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.
As he exited the room, his mother and father on each side of him, he didn’t turn around to take a final look at the burn ward that had been his home for so many months; I could tell he was determined never to look back.
It is, I suppose, a heartwarming story of human triumph: determination, the love of family and friends, and positive thinking! But, really, who was he kidding? Howard’s ex-fiancée was rightfully gone—who would (could) love a goblin? Would he ever have sex again? Would he go through life with his parents holding his arms to balance him as if he were forever two years old? Where, I ask, is the victory in that?
Howard had worked much harder than I intended to. I’d listened to him talk about how he was going to get better. I’d listened to everyone say how good he looked when, in fact, he looked like the monster that any sane person would cross the street to avoid. I wanted to scream when he took my hand, because even I didn’t want to be touched by him. He disgusted me, this thing, my brother.
My reaction had little to do with him, really; it sprang from the realization that no matter what I did, I would never be the same. I could exercise every day, I could endure a thousand surgeries, and I’d still be a blister of a human being. There is no cure for what I am. That’s what I took from Howard’s great achievement.
That’s what I understood as I lay in the skeleton’s belly with the snake swallowing my spine. HE’S JUST LIKE YOU, she hissed, BUT WITH A BETTER SOUL.
The worse realization: even if I could have gone back to what I’d been before the accident, how much better would that have been? Yes, I’d been handsome. Yes, I’d had money and a career but (let’s not mince words) I’d been a coke-addled pornographer. I was told that my friends, who had laughed at my jokes when I was sharing drugs at the side of my pool, came to visit while I was in my coma—but each looked at me for less than a minute before walking out, never to return. One glance was enough to convince them that our days of sniffing at spoons were finished forever.
After I woke, the only person who made a real effort was Candee Kisses, a sweet girl who ended up in porn only because the universe is an unjust place. At seventeen, she had become tired of her stepfather raping her; she was willing to do anything to get out from under him. So she did. She should’ve been living on a farm somewhere, married to a hardworking guy named Jack or Paul or Bill, instead of making her living by sucking cock in front of the camera.
Candee came a few times, bringing little gifts and trying to cheer me up by telling me how fortunate I was to still be alive, but mostly she just cried. Maybe it was because of how I looked; more likely, it was because of her own life. After three visits, I made her swear that she wouldn’t come back. She kept her promise. Now here’s the funny thing: I knew her for over five years, I had sex with her, and I had heard her stories about her stepfather, but I didn’t know her real name. Perhaps there are just some things you leave behind when you choose a new life.
When Howard and his parents disappeared through the burn ward door, I lost my veil of control. My chest started to lurch as anger and self-pity all came up like vomit, and my damaged throat allowed my breaths to be expelled only as long reedy gasps.
Then the girl Thérèse came to me. It was an incredible, torturous effort for her, and with each suck of air, I could hear her lungs rattle. She was exhausted by the time she reached my bed. She crawled up onto it and took my hand. Not my unburned right hand but my ravaged left one with its finger and a half missing, and she held it as if it were normal. It hurt so much to be touched there and, although I was thankful for the touch despite the pain, I implored her to get away.
“No,” she answered.
My chest was still jumping involuntarily. “Can’t you see what I am?”
“Yes,” she replied. “You’re just like me.”
Her large blue eyes, radiant through the pain, never left my damaged face.
“Leave,” I commanded.
She said she needed to rest a bit before she returned to her own bed, before adding, “You’re beautiful in God’s eyes, you know.”
Her eyes closed and I watched her face as exhaustion pulled her into sleep. Then my own eyes drifted shut, momentarily.
The nurses soon woke me up. Thérèse was there in my bed, her hand still in mine, not breathing.
It only takes an instant.
Okay, I admit it: I tried the creative visualization that Gregor had suggested.
I slowed my breathing and concentrated on making my body feel heavy, beginning with my two remaining toes: heavy, heavy. Then my feet, then my ankles. Next I thought about my heavy calves, my heavy knees, and my heavy thighs. All the way up, torso, chest, neck, head…concentrating on my breathing: in, out, in, out, steady, calm…
This is when I started thinking about vaginas. I suppose this was natural, as I’d been inside hundreds. There are those men who would have you believe that all women feel the same, but obviously these men have not been with many women. Each vagina has its own texture, its own depth and moistness: each has its own personality. That’s a fact.
I was very good at sex. It was a hobby as well as a profession. Outside of office hours, my passion was to find women who were the opposite of those with whom I filmed. If you work at a French restaurant, do you want to eat escargot on your day off? Hardly. You’ll step out for something at the neighborhood diner. If you work in television production, you end your day by reading books. And, as a professional fucker of silicone creamgirls, I found it enjoyable to try other types of women. With careful words, not sincerely felt but spoken as if they were, I could lay out the most majestic dreams and well-planned kismet. With this gift of speech, I presented myself with 1001 women, from Scheherazade to Southside Selma.
Intercourse before the camera provides little satisfaction because the set is dressed, the check is in the mail, and where’s the romance? But the feeling I got from taking—from winning—women who were not in the game was an entirely different thing. Satisfaction lay with housewives, policewomen, and secretaries. Book editors. Cowgirls. Track athletes, fisherwomen, tree planters, feminist writers, pro wrestlers, artists, waitresses, bank tellers, Sunday school teachers, dressmakers, and civil servants. Your mother, your sister, your girlfriend. I’d say anything to possess a woman, if even for an hour. I pretended to be left-wing, right-wing, artistic, manly, sensitive, commanding, shy, rich, poor, Catholic, Muslim (only once), pro-choice, pro-life, homophobic, gay (fag hags put out), cynical, wildly optimistic, a Buddhist monk, and a Lutheran minister. Whatever the situation required.
I remember a woman named Michelle. My sex with her was the closest I ever came to perfection in intercourse. She was a waitress with a slight potbelly, who smelled faintly of fried eggs and gravy and sported a scar where her appendix had been removed. I’d watched her and her husband have a furious dispute outside her greasy spoon. The husband left and she sat down on a park bench, determined not to cry. I went over and soon we were talking, soon she was laughing, soon we were back at my place. We had some cocaine and we laughed a little more and then we started to playfully punch each other’s shoulders. When we started to fuck, first there was urgency, and then there was surprise at how good it felt, and then there was moaning. She started to laugh again and so did I, and then she started to cry; she cried all the way through—not from sorrow, but from release.
We went for hours. It seemed that we wandered a precipice where every nerve was awake. She told me about everything that transpired in (and out of) her marriage bed. She told me that she was afraid that she’d never actually loved her husband. She told me about her fantasies of her husband’s sister and how she touched herself in public when she thought—but wasn’t sure—that no one was looking, and she told me that she stole small things from the corner store because it made her horny. She told me that she believed in God and that she liked thinking about Him watching her do these things. I told her that she had been a very busy girl. We never stopped fucking and I found myself crying, too, at the rawness of it all.
My skin will never work like that again, so aware of the other person that I’m unsure where she ends and I begin. Never again. Never again will my skin be a thing that can so perfectly communicate; in losing my skin to the fire, I also lost the opportunity to make it disappear with another person. Mostly I’m glad that I found such physical connection, if only once, but I certainly wish it had been with someone whom I’ve seen since.
Perhaps I was clearly and persistently in the wrong in my many sexual transactions. But, then again, perhaps not. Please consider that I provided considerable comfort to many downhearted women. What does it matter if Wanda Whatshername believed I was a recently divorced, misunderstood painter? Her husband was more interested in drinking beer with the boys than in taking her dancing, so it probably did her a world of good to fuck a stranger. The key to the whole endeavor was that I was able to fold myself instantly into the shape of each woman’s fantasy. To do this, to decode a person so that you can provide her with what she wants and needs, is an art, and I was a fuck artist.
The women didn’t want the real me, and they didn’t want love. They wanted a carnal short story, one that they had already been heating up in the dew of their thighs, to disclose at their book clubs. I was just a physical body—a most singular beauty, too—with
which they could realize their true desires.
This is the truth: we all desire to conquer the comely one, because it affirms our own worth. Speaking for the men of the world, we want to own the beauty of the woman we’re fucking. We want to grasp that beauty, tightly in our greedy little fingers, to well and truly possess it, to make it ours. We want to do this as the woman shines her way through an orgasm. That’s perfection. And while I can’t speak for women, I imagine that they—whether they admit it or not—want the same thing: to possess the man, to own his rough handsomeness, if only for a few seconds.
All in all, what difference did my deceptions make? I didn’t have AIDS or herpes, and while it’s true that I’ve taken my share of needles in the ass, who hasn’t? A little penicillin goes a long way. But then again, it’s easy to fondly recall the days of minor genital infections after your penis has been removed.
Creative visualization is probably not for me.
Connie, of the morning shift, was the youngest, blondest, and cutest of my three nurses, and she checked my bandages when I awoke. Generally far too perky for my liking, she did have an adorable smile with just slightly crooked teeth and an always genuine “Good morning!” When I asked her once why she was always so gosh-darn nice—a difficult sentence but I got it out of my mouth—Connie answered that she “didn’t want to be mean.” There was great charm in the fact that she couldn’t even imagine why I’d bother to ask such a question in the first place. In her efforts to be unfailingly kind, it was rare that she came onto the shift without bringing me some small gift—a can of soda that she held while I sipped through a straw, or a newspaper article she would read aloud because she guessed it might interest me.