LIGHTS ON,
RATS OUT
A MEMOIR
CREE LEFAVOUR
Copyright © 2017 by Cree LeFavour
Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler
Cover layout by Becca Fox Design
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Excerpts from The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, translation copyright © 1927, copyright renewed 1955 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg. © S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin 1924. All rights reserved by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.
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FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Text Design by Ashley Prine
This book was set in Scala with Frutiger by Tandem Books
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: August 2017
ISBN 978-0-8021-2596-5
eISBN 978-0-8021-8915-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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17 18 19 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Nicole LeFavour
So meshed in nerves and hesitation, it could not be a thing to be afraid of; yet it was a real beast, and this book its mangy skin, dried, stuffed and set up squarely for men to stare at.
—T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
PART I
CHAPTER 1 Kid Gloves
CHAPTER 2 Medical Emergency
CHAPTER 3 IPE
CHAPTER 4 Fabulous Patient
CHAPTER 5 Hard to Fake
CHAPTER 6 Chiclets or Razzles?
CHAPTER 7 An Unnatural Teenage Fantasy
CHAPTER 8 Catch Me
CHAPTER 9 Unholy Pleasure
CHAPTER 10 Sympathy to Ingest
CHAPTER 11 Hide Better!
CHAPTER 12 Appetite for Destruction
CHAPTER 13 Not Safe Enough
CHAPTER 14 Quackery
CHAPTER 15 Said Spontaneously
CHAPTER 16 A Well-Conducted Hotel
CHAPTER 17 Politesse
PART II
CHAPTER 18 Humiliation Olympics
CHAPTER 19 One Big Disappointment
CHAPTER 20 SDB
CHAPTER 21 Enemy Cover
CHAPTER 22 Well Documented
CHAPTER 23 Safe with My Sister
CHAPTER 24 Passing Plates
CHAPTER 25 Looking-Glass Cake
CHAPTER 26 Characterologic
CHAPTER 27 A Thing for Lit Cigarettes
CHAPTER 28 Quiet Rooms
CHAPTER 29 Carnival Lights
CHAPTER 30 A Splendid Woman
CHAPTER 31 Afoot Again
CHAPTER 32 The Ceiling of the Profile
PART III
CHAPTER 33 Safe in My Bed
CHAPTER 34 The Queen of the Universe
CHAPTER 35 So Many to Choose From
CHAPTER 36 Want to Fuck?
CHAPTER 37 Sexual History
CHAPTER 38 Borderline
CHAPTER 39 Guilt→Sex→Excitement
CHAPTER 40 Musical Chairs
CHAPTER 41 I Can’t Pretend
CHAPTER 42 Mamsy-Pamsy Parenting
CHAPTER 43 Pocket Trick
CHAPTER 44 Lights On, Rats Out
CHAPTER 45 Set It Alight
CHAPTER 46 Ugly but Interesting
CHAPTER 47 A Bigger, Wilder End
Acknowledgments
Prologue
I’m somewhere in the sprawling mess of suburban New Jersey, sitting on damp earth. Shielded from the road by a gravestone, I put a flame to my Camel Light. Whatever irony or black humor my location offers, the graveyard is the only privacy I can find in this ugly matrix of unknowable highways, roundabouts, turn lanes, and exits. No more than one hundred yards away my thirteen-year-old daughter moves pointlessly up and down the soccer field in her cheery yellow-and-blue uniform, long brown hair pulled back in a slick ponytail, trying her best to get to the ball.
It’s been twenty years. Would it be as good as ever? Taking a drag to fire up the ember. Choosing my spot. Holding the burning cigarette to my skin. Feeling my brain bleed out in a state of perfect concentration. I’d go inside the sensation, will it into pleasure until it became just that. Bliss. Time at rest. The world stopped in a pinprick of pain-pleasure. I might stay, light and use a second cigarette on the spot, then rest on the interior of my mind where that inky calm holds.
I guess I never finished the task of knowing my own mind well enough to see this day coming. What misshapen root bears the strange urge that makes holding a cigarette to my skin seem not just a good idea, but necessary? There’s only one person who knows this particular kind of crazy because he’s been through it with me before, my former psychiatrist, Dr. Kohl. It’s been more than two decades since I left Burlington, Vermont, for New York City after three years in treatment with him. What had this fetish meant to me then and how did I stop only to feel it quicken now? The answer flaps about somewhere in the past, snapping now and again like a flag in a strong wind.
I wouldn’t care so much about solving the riddle of my desire but for the pain of reconciling it with the reality of my beautiful daughter just over there. I can’t match the impulse with what I am to her and how I want her to know me: strong, reliable, with ample belief in this wonderful, strange life. I’m pulled outside myself by the ref’s whistle mixing with the claps and yells of doting, vaguely bored parents positioned, as I should be, in a row of folding chairs on the sideline. I long for Dr. Kohl as I crush out my cigarette on the wet grass.
The whistle is my cue to dodge the busy traffic, step onto the field, find my daughter, and envelop her with whatever it is she needs. I can do this and whatever’s necessary to maintain normalcy and I will. But I need to reclaim the self I once was, the one I left with Dr. Kohl, if I’m going to avoid the 3rd degree burn I suddenly want so badly to imprint on myself.
At home, untouched in the attic all these years, is the fat file Dr. Kohl kept during my treatment—each of our sessions written out in dialogue along with his notes to himself. He copied the documents and handed them to me when I departed.
I’ve left the radioactive pages untouched all these years. Now I need them to take me back to my younger self, the one who would make her mark and cover it with transparent Band-Aids, long sleeves, and anything she could find to keep her secrets.
11/11/2012
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
I have written this memoir using all evidence at hand including files of physicians’ notes, hospital records, and my own journals. I’ve quoted from these documents verbatim. Some include grammatical and spelling errors that I have retained for accuracy. I have changed the name of my psychiatrist and several identifying details to preserve his anonymity.
PART I
POTTER: Oooo. It damn well ‘urts.
LAWRENCE: Certainly it hurts.
POTTER: What’s the trick, then?
LAWRENCE: The trick, William Potter, is not minding …
—Harry Fowler as William Potter and Peter O’Toole as T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia
To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more—this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.
—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.
—Emily Dickinson, “The Mystery of Pain”
CHAPTER 1
Kid Gloves
1st degree: a superficial burn of the epidermis. Grazing the bare forearm against a hot baking sheet loaded with sugar cookies might cause such a minor infliction. 1sts heal in days and leave no scar. Baby stuff. At the other extreme, the most severe 4th degree extends through the epidermis and dermis, damaging the subcutaneous tissue, including muscle and bone. House-on-fire-and-no-way-out bad. This meanie requires “excision,” a word as hideous as the procedure: cutting away and removing dead flesh and damaged bone only to repair the gap with grafts of healthy skin harvested from elsewhere on the body.
At the upper middle of the order settles the fetching moderation of the 3rd. It destroys the epidermis and much or all of the dermis beneath but no muscle or bone. Yep. Three is my number, although I do flirt with upper 2nds in weaker moments or when rushed. I’ve done a lousy job before and the proof of it is no end of pain—2nd-degree burns hurt—it’s a problem creating its own reward as I go back in to fix things up.
3rds and 4ths can be done with a lit cigarette if you try. It’s all about “the prolonged action of any intense form of heat.” That cherry glow produced by a puff on most factory-made cigarettes produces roughly 900°F heat; a smoldering cigarette hovers around 400°F. The royal tell is not just a loss of sensation but an unmistakable leathery, hard yellow-brown surface. Snakeskin boots. Alligator hide belt. Kid gloves. Getting there takes holding the cigarette in place until the pleasure’s spent. No less than one cigarette will do, with plenty of puffs in between to keep it lit, but two work better, allowing moments of leisure to enjoy the experience between drags. In a severe 2nd or 3rd the blister takes hours, not minutes, to appear. When it does, there’s no change at the center, although the spot may be circled by a delicate golden pus-engorged halo. 4ths are entirely above such mess.
I know I shouldn’t get hung up on the numbers. Guillaume Dupuytren’s original 1832 classification of burns orders a lax spectrum even if its weak logic crushes the chaos of the modern bible of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM. Then again, the deranged Richter scale, with its base-10 logarithmic formula, in which an earthquake registering 6 on the Richter scale is ten times stronger than a 5, makes the other two seem simple. All three models muster their sorry best to grade extremities of damage only to confound what might have been made tangible. Dupuytren’s fixation on a burn’s depth starts to appear positively sensible next to the seismographic measure of earthquakes or the numerically crazed symptomology of mental illness.
Whatever the number, eventually the skin sloughs off in one round piece. What grows back a month later or more is not new skin—neither dermis nor epidermis—but scar tissue, pink at first, later white. It will never disappear, only flatten and fade over the years from pink to silver to white. It’s all collagen like the miraculously perfect surrounding skin, but the fibers arrange themselves not in a neat basket weave but in a unidirectional mess. Fibrosis.
I hate to leave a spot lightly touched. There’s no going halfway—1sts are a joke and minor 2nds aren’t my element. For one thing they hurt—later, when I don’t want them to. It’s curious not minding intense pain. It means, among other things, that I can go back over burns done feebly, old or new, partially healed but still pink, wet, as if they’re done. But they’re not. They’re in play, ready for more. Ready for service.
Right now I need skin and my options are limited. I’ve been busy. Not only am I running out of time, but the sorry facsimile of a cast—gauze masquerading as plaster—blocks access to the choicest spots. Amounting to little more than two and a half yards, 2.2 meters wide, it is evidence of what I experienced as porn-level excitement when at my last appointment Dr. Kohl revisited his dormant medical skills: disinfecting, dabbing, placing pads, layering gauze, securing all with two lengths of medical tape. The bandage is tangible proof of my psychiatrist’s attention and through it I track a juicy snatch of time. I know my attachment to it is no more logical than a lusty squirrel’s persistence in guarding a cache of empty, broken walnut shells.
Johns Hopkins’s proud. Go Blue Jays! Enough talk therapy. Let’s practice real medicine. Leaning close, my psychiatrist, Dr. Kohl, cradled my arm as he tenderly dabbed ointment and then meticulously wove the sterile gauze from wrist to mid-biceps. There’s no escaping it—without the dignity of a blank slate of plaster awaiting fond words and doodles the appearance of this unwieldy thing I’m so assertively attached to must disappoint. It’ll have to do. I know that what the shell conceals isn’t all bad: A heavy coat of white silver sulfadiazine ointment cools the flesh beneath squares of Telfa nonstick pads. The pads guard roughly one hundred wounds—in various stages of recovery—from the grab of the gauze that, other than being spectacularly showy, is there to hold the pads in place and absorb pus. The skin at the bottom of the assemblage is not so much skin as an oozy landscape of red, pink, white, and yellow flesh speckled with fresh scars. Inexplicably, I adore the whole gruesome mess.
I home in on the palm rather than destroying a shred of his sacred evidence. It’s definitely available. Naked, fleshy, and thick, abductor pollicis brevis, flexor pollicis brevis, and adductor pollicis—the three muscles control the thumb.
I pause, focusing on the torn foil frame where seven circular butt ends compete for attention, their claim to distinction driven by no logic other than a conspiracy of confusion in which one or the other tries to stand out as it. The admittedly illogical project is to see beyond the trick, to divine the real, right one—sorting through the decoys occupies the greater part of the work. Thirty seconds pass before I recognize the one I’m meant to choose at the edge, half obscured by a wafer of shiny silver paper.
With a gentle pinch it’s between my lips. One practiced motion: wrists in a huddle, hands cupped to protect against a nonexistent wind, head down, thumb grinding the ridged metal wheel, flame popping cheerfully into view as it meets the cigarette’s raw end. A pull of breath completes my business as the precisely cut and glued paper sacrifices a few filaments of dry, broken tobacco leaf, fragile and ready for destruction as finely grated chocolate. The confident flame coaxes the dormant object to life, a lambent coal its proof. The first drag—now this is what lungs are for.
It can take a few seconds but once I muster the determination to land the burning end on the pristine skin I’ve chosen for the purpose, once I make initial contact, my mind and body blossom into exhilaration. The sensation reads as pain—hot and fresh. But when its animal simplicity surges landing on whatever part of my brain, whatever section of that flaccid organ occupies th
e space just behind my forehead, I own it. Like nothing else, I am here. I am positioned. I am.
Holding the cigarette down, I focus on the intensity, its deep center, its hyper-sensory wake. Drawing on the cigarette, bringing it back to life, going back in. Holding. Holding. Holding it down. Focusing on the pain, willing it into something else entirely. Clarity. Filter nearing, part of me relieved it’s almost over. Fading. I hold it there as it makes its way deeper but I’ve already nailed the forbidden flush of transcendence; it lingers. And again because it’s not over yet.
Sucking the cigarette a few more times to use the last of it, I hold it down, edging it wider for a jolt here and there as it finds a fresh nerve beyond the neat circumference I’ve created. The burned edge of the paper, barely alight, is the destroyed ground the camel on the rubbery filter appears to cross; it never fails to evoke the film image of T. E. Lawrence’s exhausted animal Jedha crossing the Sinai Peninsula. I crush it right on the spot, hitting hard skin that sheds the gray-black ash, leaving behind a few flecks of cinder and enough ash to obscure a yellow center now the color of a fifty-pack-years smoker’s index finger.
Then I do another. And another. One for my cheek. Three on the top of my foot. Two for the back of my hand. I have all night.
Every postburn cigarette is as good as the one after an egg sandwich with ham and American cheese on a toasted, buttered English muffin. Good as the one you light up after masturbating. Consummate. The first-of-the-day-sip-of-fresh-hot-milky-coffee right. One in a pack of twenty. Resplendent.
CHAPTER 2
Medical Emergency
The plane ticket tells me nothing more than the dull geography of my future: BTV–BWI. One way, 9:00 A.M., Wednesday, 9/10/91. It’s a cryptic string signifying my flight from Burlington International Airport to Baltimore Washington International Airport on what will turn out to be a practically tropical September day. On the 11th—the day after tomorrow, at which point there will be precisely 111 days left in the year—I will be admitted to the locked ward of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital as soon as it opens for business. It’s happening. Dr. Kohl’s letter reads:
Lights On, Rats Out Page 1