Rudy Delson, author of Maynard and Jennica, will be reading at Brooklyn Reading Works at the Old Stone House on September 20th. In the meantime, he’s been visiting doctors.

“Since my book will be published next week, I’ve been to see my doctors, and in particular, I’ve been to see my dermatologist. Because I have this spot here, and also this dry thing here, and also, here, can you feel that lump? Pace Susan Sontag and Illness as Metaphor, having the good luck to publish a book raises the risk of bad luck in the form of cancer. And also in the forms of (a) the Antarctic ice sheets collapsing the night before my book party, (b) the U.S. dollar collapsing the night before my book party, (c) global fish stocks collapsing the night before my book party, and (d) bedbugs.

So I went to see Dr. Mark Tesser, my dermatologist, up on Prospect Park West. We talked about Eliot Spitzer—we always talk about Eliot Spitzer—and then we talked about Chuck Schumer, and then Dr. Tesser told me to take my clothes off. Apparently the spots I had spotted were nothing to worry about, but Dr. Tesser was concerned about a freckle on my forearm, a dubious freckle:

“What’s this?” “Um, that?” “Yes.” “That’s always been there.” “Always this color?” “Um, yes.” “Always darker in the middle?” “Um.” “I want a biopsy.”

So he took a biopsy: punched a hole into my forearm, lifted the chad of skin away with a pair of forceps, and then sent it off to the lab for further study. The biopsy left an ideal wound, two millimeters deep, perfectly circular, and bloodless. While he cleaned me up, I told Dr. Tesser about my book—he wrote the title down on his pad, as though he were about to send me to the pharmacist with a prescription for Maynard and Jennica—and then hurried off to see his next patient.

His nurse gave me a pamphlet on “caring for your wound,” and I headed home, to consider the fate of Antarctica.”