Boy Movies #30

Me, my cyst, and Fast X

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You made one mistake… you never took my car

I’ve had a cyst on my back for a handful of years now. It sits between my shoulder blades, slightly off center, a skin-colored bump that has, at various stages, increased and decreased in size. It first appeared when I was in college, but I only saw a doctor about it after it started causing me discomfort, since the internet had assured me lack of pain (usually) meant the cyst is benign. My doctor, a woman who once, unprompted, told me to Google “the South Beach Diet,” prescribed me an antibiotic and sent me on my way with no further information. The antibiotic worked, the cyst went away, and I felt normal again. About two years later, the cyst returned.

This, I now know, is more than likely to happen unless the cyst is — apologies to the squeamish — cut out entirely. When it initially came back, I once again felt no pain, which gave me an excuse to write it off as nothing. I couldn’t feel it, and since it was on my back, I rarely saw it. My cyst became another part of me, something I would only acknowledge in the summer if I happened to be wearing something with an open back. Suddenly, shame would settle in, embarrassed as I was about the unsightly (in my opinion) look of it, now exposed for the world to see. I’d say, “I should really get that looked at,” and then, inevitably, never follow up. When I finally got insurance in 2021, I ran out of excuses. I remember slogging my way to a dermatologist appointment on a sweltering day in July, my shirt dark with sweat, plagued with vague concerns over the idea that something in my body could be wrong without me knowing. But everything was fine, my doctor said after examining the bump. “Is it causing you pain?” he asked, to which I said no. “Come see me if it gets painful. Otherwise, some people live with these their whole lives without issue.” I wondered privately what I should do if I didn’t want it there at all, regardless of whether it was benign, but worried that my aesthetic woes had no place in a doctor’s office. (Services offered at my derm’s office include coolsculpting and botox; I cannot tell you why I was nervous to ask.)

This past spring, the discomfort reached such acutely miserable heights that it became impossible to ignore. I hilariously had to wait two weeks for a dermatologist appointment, during which time the formerly grape-sized bump doubled in size. Still, there was no rupturing, no leaking. I have no horror stories to regale you with, like the ones I was exposed to while lurking the very many cyst-specific subreddits (never do this). Some days I managed to convince myself I was being dramatic; other times, usually in the middle of the night, I decided that I was on the edge of death. In reality, I mostly just had trouble putting on a bra and dealt with back cramps from having to sit in exactly one spot for hours lest I risk brushing my cyst against something. “Oh, yeah,” my doctor said when I finally got in to see him in May. “That’s inflamed.” He told me I had one of two options: “Surgery,” he began, at which point my expression must have had some sort of visible change, because he laughed and quickly added, “There’s also the antibiotic route. We can try it and see if it makes it more manageable, but I can’t guarantee it’ll help.” Here’s the thing: I’ve been fortunate enough to go almost twenty-eight years without any significant medical issues, which means that the word surgery fills me with unspeakable anxiety. Tears instantly, humiliatingly, formed in my eyes; it was like someone had slapped me across the face. Yes, I said, let’s try the antibiotic first. I left, comforted by this — it’d worked once, after all. Why couldn’t it work again?

I started taking the antibiotic on a Wednesday afternoon and by Friday night I knew something was off. Nothing about the cyst had changed, but my entire body felt weird in a hazy, indescribable way. On Saturday morning, I woke up to discover I had experienced some sort of allergic reaction overnight, causing my eyes to become puffy and red to the point of being nearly swollen shut; I popped as many Benadryl as one single person can consume at a time (two) and subsequently fell into a restless sleep, which gave me vivid nightmares of my teeth falling out and giant, flying insects manifesting in my home. It felt like being trapped in a psychological horror film. When I woke up, I sent a confused voice message to my friend Alexis to cancel our plans for the afternoon: “So… not me waking up with my, um, eyes swollen,” I told her. “I would take a picture but it is so ugly.” It took a whole three days for my idiot brain to realize that I was allergic to the antibiotic.

But, well, I’ll get to that.

I’m going to give you all a recommendation that I hope you never have to take me up on: If you ever find yourself in the position of being confined to your home for an entire day with eyes you can’t really see out of, throw on a Fast and Furious movie. I chose two, a double feature of Fast & Furious 6 and Furious 7, mainly because I knew my bout of visual trauma meant there was no chance of me seeing the latest installment in this demented series, Fast X, on opening weekend as I’d intended. I’d recently rewatched Fast 5, so it felt right, and I’m of the opinion that the three-part stretch of Fast 5, Fast & Furious 6, and Furious 7 is the best period in the entire franchise. (This is not an original take; the filmmakers also seem aware of it, considering that Fast X is essentially a direct sequel to Fast 5.) More than that, I was unhappy and uncomfortable and wanted to be transported somewhere else. The Fast and Furious movies — filled with characters who don’t feel pain, who defy gravity and cheat death and can walk away from going eight rounds with a big bald guy without so much as a scratch — get you as close to ascension from this mortal plane as you possibly can without drugs.

The Fast movies often derogatorily get compared to the Mission: Impossible movies, which I think is both fair and unfair. First of all, why are we pitting two queens against each other? Second of all, people love to deride the Fast movies as fake or whatever, but I’d wager that that’s part of the joy. How absolutely life-affirming to be rotting away on my couch, laughing out loud at the impossible sight of Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto jumping from a moving car, soaring through the air to catch his beloved lesbian wife, Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty — who was, at this point in the series, dealing with a bout of Winter Soldier disease — before she could fall to her death, and landing on the windshield of a separate car without breaking a single bone. How fun to watch The Rock’s Hobbs flex his way out of an arm cast. How incredible to see Dom drop an entire highway on Jason Statham’s Shaw in Furious 7, especially with the knowledge that Shaw would be alive and well by The Fate of the Furious.

The apparent immortality of these characters became an in-joke in F9, a running piece of commentary about how Roman (Tyrese Gibson) just can’t seem to die. But the same can be said for all of the members of the familia, none of whom should be alive. A recent Vulture piece begged the franchise to start killing off characters, to which I say: don’t! (Unless they get rid of Charlize Theron’s tedious Cipher, truly the worst late-game addition to this franchise. No one would miss Cipher. I just had to Google to double check that it was actually her name.) Yes, the cast has gotten enormous; Fast X even keeps them sectioned off in separate locations, which I assume is because a camera lens wide enough to capture all of that muscle has not yet been invented. But I like it that way! The ever-growing Fast and Furious family is God-fearing, race-bending, and they will live forever. Even Brian, who wasn’t killed off after Paul Walker’s death and has since been relegated to a permanent position of stay at home dad, existing outside of time and the rules of our transient universe.

I made an emergency appointment at my dermatologist after the eye incident, where I was told that it would be in my best interest to get the cyst drained. I’m not sure if you’ve ever laid on your stomach under harsh fluorescent lights at ten in the morning as a woman in her early 20s uses an iPad to take photos of your inflamed cyst, but I’m not exaggerating when I tell you it’s the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt. As I waited to be injected with local anesthesia, I inexplicably remembered the scene in F9 in which Roman notices that the back of his jacket is filled with bullet holes that never pierced through the fabric into his body. Oh, to be as indestructible as a member of the Fast family. Maybe if I wasn’t such a dirty lapsed Catholic, or if the taste of Corona didn’t make me gag, I wouldn’t have developed a cyst in the first place. “Will the cyst come back?” I asked the doctor performing the draining. (In another hysterical twist, my regular derm was on vacation and therefore unavailable to see me that day.) “Yes,” she said plainly. “Because we’re not cutting it out. But this will relieve some of the pain.” As terrified as I was of the harsh pinching and squeezing that comes along with draining, any relief, after a month of being in near-constant pain, sounded like heaven. 

Later that week, I reclined leisurely in my seat when I saw Fast X, unconcerned with potential cyst irritation. I guess the film is being dunked on for its shoddy CGI and ridiculous plot (guys, come on), but like, who cares? These movies, when experienced correctly, feel not unlike being punched repeatedly in the back of the head — so deliriously bananas, but played by Vin Diesel with the sincerity of someone who believes that he is performing Hamlet¹. The introduction of a literal queer-coded Jason Momoa (I cannot believe what I’m saying either) as the son of a guy Dom killed in Fast 5 is fascinating: Momoa imbues his character with a gleeful maniac spirit that feels almost out of place in films that are typically played so straight. We as the audience love to hoot and holler at the Fast films, but we get to laugh because Vin Diesel is decidedly not laughing. Momoa’s performance is almost meta; he’s a vessel for how we view these movies that exists within the universe of the movie. And don’t even get me started on the return of The Rock.

Anything is feasible in the Fast movies. They make me feel alive, because the ethos of them is based so entirely on being alive, and also forgiveness, and also redemption. Bad guys will always turn good; dead guys will always be resurrected. You can get your shit rocked in a street fight and still walk away with a gorgeous blowout. You can go to space in a car and be back in time for the cookout. John Cena can be the biological brother of Vin Diesel and Jordana Brewster. If you ask questions, you risk being met with nonsensical answers.

The pain came back this past Tuesday, about a week after I got my cyst drained. I’ll never be like Dom or Letty or Roman, living on the edge and, nonetheless, still living. I should probably call my dermatologist.

• The day Vin deletes this Instagram post is the day I delete Instagram. It reads like an epic poem. And it WORKED.

1. If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: Vin Diesel is the Jeremy Strong of the Fast franchise.