The Gargoyle (6 page)

I did manage to get a few final words out: “More painkillers.” He said he couldn’t give me them, so I told him to go away. He told me that I didn’t have to talk if I didn’t want to, but he would share some methods for creative visualization to cope with the pain. I took his suggestion to heart and creatively visualized that he’d left the room.

“Close your eyes and think about a place you want to go,” he said. “This place can be a memory, or a destination that you want to visit in the future. Any place that makes you happy.”

Sweet Jesus.

Dr. Edwards had warned me that the first time I was conscious during a débridement session would be painful beyond the ability of the morphine to alleviate, even with an increased dosage. But all I heard was “increased dosage,” and it brought a smile to my face, although no one could see it under the bandages.

The extra dope started to take effect shortly before I was to be moved, and I was floating on a beautiful high when I heard Dr. Edwards’ clipped footsteps, from sensible shoes, coming at me from down the hall before she arrived.

Dr. Edwards was, in every way, average looking. Neither pretty nor ugly, she could fix her face to look adequately pleasing but she rarely bothered. Her hair could have had more body if she’d brushed it out each morning, but she usually just pulled it back, perhaps out of practical concerns, as it is hardly advisable for loose strands to fall into burn wounds. She was slightly overweight and if one were to make a guess, it would be a good bet that at some point she’d simply grown tired of counting calories. She looked as if she had grown into her commonness and accepted it; or perhaps she’d decided that, since she was working among burn survivors, too much attention to her appearance might even be an insult.

Dr. Edwards gestured to the orderly she’d brought with her, a ruddy chunk of a man whose muscles flexed when he reached out for me. Together, they transferred me from my bed to a stretcher. I squealed like a stuck pig, learning in a moment just how much my body had grown to accept its stillness.

The burn unit is often the most distant wing of a hospital, because burn victims are so susceptible to infection that they must be kept away from other patients. More important, perhaps, is that the placement minimizes the chance of visitors stumbling across a Kentucky Fried Human. The débridement room, I could not help but notice, was in the farthest room of this farthest wing. By the time my session was finished, I realized this was so the other burn patients couldn’t hear the screams.

The orderly laid me out on a slanted steel table where warm water, with medical agents added to balance my body chemistry, flowed across the slick surface. Dr. Edwards removed my bandages to expose the bloody pulp of my body. They echoed with flat thuds as she dropped them into a metal bucket. As she washed me, there was disgust in the down-turned edges of her mouth and unhappiness in her fingertips. The water flowing over me swirled pink. Then dark pink, light red, dark red. The murky water eddied around the little chunks of my flesh that looked like fish entrails on a cutting board.

All this was but a prelude to the main event.

Débridement is the ripping apart of a person, the cutting away of as much as can possibly be endured. Technically, it is removal of dead or contaminated tissue from a wound so that healthy skin may grow in its place. The word itself comes intact from the French noun
débridement,
which literally means “unbridling.” The etymology is easy to construct: the removal of contaminated tissue from the body—the removal of constricting matter—evokes the image of taking the bridle off a horse, as the bridle itself is a constriction. The débrided person shall be set free of the contaminant, as it were.

So much of my skin was damaged that removing the putrefying tissue meant more or less scrubbing away everything. My blood squirted up onto Dr. Edwards, leaving streams of red across her gowned chest, as she used a razorlike apparatus to take the dermis off my body, not unlike the way a vegetable peeler removes the skin from food.

Dr. Edwards made long—No, that’s too formal. Our situation made us more intimate than the cruelest of lovers, so why not use her given name?
Nan
made long swooping passes over my back. I could hear the blade as it slid along my body, disengaging the skin. The only way she’d know that she’d reached the good tissue was to actually slice into it. If I screamed in pain, she had burrowed deeply enough to find functioning nerve endings. As Blake wrote in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

Nan deposited the thin sheets of my flesh in the same metal bucket that held my dirty bandages. It was like seeing myself disappear, the flags of my existence being blown away a millimeter at a time. The pain, mixed with the morphine, caused the most interesting images to flash through my mind: Senator Joe McCarthy bellowing “Better dead than red” a carpenter assembling the crosses upon which the crucified would be nailed; dissection in biology class, with eighth-grade scalpels cutting into frog stomachs.

Once I was fully débrided, the exposed sites needed to be covered with grafts, be they cadaver or pig. It never mattered much, because my body rejected them all. This was expected, as the grafts were never meant to be permanent; they were there mostly to prevent infection.

During my stay in the hospital, I was skinned alive over and over. In many ways débridement is more overwhelming than the original burning because, whereas the accident came as a surprise, I always knew when a débridement was scheduled. I would lie in the skeleton’s belly and dread each future sweep of the knife, previewing it a hundred times in my imagination for each actual occurrence.

The dispensing of morphine was self-regulated—to “empower” me, they said—and I worked that button furiously. But there was a goddamn block on the overall amount so I couldn’t overdose myself: so much for empowerment.

By the time I was twenty-three, I’d acted in more than a hundred pornos, of varying quality. Most of the early ones are primitive but there are a few, from the later years, that I consider genuinely decent work.

Pornography is like any other job: you start with lower-end companies but, as your résumé improves, you move up. In the beginning, I worked with directors who were only a step above amateurs—but, then again, so was I, not yet having embraced the fact that sex, cinematic or otherwise, was not about jackhammering away until orgasm.

I learned sex the way anyone does, by doing; for once the library was useless. Practice, not theory, taught me that a performer cannot race to climax without disappointing the viewer—but neither can he fuck indefinitely without becoming boring, and this was the balance that must be achieved. Likewise, I learned there is no standard set of maneuvers, and that readjustments can only be properly made when listening to the commands of the other’s body.

I do not wish to brag, but the increase in my proficiency was admirable. Others noticed: demand for my services grew, my directors became more reputable, the women with whom I worked more talented, and my payments increased. My reputation, for performance and dedication, became known both to consumers and to those in the industry.

Eventually, I was no longer satisfied to work only one side of the camera and asked for other production responsibilities. The overworked crews were happy for the assistance; I would help set up the lighting equipment while asking the cameramen how they knew where the shadows would fall. I would watch how the directors set the scene and, by this point, I had performed often enough that I could occasionally make a good suggestion. If the producer ran into a problem—an actress canceling at the last moment or a camera breaking down—I had enough friends in the industry that after a few quick calls, I could often solve it.

Before long, I branched into the role of writer, as much as one can claim to write a porn film. The writer can establish a situation, but when it comes to the action, he can only write
SEX SCENE HERE
. Different performers do different things: some refuse to do anal, some refuse to do girl-on-girl, and so forth, and because you’re never really sure in advance which performer is going to do which scene, you can’t get too specific. Final decisions are always made on the set.

Despite a coke habit that grew so severe giant white mosquitoes came for early morning visits, I was not an unintelligent young man. I was aware of the financial advantages of porn—no matter the economy, there’s always a market—but there was more to it than this. I liked to write and act, and viewed my work to be a satisfaction of my artistic urges at least as much as it was a matter of commerce. After directing a few films, I figured out that the real money wasn’t in acting in someone else’s films but in getting others to act in
mine.
So I formed my own production company at a relatively young age and became a “successful executive in the movie business with a substantial income.”

At times, I found this to be a better way to introduce myself than as a pornographer.

Naturally I wasn’t the only victim in the burn unit. Sufferers came and went. Some finished their treatments and moved on, while others died. To illustrate: one patient was Thérèse, a completely precious child with blond hair and sapphire eyes.

To look at Thérèse, you wouldn’t have even known that she’d been burned, because she wore her destruction inside. Thérèse had experienced an allergic reaction—not unlike a chemical fire in her lungs—to antibiotics administered to alleviate asthma attacks. I overheard one doctor explain it to an intern: “For her, it was like taking a big gulp of Agent Orange.”

Thérèse’s mother, wearing a dark green gown that marked her as a visitor, brought in many overflowing arrangements of plastic flowers. (Real flowers, which carry bacteria by the million, could be agents of our death.) The mother was devout and always telling the little girl that each earthly occurrence was a part of God’s Grand Design. “We can’t know why things happen, only that God has a tremendous plan for each of us. His reasons are just, though we might not be able to understand them.” Personally, I believe it’s a poor idea to tell a seven-year-old girl that God’s tremendous plan is to incinerate her lungs.

Howard was another patient in the ward. He’d been burned long before I arrived, in a house fire after his Alzheimer’s-stricken grandmother fell asleep with a lit cigarette between her fingers. She didn’t survive but he did, and now he was working diligently on every aspect of his rehabilitation. He used the walkers, he arm-curled his small silver dumbbells, and he walked ten steps one day and twelve the next. He beamed with each achievement, constantly telling me that he would “beat this thing” and “get his life back.” These proclamations only intensified after his fiancée informed him that they’d no longer be getting married.

When he was discharged, Howard’s entire family and a dozen friends (including the ex-fiancée) came to the burn unit to celebrate. They brought a cake and everyone told him how great he looked and how proud they were. Howard talked about this being “the first day of the rest of his life.” It was a big fucking show, even the way they dramatically packed up his stuff. Howard shuffled over to my bed and took my good hand. “I told you I’d beat this thing. I told you. You can do it, too!” He winked in an effort to inspire me but, because of the skin contracture around his eyes, it only made me think of a housefly struggling to get out of a toilet bowl.