are, that changes, too. Because who you are is not permanent.”
Lance looked a little embarrassed, as if he’d talked himself into an area where he didn’t want to go. He moved his gaze around the room, engaging all eyes for a few moments, before beginning the big wind-up. “Modern burn treatment is incredible, and the doctors are amazing, and I’m so thankful to be alive. But none of that is enough. Your skin was the emblem of your identity, the image that you presented to the world. But it was never who you really
“Some day soon,” Lance said, “you’ll walk out of here and have to decide how you’re going to live the rest of your lives. Will you be defined by what other people see, or by the essence of your soul?”
TWO VERY POOR CHOICES.
Gregor brought an assortment of goodies to wish me a happy Halloween. Because we are men, we didn’t mention our previous conversation, and the candy was his way of saying that we should pick up where we’d left off before our spat. If the place hadn’t been a hospital, I’m certain he would have brought a six-pack of beer.
The evening proved to be a breakthrough in our friendship. Gregor told me a somewhat embarrassing story about his very worst Halloween, when he’d dressed-in a misguided effort to impress a medical student he fancied-as a human liver. He’d gone to great lengths to make his costume as realistic as possible, including a rubber hose that was supposed to approximate the hepatic tube, which he hooked to a hidden bag of vodka in the organ’s left lobe. His rationale was that he could take sips throughout the evening, whenever his nervousness with the woman became too much. (For perhaps the first time in history, a man filtered alcohol out of his liver to put into his body.) Unfortunately, his shyness was so great that he soon became completely drunk. At the end of the evening, Gregor and his date found themselves in the loft of an artist who made a living imitating the works of Jackson Pollock. The story ended with Gregor paying the artist several hundred dollars after vomiting onto one of his canvases, although I don’t know how it could have made any difference to the work.
I tried to one-up Gregor with my most embarrassing Christmas story, of a failed attempt at seducing a department store elf who was married to a steroid-abusing Santa. Gregor responded with a yuletide tale of his own, in which he accidentally shot his mother with the BB gun he’d received after months of swearing that safety would be his primary concern. In the end, we somehow decided to share the single most embarrassing stories of our childhoods, holidays or not. I went first.
As a normal young boy I discovered it was pleasurable to stroke my penis, but as I was living with my addict aunt and addict uncle at the time, I had no one with whom to discuss my biological discovery.
I had a vague understanding, from eavesdropping on the meth-smoking adults, that there were such things as venereal diseases. You certainly did not want to contract one, as nasty things would happen to your jigger if you did. (Aunt Debi, when she found herself unable to avoid referring to my penis, always called it a jigger.) I also knew that venereal diseases were passed in the fluids that resulted from sexual acts. I could have done some research, I suppose, but I knew the librarians too well to risk being caught looking through such books. Besides, it was all pretty straightforward: since there was venereal disease in ejaculate and I was now capable of ejaculating, I would have to be careful not to infect myself. So I reviewed my options.
I could stop masturbating. But it felt too good.
I could cover my stomach with a towel to catch the offending fluid. But the towels were too large to hide and too difficult to clean discreetly.
I could masturbate into a sock. But all my socks were of a loose cotton weave, through which seepage threatened to enter the pores of my skin.
I could masturbate into zip-lock sandwich bags. Yes: not only was this approach medically sound, but also it offered an unusual level of convenience. Clearly, this was the way to go.
Before long I had a large collection of brimming Baggies under my bed, but I couldn’t simply bundle them up with our regular trash-what if someone discovered them, or if a scrounging dog spread the salty bags across the front lawn? So I decided the best option was to place them in another family’s garbage can; the farther away from our trailer, the better.
The ideal location would be the rich area of town, removed from the trailer park both in distance and social standing. What I failed to consider, however, is that moneyed folk react suspiciously to young boys sneaking around their trash bins. Before long a police car arrived and I was standing in front of two burly officers trying to explain my surreptitious actions.
I desperately wanted not to betray the true nature of my mission, but the police demanded that I hand over the shopping bag in my possession. I begged them to let me go, stating there was nothing in the bag but “my lunch.” When they took the package by force, they found forty little parcels of an unknown white substance and demanded to know exactly what kind of liquid narcotic I was dealing.
Afraid of being questioned at the local police station while they ran a chemical analysis on the milky fluid, I confessed that I was walking around with zip-locked sandwich bags filled with my own semen.
The officers didn’t believe me, at first, but as the details of my story piled up, they stood in stunned silence-until they began to laugh. Needless to say, I was unimpressed with their reaction to my health crisis. When their amusement subsided, the officers deposited my junk in the nearest trash can and drove me home.
In our newfound spirit of male bonding, Gregor boasted that he had a story that could equal mine, if not better it.
As a lad, Gregor was likewise uneducated, although I give him full marks for never believing that he could infect himself with an STD. When he discovered self-pleasure, his thoughts ran somewhat like this:
So Gregor began his experiments. He tried liquid soap in the shower until he discovered the harsh reality of soap burn. His next attempt involved hand lotion, which worked well until his father began to question the boy’s unusual commitment to supple skin. Eventually Gregor, who had a creative mind and a kitchen with a fully stocked fruit bowl, began to speculate on the possibilities afforded by a banana peel. Had not nature itself designed the peel specifically to house a fleshy cylinder?
The peel had an unfortunate tendency to rip during the act but, not to be defeated, Gregor decided to shore up this natural weakness with duct tape. This worked well, but he was faced with the same predicament that had stymied me: disposal of the evidence.
He decided upon flushing the remains down the toilet, but the fourth peel caused the pipes to back up. When Gregor’s father discovered the clog, he naturally set to work with the plunger. Gregor hid in his bedroom, praying feverishly to God to send the peels down the tube instead of back up.
God answered Gregor’s prayers. The incriminating fruit did indeed go down, and the plumber’s only comment was that Gregor’s mother might consider adding more fiber to the family diet. Gregor kept his promise to the Lord by abandoning his fruit-abusing ways forever-or so he assured me, at my hospital bedside.
We were laughing at ourselves and promising to keep each other’s secrets safe when Marianne Engel entered the room, wrapped in a mummy’s bandages, her blue/green eyes beaming out from between the white strips on her face, her dark hair cascading down her back. She was obviously not expecting to encounter a psychiatrist in my room, much less one who had treated her in the past. It stopped her un/dead in her tracks, as if three thousand (or seven hundred) years of rigor mortis had set in all at once. Gregor, recognizing her unmistakable hair and eyes, spoke first. “Marianne, it’s wonderful to see you again. How are you?”
“I’m fine.” The words came tersely. Perhaps she was afraid her costume would put her right back in the loony bin, as wandering through the burn ward in bandages was whimsical at best and a bad joke at worst.
In an effort to put her at ease, Gregor said, “Halloween’s my favorite holiday, even more than Christmas. Your costume is great.” He paused to give her the chance to respond but she didn’t, so he continued, “It’s very appealing for psychiatrists, you know. Seeing everyone’s costume is kind of a peek into their deepest fantasies.
