At age eight I was mauled by cooties. I survived but the cure caused me to lose my hair — and eventually my religion.
Peers teased: "Duffy's got cooties!" Actually it was ringworm, the same fungus that causes athlete's foot and jock rash. It spread via the cloth seatbacks in our burg's only movie theater. The afflicted were usually
short-torso boys whose head didn't rise above the seatbacks. TV was
in its infancy (1953), so the cinema drew hordes of kids for Saturday serial-dramas (¢20). Legs dangling and gourd against the cootie-ripe
seatback, I gazed bug-eyed at the big screen's weekly installments of Flash Gordon and Captain Midnight.
Having cooties was bad enough. Worse was the scalp-zapping treatment prescribed in those bleak Cold-War years. Worst of all was the slow hair loss that followed. I can still see Mom and the doc peering through the thick-glass porthole of a floor-to-ceiling lead wall as I lay on a black slab. "Don't move!" the doc warned. Above me whirred a cone-nosed gizmo that zapped my noggin with enough X-rays to kill all hair roots — and what else?
Those were the drab-gray years of thalidomide babies, air-raid drills and fallout shelters. Ringworm is just athlete's foot of the scalp — yet doctors zapped it with high-energy photons as though blasting Godzilla. Science hadn't yet noticed that X-rays (like smart-bombs) can cause collateral damage. Now they warn any who had such treatment (since replaced with anti-fungal ointments) to have thyroid checked for tumors.
Being zapped by a cone-nosed robot was scary, but it was over in minutes. Far worse was going to school during the weeks required for zapped hair to vacate scalp. Only a half dozen boys at St. Cecilia's were afflicted, yet the nuns were keen to purge the bug as though it were pagan heresy. They saw all woe as God's punishment for sin, and the best way to avoid sin is to obey nuns. The sisters knew words alone wouldn't deter some kids from forbidden fruit, so they controlled via fear-based object lessons.
Fear of palm hair deters self-abuse. Fear of hellfire deters impure thoughts. Fear of disease helped instill fear of God, so nuns marked cootie-boys in a way peers would fear to emulate. The underlying message: "God punished these boys for disobedience. Obey, lest you also be scourged."
Horror thwarts schoolyard bullies
