The Gargoyle (25 page)

Maddy put me in a wheelchair and pushed me into a common area with four other burn patients. A man stood at the podium in a dress shirt and tie: Lance Whitmore was a former patient who had survived burns that were almost (but not quite) as bad as mine. His damage was less visible—only the right side of his jaw and neck revealed that he had been burned—but he said he had extensive keloid scarring on his torso that he could show us at the end of the lecture, should we desire to see what we could expect a few years into our recoveries. I didn’t; it was enough to deal with the present day.

Lance’s presence was intended to be both inspirational and informative. He’d been on the outside for three years and he was ready to pass along some hints for a successful transition, just like an AA speaker.

“Look up the word
insult
in the dictionary,” Lance began, “and you’ll find a number of definitions. In the medical sense, the word refers to harm brought to the body from an outside force, which in our case was fire. Of course, there’s also the more common meaning, and you’re going to get your share of insults—both intentional and not—when you leave this place. People don’t quite know what to make of us.”

Lance’s speech went as one might expect: he talked about the “challenges” and “opportunities” he’d faced, and what he’d done to reclaim his life. When he was finished, he opened the floor to discussion.

The first question was from a female patient who’d been scratching herself through the entire talk. She wanted to know if her “damn donor sites” would always itch “so damn much.”

“The itching will eventually go away. I promise.” There was a general murmur of relief through the group. Even I, who had vowed to remain quiet, let out a thankful sigh. “There’s nothing you can do but tough it out, unfortunately, but I always found it helpful to remember what Winston Churchill once said.”

“‘We shall never surrender’?” suggested the itchy female.

“Well, yeah,” laughed Lance, “but I was thinking about ‘If you’re going through Hell…keep going.’”

Another patient asked, “What’s it like when you go out in public?”

“It’s really hard, especially the first couple of times. Most people pretend they can’t see you, but they whisper. Some will mock you openly, usually young men. The interesting thing is that a lot of people think that if you’re burnt, you must’ve done something to deserve it. The teaching of the ages, right? Fire as a sign of divine retribution. It’s difficult for people to face something as illogical as us—burned, but alive—so we must have done something wrong, or otherwise they’d have to accept that it could happen to them.” He paused. “Who here thinks their burns are some kind of punishment?”

We looked at each other before one patient tentatively raised his hand, followed by a second. I was not going to raise my arm, no matter how long Lance waited.

“It’s completely normal,” he assured us.
“Why me?
I asked the question every day but never got an answer. I lived a good life. I went to church, paid my taxes, volunteered on weekends with a boys’ club. I was, and am, a good person.
So—why—me?”
Pause. “There is no reason. A moment of bad luck, with lifelong consequences.”

Another patient asked, “Do people ask about your burn?”

“Children, because they haven’t learned tact. Some adults do, too, and to be honest I appreciate it. Every single person you meet for the rest of your life will be wondering about it, so sometimes it’s good to get it out of the way so you can move onto other things.”

A timid hand went up. “What about sex?”

“I like it.” Lance’s delivery of the line earned some laughs, and I guessed that he had given this speech often enough to perfect his answers to the questions that always came. “It’ll be different for everyone. Your skin was a pretty amazing part of the experience, right? The largest organ of the body, a surface area of about three square meters, and that’s a lot of possibility for pleasure. Now we’ve lost a lot of our nerve endings, and that really sucks.”

The patient who had asked the question sighed heavily, but Lance held up his hand to indicate that he still had a few more things to say. “Skin is the dividing line between people, where you end and others begin. But in sex, all that changes. If skin is a fence that divides people, sex is the gate that opens your body to the other person.”

Never again would I have that option, not with anyone. Not with Marianne Engel.

Lance cleared his throat. “I’m lucky: my wife stayed with me. In fact, the burn brought us closer together emotionally, and that’s translated into our sexual activity as well. It forced me to become a better lover, because I’ve had to become more, umm, creative. That’s all I’ll say about that.”

“What was hardest for you, after your release?”

“That’s a tough one, but I think it was wearing the pressure garments twenty-three hours a day. They’re amazing, you know, for limiting the scarring but—Jesus Christ!—it’s like being buried alive. You look forward to your bath, even though it hurts, just to get out of the damn thing.” Lance held my eyes for a moment, and I had the feeling that he was speaking to me specifically. “I wore mine for the first ten months after release but for some of you it’ll be a year, or longer.”

He continued, “It’s only after you get out of here that you’ll finally realize that a burn lasts forever. It’s a continual event, one that constantly reinvents itself. You’ll swoop from incredible highs when you’re just glad to be alive, to those lows when you wish you were dead. And just when you start thinking that you’ve accepted who you are, that changes, too. Because who you are is not permanent.”

Lance looked a little embarrassed, as if he’d talked himself into an area where he didn’t want to go. He moved his gaze around the room, engaging all eyes for a few moments, before beginning the big wind-up. “Modern burn treatment is incredible, and the doctors are amazing, and I’m so thankful to be alive. But none of that is enough. Your skin was the emblem of your identity, the image that you presented to the world. But it was never who you really
are.
Being burned doesn’t make you any less—or more—human. It only makes you burnt. So you’re in a unique position to understand what most people never will, that skin is the clothing but not the essence of a person. Society pays lip service to the idea that beauty is only skin deep, but who understands like we do?

“Some day soon,” Lance said, “you’ll walk out of here and have to decide how you’re going to live the rest of your lives. Will you be defined by what other people see, or by the essence of your soul?”

TWO VERY POOR CHOICES.

Gregor brought an assortment of goodies to wish me a happy Halloween. Because we are men, we didn’t mention our previous conversation, and the candy was his way of saying that we should pick up where we’d left off before our spat. If the place hadn’t been a hospital, I’m certain he would have brought a six-pack of beer.

The evening proved to be a breakthrough in our friendship. Gregor told me a somewhat embarrassing story about his very worst Halloween, when he’d dressed—in a misguided effort to impress a medical student he fancied—as a human liver. He’d gone to great lengths to make his costume as realistic as possible, including a rubber hose that was supposed to approximate the hepatic tube, which he hooked to a hidden bag of vodka in the organ’s left lobe. His rationale was that he could take sips throughout the evening, whenever his nervousness with the woman became too much. (For perhaps the first time in history, a man filtered alcohol out of his liver to put into his body.) Unfortunately, his shyness was so great that he soon became completely drunk. At the end of the evening, Gregor and his date found themselves in the loft of an artist who made a living imitating the works of Jackson Pollock. The story ended with Gregor paying the artist several hundred dollars after vomiting onto one of his canvases, although I don’t know how it could have made any difference to the work.

I tried to one-up Gregor with my most embarrassing Christmas story, of a failed attempt at seducing a department store elf who was married to a steroid-abusing Santa. Gregor responded with a yuletide tale of his own, in which he accidentally shot his mother with the BB gun he’d received after months of swearing that safety would be his primary concern. In the end, we somehow decided to share the single most embarrassing stories of our childhoods, holidays or not. I went first.

As a normal young boy I discovered it was pleasurable to stroke my penis, but as I was living with my addict aunt and addict uncle at the time, I had no one with whom to discuss my biological discovery.

I had a vague understanding, from eavesdropping on the meth-smoking adults, that there were such things as venereal diseases. You certainly did not want to contract one, as nasty things would happen to your jigger if you did. (Aunt Debi, when she found herself unable to avoid referring to my penis, always called it a jigger.) I also knew that venereal diseases were passed in the fluids that resulted from sexual acts. I could have done some research, I suppose, but I knew the librarians too well to risk being caught looking through such books. Besides, it was all pretty straightforward: since there was venereal disease in ejaculate and I was now capable of ejaculating, I would have to be careful not to infect myself. So I reviewed my options.

I could stop masturbating. But it felt too good.

I could cover my stomach with a towel to catch the offending fluid. But the towels were too large to hide and too difficult to clean discreetly.

I could masturbate into a sock. But all my socks were of a loose cotton weave, through which seepage threatened to enter the pores of my skin.

I could masturbate into zip-lock sandwich bags. Yes: not only was this approach medically sound, but also it offered an unusual level of convenience. Clearly, this was the way to go.

Before long I had a large collection of brimming Baggies under my bed, but I couldn’t simply bundle them up with our regular trash—what if someone discovered them, or if a scrounging dog spread the salty bags across the front lawn? So I decided the best option was to place them in another family’s garbage can; the farther away from our trailer, the better.

The ideal location would be the rich area of town, removed from the trailer park both in distance and social standing. What I failed to consider, however, is that moneyed folk react suspiciously to young boys sneaking around their trash bins. Before long a police car arrived and I was standing in front of two burly officers trying to explain my surreptitious actions.

I desperately wanted not to betray the true nature of my mission, but the police demanded that I hand over the shopping bag in my possession. I begged them to let me go, stating there was nothing in the bag but “my lunch.” When they took the package by force, they found forty little parcels of an unknown white substance and demanded to know exactly what kind of liquid narcotic I was dealing.

Afraid of being questioned at the local police station while they ran a chemical analysis on the milky fluid, I confessed that I was walking around with zip-locked sandwich bags filled with my own semen.

The officers didn’t believe me, at first, but as the details of my story piled up, they stood in stunned silence—until they began to laugh. Needless to say, I was unimpressed with their reaction to my health crisis. When their amusement subsided, the officers deposited my junk in the nearest trash can and drove me home.

In our newfound spirit of male bonding, Gregor boasted that he had a story that could equal mine, if not better it.

As a lad, Gregor was likewise uneducated, although I give him full marks for never believing that he could infect himself with an STD. When he discovered self-pleasure, his thoughts ran somewhat like this:
If masturbating with a dry fist is this enjoyable, what would it feel like to use something that better approximated a vagina?

So Gregor began his experiments. He tried liquid soap in the shower until he discovered the harsh reality of soap burn. His next attempt involved hand lotion, which worked well until his father began to question the boy’s unusual commitment to supple skin. Eventually Gregor, who had a creative mind and a kitchen with a fully stocked fruit bowl, began to speculate on the possibilities afforded by a banana peel. Had not nature itself designed the peel specifically to house a fleshy cylinder?

The peel had an unfortunate tendency to rip during the act but, not to be defeated, Gregor decided to shore up this natural weakness with duct tape. This worked well, but he was faced with the same predicament that had stymied me: disposal of the evidence.

He decided upon flushing the remains down the toilet, but the fourth peel caused the pipes to back up. When Gregor’s father discovered the clog, he naturally set to work with the plunger. Gregor hid in his bedroom, praying feverishly to God to send the peels down the tube instead of back up.
If you help me, Lord, I will never masturbate into a fruit skin again.
When Gregor’s father was unable to unplug the pipes, the local plumber was called in, bringing a toilet snake and the potential for disaster.