Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

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 dйbrided, 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 dйbridement is more overwhelming than the original burning because, whereas the accident came as a surprise, I always knew when a dйbridement 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 rйsumй 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 Thйrиse, a completely precious child with blond hair and sapphire eyes.

To look at Thйrиse, you wouldn’t have even known that she’d been burned, because she wore her destruction inside. Thйrиse 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.”

Thйrиse’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 fiancйe 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-fiancйe) 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-fiancйe 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?