California Healing

Scabies was the leprosy of 1990 Grateful Dead tour. That's probably how it made its way to our Charlotte NC hippie house. One of my roommates had given some dude named Owl a ride on spring tour and may have brought the scabies back. Or maybe it came from the metal band house next door. Either way, I took it back on tour in early summer while traveling with a different roommate who was a girl but not my girlfriend. We had tickets to Dead shows in California and I'd almost cleared the scabies by using a prescription cream that smelled like sour milk. By the time we reached the Painted Desert in New Mexico, the poison ivy style rashes had mostly subsided, but as we crested into the Sierra Nevadas at dawn, I caught myself scratching my left ankle. Two nights later at the California show, I was hanging inside the amphitheater when I heard someone across the lawn yell, "scabies!" The voice was too far away to be screaming at me, but it sounded like a medicine man exorcising the parasite. My whole body itched and stung, symbolically or real I wasn't sure, and the smell of the sour lotion on my legs and ankles seemed to waft in the air. I wanted to scream the word "scabies" but I didn't dare. After the show I waited in line to use the emergency showers that had been set up using a water truck, piping, and some tarps. Inside the tarps hippies stripped their clothes and took locker room style showers side by side. I found my turn beside a healthy, long haired girl who slipped out of her Indian skirt and Guatemalan shirt like some fairy goddess. I dared not look and quickly stripped down, balling my clothes at the dry edge of the pallets that lined the sound. I turned my back as I began to shower, less out of modesty and mostly to hide the red blotch on my ankle and leg. I washed from head to toe with no soap, dressed my soaking body into my clothes, and slunk back to where we were camped. At this point my stomach growled with hunger, having skipped dinner to go in the show early. My skin felt fresh in the California night air. Maybe the scabies was dying, I thought, as I unpacked my camp stove and fired it up to cook a couple of hot dogs. When I carried my meager plate of food to the little campfire the neighboring campers had built, the Oregon heads who'd earlier befriended us, saw the hot dogs. I tolerated their vegetarian rant against my dinner for about a minute and a half before the stress of scabies shame and, now, meat shaming hit me. I cussed the fireside campers, letting them know I found them judgmental and unfair. I uttered something about going away to eat my hot dogs East Coast style by my tent. My car rider friend came over to calm me down as I ate my food and crawled into the tent. We both got in and laid there as the campers all went about their giggling and talking about the night's show. Some big dude came by the tent, a Canadian dead head who carried around a giant seed pod that he used as a musical shaker, and asked us if we wanted back rubs. It was kind of him to realize I was stressed out, but I declined the somewhat creepy offer and laid on top on my sleeping bag until I fell asleep. I awoke with no ankle itching, and throughout the day as we packed up and left the concert location, I noticed that the rash looked dry and flaky. Later that evening we were camping in Yosemite National Forest with some dude we knew from North Carolina named Wild Bill. Some red wolves ran across a field nearby and we watched quietly. Wild Bill quoted the Dead song "Dire Wolf" and muttered "don't murder me." I ignored him and took the wolves as a sign that my scabies was finally healed.