Alan Russell - Burning Man

I had investigated my condition on the Internet. According to the medical literature, I was a textbook case for posttraumatic stress disorder. During the day I can control my symptoms, at least to a degree, but not at night. That’s when all hell breaks loose in my dreams. During any given week, I have the same dream three or four times. That doesn’t sound so bad. The reality is that several nights a week I find myself burning to death.

The dreams feel real. Nothing in my mind tells me that I’m dreaming. I relive what happened. I smell the smoke and feel the fire. All my despair comes back; all my pain returns. My flesh manifests what I feel. When I wake up, my skin isn’t just hot, it’s burning.

When I was a kid I remember my friend Craig Steinberg asked me, “You want to see a match burn twice?” I told him I’d like to see that, so Craig struck a match, blew it out and then pressed the hot tip into my flesh. It hurt, but it didn’t quite burn the flesh. That’s how a match burns twice.

That’s how it is with me. I keep burning. I am the burning man.

In my research I had found one doctor who had written about this phenomenon. He called the dream sequences “mental metabolization,” and according to his research certain patients relived their burning again and again, “often very realistically.”

His conclusion was an understatement. On a few occasions I awakened from my dreams of fire and pulled back my compression garments only to find my skin red and blistered. No dream should be so vivid. It doesn’t help matters that I can’t talk about my dreams to anyone but Sirius. I know the LAPD wouldn’t give me my job back if there was any hint of lingering PTSD. It makes sense to err on the side of caution if your employee is carrying a gun.

That’s why I was working so hard pretending all was well. That’s why I had agreed to this public luncheon and ceremony. The truth is that most of the time I feel like the Martin Sheen character in Apocalypse Now . I am Captain Willard waiting for a mission in my hotel room in Saigon.

I took a few deep breaths. By this time Maureen would be looking for me. I reached out and scratched Sirius behind an ear, and he responded by leaning his head into my hand. His presence made the impending ordeal a little more bearable. We exited the booth, and I paused at a sink to splash down my face. As I patted myself dry, I avoided looking at my reflection.

We made our way out to the hallway. In the distance I could see Maureen standing in the midst of a circle of people. She was nervously wringing her hands and didn’t seem to be talking quite as much as usual. Her head turned in our direction, and when she caught sight of us her relief was visible.

Pointing our way she said, “There they are!”

Several photographers broke from the pack. I didn’t smile-with my scarred face, the result looks like a grimace-but I did my best to look affable.

One of the photographers directed me with his hands: “Can you turn this way, Officer Gideon?”

I did as he asked. Judging from the angle, he preferred my bad side over my good. I guess scars make for more compelling photographs.

“We need the dog in the shot,” another photographer said.

“Give the lady what she wants,” I told Sirius, and signaled him in his pose. My partner doesn’t think he has a bad side.

Maureen introduced me to Kent McCord, who was emceeing the event. For a time McCord had been the face of the LAPD, playing the role of Officer Jim Reed on the TV show Adam-12 . We posed for a few obligatory shots and then chatted for a minute.

McCord wanted my opinion on a few cop jokes that he was planning to use on the crowd. “Shoot,” I said.

“How many cops does it take to screw in a light bulb?” he asked.

“How many?”

“Just one, but he’s never around when you need him.”

I gave it a thumbs-up, so he tried another. “So this man has to work late, and when he’s driving home he gets pulled over for speeding. Now the cop notices the driver has these tired-looking eyes, so he says to him, ‘Sir, I can’t help but notice that your eyes are bloodshot. Have you been drinking?’ The driver isn’t happy with the insinuation, so he says to the cop, ‘Officer, I can’t help but notice that your eyes are glazed. Have you been eating doughnuts?’”

It got a laugh out of me, which seemed to please McCord. I decided it was my turn to tell a cop joke. “So,” I said, “how many cops does it take to throw a suspect down the stairs?”

He asked, “How many?”

“None,” I said, “he fell.”

“I might use that,” he said, pulling out a pen and scribbling it down.

McCord struck me as a good sort. He didn’t put on airs like other actors I’d met. It was unusual that Hollywood had actually selected someone right for a cop role. I had heard about one actor who put up a stink over having to wear a Kevlar vest during a shoot because he thought it made him look fat, but I didn’t have a chance to tell the story to McCord.

“I’m afraid I have to break this up,” Maureen said. “We’re already running behind schedule.”

The meeting room hadn’t shrunk any in the ten minutes since I’d last seen it. There were probably a thousand people in the room, some of whom I actually knew. Friends and colleagues came over to pat me on the back and say a few words. It took Maureen a long time to get me to our table, which not coincidentally was in the center of the banquet room. There was a place for Sirius at the table as well, which gave me a little breathing room. He sat to my right, and I offered him a water glass from which he drank.

“I took the liberty of ordering Sirius a steak,” Maureen said.

“I hope you ordered it extra rare.”

Most of those at my table were LAPD brass, which required me to make small talk, but luckily all the well-wishers that kept converging on our table spared me from having to manufacture much in the way of conversation. I was shaking more hands than a politician on the stump.

Finally, the show began. In the front of the room the assistant chief was offering up the LAPD Media Relations version of what had occurred on the night of the fire. His description of events wasn’t like what happened or like my dreams. The police officer he described didn’t suffer from fear and panic, nor did he lose his mind for a time. It was a good war story, but not the one that I lived. I tried to ignore the stares directed my way, just as I tried not listening to what was being said. It was easier to think they were talking about some real hero rather than me.

Kent McCord was the next speaker. After his jokes, he talked about bravery, heroism, and duty. The more I pretended to be having a good time, the hotter the room seemed. I felt on the verge of spontaneous human combustion. That wouldn’t be the kind of PR the department wanted, but I knew it would clear the room fast. I recalled Richard Pryor’s line about racing out of his house when he’d been on fire: “When you’re running down the street on fire, people get out of your way.”

The loud sound of applause interrupted my musing. All around the conference room people were standing and cheering. Suddenly the space wasn’t cavernous anymore; it felt small and stifling.

I motioned for Sirius to come with me, and as he struggled to his feet the applause redoubled. The old show business rule still applied: never follow a dog act.

Gene Ehrlich was the new chief of police. He had inherited a department rocked by scandals. Ehrlich came into town with more than a white hat: he was a cop with an MBA from Harvard. The top cop knew a good photo opportunity when he saw one and stood waiting for us in the front of the room. I tried not to limp but wasn’t successful. Sitting sometimes does that to me; the fire had forever taken some of the elasticity out of my ligaments. Flashes kept going off, and I was afraid that Sirius and I would be the new poster boys for an updated Spirit of ’76 picture. I walked slowly so that Sirius could keep up with me. He was still dragging his left back leg. Television shows to the contrary, you don’t get shot and recover overnight. His vet was confident his leg would come around in time. Sirius’s fur had mostly grown back, but he was bald in a few places where the scar tissue had prevented his hair from coming back in. I was thinking about getting him several toupees. Like me, Sirius had lost a lot of weight. One of the things about severe burns is that you almost always lose weight.