Bad Doppelgängers

You know how you sometimes have a negative response to someone because they look like or remind you of someone else? Just the other day I made a mental connection between two people whom I met decades apart, but that dormant connection might have had a worsening effect on how I think of one of them.

A few years ago I started going to a dermatologist who at first seemed okay. He called me “Dr. Schrum” rather than “Mr. Schrum,” inquired about my various creative projects as if truly interested, and we had good conversations while he slowly revealed more of my skin to check for problems. I would have recommended him to anyone.

But over the visits, he became increasingly less interested in my flesh, and more in his own. Most times he would be accompanied by an undergrad student, or someone involved in digitizing their medical records (always female, by the way), and his subtext shifted to, “Look at me, see how important I am that I have these people interested in what I have to tell them!” I later switched to another doctor in the same practice, because I didn’t feel valued as a patient.

Then, just recently, I remembered someone from my past, and realized they could be doppelgängers. The dermatologist’s young and boyish looks (not quite as young as Doogie Howser) resembles the appearance that I recall of one of my fellow employees at the downtown York Thom McAn store when I worked there in 1974.

This was Mark (likely he won’t see this and won’t mind if I use his real name). He was in his early 20s and had a side hustle of selling audio components under the company name of Marko Products. (I’m guessing at the spelling.) He spoke only a little of his sales, but more about his sales ability, and that most often in regard to young women he charmed into bed with his winning smile. I recall one mention of a conquest, where he laughed after reporting her comment: “You make me feel so cheap.”

But women’s feelings were not a commodity he was interested in. And I felt that the dermatologist was also not interested in the patient behind the skin, or even the surface of the skin in later visits. I’m glad to have left both of them behind me.