcommittee. This guy kept making these startled, pump-fake nods toward my brow and it was clear the spectacle was ruining his train of thought. "The Democrats have got this...blocked-up...em, burning...poisonous...thing," he said.

The day after, one of my colleagues greeted me as I came in the door. "Hey," he said, "that's one doozy of a zit."

I tried to explain that it wasn't a zit but a cyst. "Zit" carries intimations of adolescence, sleeping in your clothes till 1 in the afternoon, missing places when you shave, Heavy Metal, spilt bong water and self-abuse?that range of human experience. A cyst, on the other hand, is a good grownups' malady: ugly, to be sure, but something like the gout or phthisis in its hint of the country life and of overindulgence in fatty chops and fine liqueurs.

"Oh, that's no cyst," my friend insisted. "That's a zit. My brother had one like it in college. Lasted a couple weeks. He messed around with it, too, and pretty soon it was a catastrophe?almost like yours. He said when he tapped around it it had a rock-hard fibrous core."

"How'd he get rid of it?" I asked hopefully.

"Main force," said my colleague, with a certain pride. "Sheer bravery and muscle power. He almost passed out."

An added problem is that my affliction is, in its mild way, driving me off my rocker. It might as well be syphilis or lead poisoning, for all the clarity of mind it leaves me. My cyst feels like it's connected to a winch in the middle of my skull that is pulling on my optical nerves and banging cymbals in my temples. Wrenching headaches woke me three times last night. So it begins to feel like an ailment out of a Hawthorne tale: an outward sign of inner derangement. We in a more medically enlightened age can reassure ourselves that Hawthorne had cause and effect confused. It's the infection that's the primary cause?what he thought of as "soul sickness" is nothing more than the effect of bacterial glop oozing down behind my forehead and seeping into my brain cavity through my eye socket. (It sure is a consolation when you look at it like that!) Either way, my brain is being poisoned. A few more days of this and I stand in danger of announcing on national television that I saw Elvis this morning, or that the Trilateral Commission is sending me coded radio messages through my dental fillings.

That's because, unsurprisingly, once my cyst had reached you-would-even-say-it-glows proportions, I was inundated by invitations to show my face in public. Television, dinner parties, speeches?the whole gamut of human interactions that allow others an uninterrupted look at you. "No one will notice," my friends told me before a tv appearance the Sunday before last. Well, maybe not this time, but I fear that, by the next time I go on, the network will have set up some of that computer-generated dudda-dudda-dump, d'dump-dump, d'dudda-dump music to go along with a special graphic with a bull's-eye and roaring flames, reading something like: "Showdown on Our Panelist's Forehead."

I had hoped to tough this thing out through sheer courage, but this morning I broke, and went to a doctor. He prescribed an antibiotic that would, he promised, have my rampant wound at bay by Christmas at the latest. And I'm proud to say that even this course took a bit of courage. Or whatever you call the virtue that keeps you from fleeing the room when your dermatologist greets you by saying not "Hello" but "Ee-yow-za!"

Harvey Wallbanger

But even though I reeled in pain throughout the weekend and appeared hideous in front of my relatives, I think I probably had a better Thanksgiving than Harvey John McGeorge of Woodbridge, VA. McGeorge is one of the inspectors who was on the UN's list of personnel to be sent to Iraq to check on weapons sites. In fact, he's probably the only such inspector?aside from Hans Blix?that most Americans have ever heard of. Because McGeorge was the guy referred to in Friday morning's Newsday headline "Inspector's Skills Questioned: Sex Club Leader on UN Weapons Team." (It was tough to tell the implications of that headline. Was McGeorge's sex life the only disqualification for his Iraq posting? Or was he an incompetent who just happened to be a pervert?)

The Washington Post had discovered that McGeorge served as chairman of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom and was a founding officer of the Leather Leadership Conference, which "produces training sessions for current and potential leaders of the sadomasochism/leather/ fetish community." The first thing that will strike most readers is the establishment-ization of what, 10 years ago, would still have been considered "transgressive" sex practices. "National Coalition"? "Leadership Conference"? That's the language not just of bureaucracy in general, but of 1980s Republican Party bureaucracy in particular.

But the second thing that will strike most readers is the question: "Who confirmed this guy?" And the answer is: No one. This is a UN operation, remember. There is no "opposition party" in the UN, so every government's political hacks can get onto pretty much any international body to which they're nominated. And since McGeorge was, due to his proclivities, unplaceable in any job requiring Senate confirmation, he was a prime candidate to get this one. In fact, his nomination has the look of someone in the State Dept.'s having said, "We've got to find a place for Harvey somewhere," since McGeorge lacks a degree in biochemistry, bacteriology or chemical engineering, which most UN inspectors possess as a bare-minimum qualification.

The big problem in having a guy with such "interests" involved in the surveillance of a hostile nation is, of course, blackmail. That's why homosexuality was until recently a disqualification for sensitive foreign service. And quite reasonably, too?since there were virtually no homosexuals who would have been comfortable revealing their orientation to the whole world. This creates a paradox. The flamboyant drag queen, who doesn't care who knows what he's doing, poses no blackmail worries at all. The real security risk is the "reticent," the "reserved," the in-the-closet homosexual?exactly the kind of homosexual that conservatives concerned about national security are most comfortable living with. If you are looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, better to send RuPaul than Roy Cohn.

McGeorge may be the first government official ever accused of sexual misconduct to realize this. "I have been very upfront with people in the past about what I do..." he said. "I am who I am. I am not ashamed of who I am?not one bit." You have to take this with a grain of salt. A person who has no qualms about revealing his sexual tastes to his boss or his building superintendent might be mortified to see them revealed to, say, his mother. And there is no question that McGeorge will?and should?resign, if only to avoid allowing important matters of national security to be overshadowed by lesser ones of sexual preference. But his forthrightness is 180 degrees opposite to "Ah did not have sex widdat woman... Miz Lewinsky"?and may constitute a political landmark.