their hungry scalpels, hastened the process with a few quick slices. The procedure is called an escharotomy, and it gives the swelling tissue the freedom to expand. It’s rather like the uprising of your secret inner being, finally given license to claw through the surface. The doctors thought they had sliced me open to commence my healing but, in fact, they only released the monster—a thing of engorged flesh, suffused with juice.
While a small burn results in a blister filled with plasma, burns such as mine result in the loss of enormous quantities of liquid. In my first twenty-four hospital hours, the doctors pumped six gallons of isotonic liquid into me to counteract the loss of body fluids. I bathed in the liquid as it flowed out of my scorched body as fast as it was pumped in, and I was something akin to the desert during a flash flood.
This too-quick exchange of fluid resulted in an imbalance in my blood chemistry, and my immune system staggered under the strain, a problem that would become ever more dangerous in the following weeks when the primary threat of death was from sepsis. Even for a burn victim who seems to be doing well long after his accident, infection can pull him out of the game at a moment’s notice. The body’s defenses are just barely functioning, exactly when they are needed most.
My razed outer layers were glazed with a bloody residue of charred tissue called eschar, the Hiroshima of the body. Just as you cannot call a pile of cracked concrete blocks a “building” after the bomb has detonated, neither could you have called my outer layer “skin” after the accident. I was an emergency state unto myself, silver ion and sulfadiazine creams spread over the remains of me. Over that, bandages were laid to rest upon the devastation.
I was aware of none of this, and only learned it later from the doctors. At the time, I lay comatose, with a machine clicking off the sluggish metronome of my heart. Fluids and electrolytes and antibiotics and morphine were administered through a series of tubes (IV tube, jejunostomy tube, endotracheal tube, nasogastric tube, urinary tube, truly a tube for every occasion!). A heat shield kept my body warm enough to survive, a ventilator did my breathing, and I collected enough blood transfusions to shame Keith Richards.
The doctors removed my wasteland exterior by débriding me, scraping away the charred flesh. They brought in tanks of liquid nitrogen containing skin recently harvested from corpses. The sheets were thawed in pans of water, then neatly arranged on my back and stapled into place. Just like that, as if they were laying strips of sod over the problem areas behind their summer cabins, they wrapped me in the skin of the dead. My body was cleaned constantly but I rejected these sheets of necro-flesh anyway; I’ve never played well with others. So over and over again, I was sheeted with cadaver skin.
There I lay, wearing dead people as armor against death.
♦ ♦ ♦
The first six years of my life.
My father was gone before I was born. He was evidently a most captivating good-time Charlie, quick with his dick and quicker to split. My mother, abandoned by this nameless lothario, died in childbirth as I surfed into this world on a torrent of her blood. The nurse who was grasping my greasy newborn body slipped in a puddle of it as she attempted to leave the delivery room, or so I was told. My grandmother first viewed me as I was whisked past her in the arms of a red-on-white Rorschach test of a nurse.
The delivery went wrong for me, as well. I was never told exactly what happened but somehow my body was cut from stomach to chest, leaving behind a long scar—maybe it was an errant scalpel as they tried to save my mother. I simply don’t know. As I grew, the scar remained the same size until eventually it was only a few inches long, centered on the left side of my chest where a romantic might draw the heart.
I lived with my grandmother until I was six. Her bitterness towards me, as the cause of her daughter’s death, was obvious. I think she was not a bad person but rather someone who never expected to be predeceased by her own daughter, nor to be charged, so late in life, with the care of another infant.
My grandmother didn’t beat me; she fed me well; she arranged all the necessary vaccinations. She just didn’t like me. She died on one of the rare days that we were having fun, while she was pushing me on a playground swing. I went up into the air and stretched my legs towards the sun. I came back towards the earth expecting her hands to catch me. Instead, I sailed past her doubled-over body. As I swung by her again on the forward trajectory, she’d collapsed onto her elbows. Then she sprawled facedown in the playground mud. I ran to a nearby house to alert the adults, and then sat on the monkey bars as the ambulance came too late. As the paramedics lifted her, my grandmother’s corpulent arms swung like bat wings with the life squeezed out of them.
♦ ♦ ♦
From the moment I arrived at the hospital, I stopped being a person and became an actuarial chart. After weighing me, the doctors pulled out the calculators to punch up the extent of my burn and calculate the odds of my survival. Not good.
How did they do all this? As in any proper fairy tale, there’s a majick formula, in this case called the Rule of Nines. The percentage of burn is determined and marked on a chart not unlike a voodoo map of the human body, divided into sections based upon multiples of nine. The arms are “worth” 9 percent of the total body surface; the head is worth 9 percent; each whole leg is worth 18 percent; and the torso, front and back, is worth 36 percent. Hence: the Rule of Nines.
Of course, there are other considerations in rating a burn. Age, for example. The very old and the very young are less likely to survive, but if the young do survive, they have a much greater capacity to regenerate. So, they’ve got that going for them. Which is nice. One must also consider the type of burn: scalds from boiling liquids; electrical burns from live wires; or chemical burns, be they acid or alkali. I ordered up only thermal burns from the menu, those strictly from flames.
What, you may wonder, actually happens to living flesh in a fire? Cells consist mostly of liquid, which can boil and cause the cell walls to explode. This is not good. In a second scenario, the cell’s protein cooks up just like an egg in a frying pan, changing from a thin liquid into something gooey and white. If this happens, all metabolic activity of the cell ceases. So even though the heat was not sufficient to kill the cell outright, the loss of ability to deliver oxygen ensures the tissue will die soon enough. The difference is slow capitulation rather than immediate immolation.
♦ ♦ ♦
With Grandma gone, I went to live with Debi and Dwayne Michael Grace—an aunt and uncle, the quintessence of trash, who were annoyed with me from the moment I arrived. They did, however, like the government checks sent for my upkeep. It made scoring dope considerably easier.
In my time with the graceless Graces, I relocated from one trailer park to another until my guardians found an all-night party that grew into a three-year methamphetamine festival. They were well ahead of their time: crystal meth was not nearly as popular in those days as it is now. If there was no pipe available with which to smoke it, a hollowed-out lightbulb was used, and sometimes the run on bulbs was such that we lived entirely in the dark. The drugs never seemed to run out, though. The Graces, flashing smiles like smashed keyboards, would hand over their every penny to the dealer.
One of our neighbors traded the use of her daughter, a few years younger than me, for the equivalent in drugs. In case you’re wondering, the street value of an eight-year-old is $35, or at least it was when I was a kid. When the mother became savage-eyed and withdrawn, the young girl would come to cry fearfully in my tiny room, anticipating an impending sale. Last I heard, her mother had cleaned up, lost addiction, and found God. Last I heard, the girl (now adult) was a pregnant heroin addict.
For the most part my childhood was not agreeable, but I was never sexually auctioned so my guardians might crank up. Still, a man should be able to say better things about his youth than that.
The only way I was able to survive that shitty world was to imagine better ones, so I read everything I could get my hands on. By my early teens, I was spending so many hours in the library that the librarians brought extra sandwiches for me. I have such fond memories of these women, who would recommend books and then talk to me for hours about what I had learned.
Long before I discovered the