Skin

And the obsession that lives beneath it

Some 60 or 70 years ago, Ed Gein’s mother died. She had been Ed’s whole world - even as an adult, he had never lived anywhere but with his dear mother and never wanted anything else.

After his mother died, though, Ed was devastated. He became even more isolated than ever; and after two older women in his hometown were killed, their bodies dragged off and no attempt made to hide or disguise the murders, it didn’t take long for the police to figure out that Ed was the killer.

An FBI profiler who wrote about Ed (in a book titled, interestingly, Obsession), says that Ed Gein was possibly the only killer he’s come across in his career that had a mental problem so bad that he wasn’t quite capable of understanding the wrongness of what he was doing. Because when the police showed up at his house and found it full of human skins — lamps made of bones and skins, clothes made of skin, chairs upholstered with skin (one of the officers wrote that there were still strips of fat attached to it underneath) — Ed didn’t try to fight, flee, or justify himself. He went meekly with the cops, stood meekly for his trial, and lived the rest of his life in a mental ward without ever causing a problem again.

If you think this sounds rather like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, you’d be right; Ed was one of the real-life killers that Thomas Harris used to create the character.

Ed didn’t get any kind of sexual thrill out of his skins. Before he became a murderer, he had stolen parts from at least fifteen recently-buried corpses. He only started killing when the exhumed bodies didn’t provide the quality of raw material he was looking for. And the two women he admitted to killing? It appears to have been more opportunistic than planned, but he said that they both reminded him of his mother.

And yes, like Buffalo Bill, Ed would wear his skins. He had a woman’s torso, tits and all, that he would put on and parade around in the moonlight with. He claimed that his dead mother spoke to him. With his skins, he was trying to become her.

I have always had weird skin. Since I was a girl, I would get random splotches on my arms and legs sometimes. My skin suffers in the dryness of winter. One year, I got these dry, scaly patches on my face and all the skin on my cheeks had to peel off, like a reptile shedding its skin, and it was kind of awful.

My skin, I have come to learn, feels sensations a little differently than the average person. I mean, your perception of the experience of being touched is not exactly like anyone else’s — it is as unique as your fingerprint — but most people, for instance, can tolerate being tickled reasonably well. It is torture to me.

The skin on my back, which has plagued me for years, has reclaimed that tingly/numb/ultra-sensitive feeling that had mostly disappeared for a few months. My back is so bizarrely sensitive that the anesthesiologist who gave me an epidural when I was birthing July had to wait until the height of a contraction to even touch my back to put in the needle — I couldn’t resist how much it tickled without the pain overriding it. Even now, something as simple as buzzing my hair is difficult because I can’t stand the feeling of the tiny shaven hairs falling down my back.

I think, trying to pinpoint exactly what I’m obsessed about, it would be this. Something I’ve been keeping inside my skin for so long that I barely remember what it feels like to not have it. In essence, I’m obsessed about myself.

All obsessions, essentially, are about the self. Ed Gein’s obsession, human skin, led him back to his mother — which was, in turn, about himself. Maybe he felt that his mother only loved him when he became her; and when she died, he went from doing that metaphorically to doing it as literally as possible.

My obsession comes out in ink. I write because I want to learn something about myself. The self that I’ve boxed up inside my head, beneath my skin — she exists in the ink that I spill on these pages; ink is the only proof that she’s real. I write because I have to, I am compelled to. Even if nobody ever reads a word of it, it has to come out.

So, unlike Ed, I have no desire to put on the skin of another human being. I take on their perspectives quite enough. I just want to wear my own skin.

Why does that have to be so fucking hard?

Skin has an amazing memory. It stores the sensation of every touch it has ever received — every slap, every instance of careless handling, every hug, every caress. Your skin soaks up the energy of every hand that touches it, and it remembers. Literally — the information is housed in your brain where the nerves that give your skin feeling can access it directly. Your skin remembers touch — or lack of it — from the first minutes of your life.

Your skin knows the touch it wants.