So I was just on the phone with my friend Chloe, who asked about the snow here in NYC. I looked out at the balcony from where I sat on the sofa and said that yeah, the storm was fun but it's pretty much all gone now. After all, I'ld gone out on said balcony for a few minutes earlier today to soak some antique metal in vinegar as well as mixing some soil and food waste later and I'ld noticed that all the snow on the balcony was gone.

So I get off the phone, get up, look out the window and notice snow on every rooftop, snow on the sidewalks far below, and occasional mounds of snow over two feet tall along the edges of streets or even off areas where people are walking.

It occured to me that I may have gone out past my balcony door but I had been so busy that I had never looked up.

I've got to get out more.

-Rustin

In a wash of fever, muscle relaxants, and pain killers, I spent weeks in the grip of dreams and hallucinations. My first clear memories from after the accident date to twenty days after the fire. The days in between were like nothing else I had ever experienced.

Occasionally some part of the outside world would intrude and I would try to figure out what was going on or even try to wake up but the dream would just adjust and go on. But outside stimuli usually just set the stage and introduced the occasional fireworks. From there it was an unending ride through hundreds of hours of worlds created by my quite literally fevered imagination.

Not surprisingly I spent a great deal of time convinced that I had been kidnapped. I could perceive the nurses coming and going. I could even distinguish the head nurse and a few others, people who would later be oddly familiar once I reentered the lucid world.

But around those ragged few bits of reality my mind constructed a conviction that I was laid on a stretcher on the floor in a dark chamber hidden on an upper floor of a Chinese restaurant in Queens. A real one, mind you, one on Queens Boulevard, now gone, that I've walked past a hundred times.

We (I and the people tied on the many other stretchers in rows all around me) were being held for some reason that had to be kept secret. It was always dark, with tiny bits of sunlight illuminating the shadowed activities. When, in the real world, I had to be transported to the CAT scanner, I was aware of the conversations by the staffers around me, aware of my being too heavy for them, of them dropping me, arguing, and then bringing in an orderly to help. When we got stuck somewhere partway there I was convinced that I lay in the kind of stretcher used for mountain rescues, hanging there at a forty-five degree angle, suspended in the huge acrylic curved window looking out on Queens Boulevard and 65th. I did wonder a bit what story they must be giving passersby to explain my hanging there.

Over several days I tried to get somebody's attention, to figure out an escape plan, some way, in my feeble condition, to get to a phone, to get up and out and go the ten blocks or so from there to the apartment of my friends Laurence and Marina.

One long dream that stretched through at least two days was a sort of tour of the high-tech fantasies so beloved of Wired Magazine and Burning Man types, in an ever-changing environment of Playskool-colored modules, computer-controlled, dynamically-reshaped structures, and mystical underground caverns.
I had hours of discussion with the members of a playful techie cooperative from a few decades in the future who were working on educational software. We discussed a lot though the fact that the rooms, sort of like brightly-colored, oversized Habitrails, kept changing color and shape kept getting in the way of my attention. The vaguely Lophtish geeks thought it was endlessly funny that I couldn't adapt to this.

An odd non-sequitur came when, as I was in the midst of some complex negotiation with the green-eyed beings looking out at me from niches in the rough-carved walls of a large dark cave, the real world intruded in the form of hundreds of hard hammering blows shaking me through. This was somebody "percussing" my chest with motors built into the hospital bed to clear some of the muck out from inside my lungs. But in my world, suddenly I was seated in a stone chair, a huge granite Mexican mortar and pestle in my lap, forced by cryptic circumstance to grind away - slam! slam! slam! slam! - five or six times a second, at the grains of corn in the mortar's shallow bowl.
Some part of me immediately grasped that this whole vibration thing was delaying the narrative flow. After a minute or so I was increasingly aware that the story was being stalled by intrusion from the outside and, unable to get out of my stone chair or wake up, watching the pestle grind away long after the corn should be powder, I got more and more impatient for whatever this shaking was to please get finished so I could go back to what I was in the middle of.
If nothing else, somehow the longer things stalled like this the less the room was a deep, profound chamber of the ancients and the more it was turning into some sort of room in a cheesy New Mexico corporate retreat, complete with glass-enclosed imitation Navajo paintings on the walls and a manufactured tabletop fountain across from me.

Trust me, this made no sense to me then and makes no sense to me now.

Anyway, eventually the percussing ended but by now the whole thing was gone and I was stuck in the middle of the night out back by the dumpsters behind a suburban convenience store, alone and bored under cheap sodium lighting.

The goddamned interruption had taken me from Anne Rice to Kevin Smith.

Oh, well. Something new will come along any minute now.

But the real nightmare, the one that haunts me to this day was all too coherent.

It sure did start simply. In a sense everything is simple when your upper and lower teeth are welded to each other.

I was riding in the back of a jeep crossing an endless dried out wasteland in a future that was not so nice at all. The wars were over; the wrong guys won.

The muslim extremists had done and brought down civilization just about all over the world and ruled the resulting barren planet with a deadly intolerance. Primitive brigands commanded all activitities, enforcing a xenophobic, terrified sort of peasant Islam everywhere, enforced by illiterate, machine gun-wielding soldiers with only the most basic madrassa educations who destroyed anything that they felt threatened them, their worldview, or their authority.
Under these circumstances the whole infrastructure of modern civilization was crumbling, a piece at a time, as nuclear reactors were forced into ill-planned shutdowns, toxic waste dumps were stripped of all staff, dams and reservoirs left untended, scientists and engineers broken and killed in a world-ranging Khmer Rouge atrocity.

And thus wasteland. Grey and yellow horizons of denuded, toxic land ripped at by ever-worsening sandstorms, sandstorms reaching from Kenya to France and getting a little farther every year. Killing sun, blasting heat, sudden freezing cold. a planet on the way to breakdown.

And through that we rode. I couldn't move; I could barely twitch. My mouth wasn't even capable of speech, with my upper and lower teeth one uninterrupted enameled bone. A long side dream took place where I got to watch, acting only as a slave to the people around me, as all of my possessions were sold off, given away or, if they didn't understand something, simply thrown into the garbage. And I could only silently watch, forced into servitude and obedience. Then I was back in the jeep, as it drove on by the hour.

Finally we reached a cluster of structures, too pathetic to be called a village. I was taken from the jeep and brought into a low-ceilinged, cinderblock shack, dark and filled with the buzzing of flies. My masters pulled me over to a darker corner, separated only by a low raw cement wall where they hunched over with somebody else in matching robes and rags as they all, stinking, undistinguished, not even anybody special, who now owned me as a slave, mumbled away at each other.

After some interval of this I was handed over. Evidently I had just been sold. My old masters headed off, the new pulled me along into another jeep, maybe a bit bigger, a bit cleaner, and we drove away onto another dusty track through nothing at all.

And one of them reached back and started unwrapping me. All of them started loosening kefiyahs and dust masks. And from under the layers of grimy wrapping emerged smiling American faces!

For the first time in all of this somebody said something to me beyond "pick up that tray" or "get me that". One of them, turned around in her seat and grinning said as she loosened the wrappings binding me, said, "It's gonna be O.K. we're U.S. Army and we're gonna get you out of here."
I was thrilled but confused. But mostly just free. She promised that in a while they'd have my mouth fixed.

We rode on and it turned dark as we approached an impossibly deep ravine. We slowed down. They said that we were at a very dangerous point, absolutely couldn't make any noise.

All down the steep cliffsides were tiny flickering lights - cookfires and lanterns of people who were camped there, originally perhaps on pilgrimage but now starving, stranded, desperate.
And hating the people who had reduced them to this. Because, you see, it had been decades since the real collapse had started and these weren't deep desert arab tribespeople. These were a mix of Middle-eastern citydwellers, Europeans, outcasts, and refugees from all over, forced by the people now in power to live in huddled imitation of the beduin in improvised tents, oil lamps made of scrap, and perhaps a rare bit of carefully hidden technology from before the fall.

That image, of the weak little fires of broken people, stays with me. Most of them, in this world, would die down there. People, normal people, caught up in a living hell. Terrified, spindly, wrinkled beggars in hovels who, thirty years earlier, had perhaps lived in Bologna, London, Boston.

But if they saw us they'd report us in an instant. So we very slowly, very carefully drove our way down a steep and narrow trail doing our best to seem generic, nothing special, nothing to look at. Just another dark spot in the distance.

At the base of the trail was a cave, maybe forty feet high, ninety feet deep, still looking rough but probably made bigger by the people in it.
And there they were. U.S. Marines. A few Army. A few not in any uniform. With a couple of helicopters stored against the rock wall and genuine American rock music coming out of a tinny little stereo as the twenty or thirty of them stood around while a few more here and there went about their business.

"Main base? we're it. We're all there is for a few thousand miles. There is no huge U.S. military anymore. We scrounge what we can, they give us what they can, but we're all there is."

Oh yeah, there was still a United States. It consisted of the few less desirable states in the middle of the country that had been able to hold out along with a little bastion here and there along the coasts. Sure, there was still a United States. With about thirty million people on shitty land with no money or support, just barely holding off a vast enemy.
They still had a military; they used it to defend what little they still had. A few token operations like this one were kept going here and there but each on their own. If a helicopter or jeep or even refrigerator died they could ask for a replacement and the folks back home would try, but don't count on anything.

After all, we'd lost. Lost all of it.

And that's the sort of thing I dreamed. It went on day after day after day. I had another dream, as an armless and legless slave poet hundreds of years later in the "civilized" world such Muslims would build, full of florid poetry, sweet water running in trickling fountains covered in lush decorations, and utterly unremorseful "nobles" keeping everybody not of the ruling classes in complete slavery, subject to torture or execution at the merest whim.

Another was in a huge merger of a computer game, a Westworld kind of simulated reality, and some sort of malfunctioning enclosure in which I was trapped, crushed into place as the funriture around me deformed, trying to escape and crying out to passing people.

And, yes, I'm giving you the short form. The words don't exist to convey the intensity, the reality, the excruciating detail of these worlds, from the sense of confinement in the back of that jeep to the sodium lighting in that far future world, claimed by them to be their invention and actually a ham-handed imitation of a nineteen-seventies streetlamp.

In the years before the fire I spent many many days studying both military history and risk factors in the modern world. Read books on the Yakuza and Jonestown and the Branch Davidians. Studied up on a couple dozen wars and stacks of ideologies. Looked into Suharto's revolt and the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. Wrote papers on the work of Milgram and Cyert.

Somehow these mixed up with the stuff I could feel through all the drugs to drop me into a terrifyingly real world of what happens if we really fuck it up.

I don't wonder what will happen if we let the religious extremists get what they want.

I don't speculate about the possible consequences of the anti-reason zealots being in power.

I lived there. And it was hell on Earth.

In fact, that doesn't capture it.

It was Earth made hell.

We're in a world war, boys and girls, between those driven by fear and those driven by reason and this time if we screw it up it will make Afghanistan under the Taliban look like a midwestern high school prom.

By the way, anybody who wants to dismiss all of this as anti-Muslim prejudice, well, take a look at what the conquistadores did to Mexico City. Think about what the Nazis and Imperial Japanese did all over the world. Responding to the unfamiliar or threatening with a rifle butt and a couple of machine gun bursts is no monopoly of the Taliban. Our own no-nothings would do the same if they thought they could get away with it.

Anyway, that is what it was like for me in the first weeks of September, 2004.

-Rustin

The next weeks were an interminable dive into a vague and shifting territory of dreams and hallucinations.

It was every dream you've ever had about being trapped in a dream except that it was true. I was.

Every nightmare about being unable to move, strapped down, unable to talk or move or do anything about the constant intense pain. Except that was an accurate description of things.

Every anxious paranoid fantasy about being trapped somewhere in the hands of people who won't listen to you and won't let you go.

And it was all real.

From talking to other people I've since found out what was going on way up there in the real world. Forty percent of my body was covered in severe burns, what are called second degree structural, which means that the tissue was baked deep but wasn't dead and wasn't coming off. This last actually wasn't a firm conclusion for a long time. It wasn't until a month after the fire that the doctors felt safe in saying that I wouldn't need any skin grafts.

So both legs up to mid-calf, my left arm and the back of my left hand, patches on my right arm, and part of my left torso were all barbequed. The burned areas were wrapped in special bandages that adhere to the burn and don't come off until new skin is coming back. These bandages were themselves wrapped in bandages to reduce infection and soak up the blood and other fluids that leaked through. Unlike the inner ones, these had to be changed.
I also had more day-to-day sunburn-type burns just about everywhere else. Evidently my skin all turned bright red and my face got so swollen that my eyes wouldn't open. They say that those areas were healing by about the middle of the month.

My lungs had taken a beating and the burns went deep enough that much of my muscle tissue was none too happy so I wasn't going anywhere fast and for the first week or so I went through various stages of fever and exhaustion.

They say that for the first few days I was awake, joking, seemed to be okay, but that by four days in sometimes I seemed awake and could talk well enough to complete sentences but was clearly delusional. My friend Janet Pascal came by and talked about the state of the apartment and I appeared to be coherent, asked some questions, then looked at her and started frantically insisting that the chocolate-covered strawberries needed to be gotten out; they were essential. At one point a nurse asked Janet what my "language of origin" was since I was so incomprehensible. Other times I just talked like a sleepwalker, with seemingly unrelated words and clauses strung together in the tones of reasonable speech.
It still, by the way, bothers me quite a lot that I remember NONE of this, not even from the first couple of days.

Then things went downhill. I got pneumonia, which turned out to be drug resistant. This was bad enough that the doctors were saying that my odds of living out the month were under fifty percent.
There is a hell of a lot that my friends had to go through that I wish they could have been spared but that in particular is an awful thing for anybody to have to do, to have to take a doctor aside and ask if a thirty-seven year old friend will live out the year or even the month.

I was also kept heavily dosed with muscle relaxants since I had tried to pull out my breathing tube, I.V., and so on. All that this meant to me at the time was that I was aware that I couldn't move and with the breathing tube in, couldn't talk either.

As it happened one aspect of the paramedic's choice had been excellent. There wasn't a single other serious patient in the unit. Other patients were brought in now and again for a few days but I was the only severe case. This guaranteed my getting the full attention of Doctor Al Sayef, the head of the unit, and of the assorted interns and nurses.
In fact, I was evidently considered news throughout the hospital. Staff from all over the cluster of buildings knew about the guy up in the burn unit and would come by, stand outside the door, and look in. Since nobody is supposed to enter a room like this without washing up and putting on mask and gown and gloves there weren't too many who got past the door. But for months after I would meets somebody in the hospital and hear either "I've heard of you" or even "I remember going by and taking a look at you way back."

Actually, the standard of care I got was probably quite a bit better than the care given to the usual homeless person or drug addict or plain old bottom of the ladder shmoe they dealt with. Let's face it, people, especially people in bureaucracies, respond to being under the spotlight and hoo boy did my friends keep me under ten thousand watts of attention at all times.

They were amazing. So many people came by that every week or so somebody got stranded downstairs because both visitor passes were in use. My friend Dan Benderly had a Yahoo group up and running by a week and a half in and over the next few months several hundred messages went back and forth (including some by /.'s own interrobang) as one person after another stepped forward to help.
In the midst of all this my mother, who I haven't spoken to since the late nineties and lives on the other side of the country, showed up and started sitting her own vigil, putting in time and energy and kicking in thousands of dollars to grease the wheels. But possibly the most productive thing she did was serve as a sounding board for Doctor Al Sayef, who himself was fighting a tendency to surrender to despair. He later told me that he got in the habit of calling her to discuss the case and work through his anxieties.

While I may have been a delusional basketcase, my friends were solidly on the ball. The staff of Harlem Hospital found themselves under the watchful gaze of two doctors, a nurse, a respiratory therapist, a couple of lawyers, a couple of engineers, and about a dozen other smart, attentive, informed people, several of whom were spending hour upon hour boning up on the issues of burn treatment and critical care.
By any meaningful standard, they were in just as substantive an advisory role as many a consulting physician. In fact they set up their own log book, kept at the nurse's station, and every single day made sure that at least one person came by, checked in, and wrote an entry.

I am only now, all these months later, finally starting to read the messages in that Yahoo group and it's odd to see the level of detail even there. Exact temperatures, tentative diagnoses, things to be researched, scheduling of times for them to get together and meet about all of this.

It also didn't hurt that one visitor, Maggie Clarke, is in her own eccentric way a significant enough player in city politics to be able to contextualize a statement with how it relates to her latest talk with the relevant assemblyman, one of the borough presidents, or the mayor. A few of my other friends, most notably Kim Smith, who was absolutely indefatigable, could also be counted on when appropriate to make known that they knew people who, well, weren't exactly junior staff at Dairy Cream.

Yep, I've got wonderful people around me. Chances are that without them I would have died by about September twenty-fifth. I quite literally would be dead without them. But inside my head it was an entirely different world.

-Rustin

It didn't take that long to get to the hospital. It all looks very different on your back. The lift and drop onto a hospital stretcher, wheeling through slamming doors and an emergency room barely glanced, watching the stains on the ceiling and the decaying cheap fluorescent fixtures rush past and some part of me realizing that I'm now in the hands of ghetto-level hospital care.

After a dizzying succession of hallways and doors and one elevator I was wheeled into a large room lined with stainless steel cupboards. It would have all seemed very high-tech if it weren't for the several flickering lights and the fragmenting, stained acoustic tiles.
Up! and Over! and Down! and I was lying on an examination table surrounded by a shifting clutter of people in scrubs. With an oxygen mask on my ability to chat was somewhat impaired, but I was curious about the things they were doing and, after all, they insisted on going through all the same questions as the paramedic. Past the shoulders of the nurses and doctors some pinhead with third-rate English skills was asking who she should call. This task was clearly beyond her since she kept getting both the names and numbers wrong. My speech wasn't that impaired by the mask. Meanwhile, I was feeling colder by the minute and it took some effort to convince them to get me a blanket as I lay there completely naked in a room with institutional-level air conditioning with the door to the hallway wide open. Most of the people actually seemed pretty nice, but nonetheless they were distracted and the phone call aide wasn't the only one with spotty English skills.

They were turning me into something different. I had come in a normal person with a fucked up body. Step by step they turned me into a hospital person. Dozens of questions collected the first data to make me real to the all-important hospital bureaucracy. Test after test collected the specifics to fill in the reality of my body to add to the abstraction of my identity. Temperature checked here and here, measurements checked here and here and there. The oxygen mask was replaced with a more permanent one. A more permanent I.V. line was stuck in and glued on. The first cursory washing down got done. A vigorous and varied cocktail of chemicals dripped its way into my veins. I was examined, prepped, and optimized for my new context.

After the first flurry of activity they each scurried off, one by one, leaving me lying there alone in a four hundred square foot room, to look at all the stainless steel cabinets and assorted equipment, half of it in grungy-looking covers of yellowing plastic.

One by one and two by two, people came in, did some brief task, went out again, with some of them having to do with me and most not, those usually consisting of finding and getting some supplies or other. One woman left the door to a drug cabinet wide open and it was driving me to distraction lying there unable to get up, go over, and close the damn thing. Whatever happened to sanitary procedures?

After a few rounds of quick dropbys a nerdy little guy ambled in, the first white person I'd seen here. With his book-bag and chubby cheeks and unassuming manner he looked like some prematurely aging junior high school kid who had gotten lost and was coming over for directions. Instead he took off the book-bag and started unpacking an examination kit. He was there to see how much damage my eyes had taken. Ya know, fireball and all; he said that some degree of damage should be assumed.
He asked me to read off a few things from a sheet of paper, no problem there, shone a bright light in my eyes to look for damage, surprisingly no damage at all, then went to check my retina, nope, couldn't tell. And things had been going so well. Evidently he was having trouble; something odd about my eyes, not bad as such, just cryptic. He put in some drops - this will sting - yeah whatever - waited a minute - no joy. Hmmm. Okay, in went some drops that really stung and he started packing up, said he'd be back in half an hour to see what he could see, and ambled out.

I have no idea how long I lay there. I assume that it was well over an hour, I faded in and out a bit, must have been heroically drugged since there still wasn't much pain at all. My main discomfort came from the fact that my body's temperature control mechanisms were collapsing as the trauma started to take effect. It didn't take too long for my chill get so much worse that it felt like I was freezing. Then within half an hour I was warm again, then cold, and back. The aides were pretty cool about bringing blankets, then having me pull them off a bit later. They've probably seen it a thousand times.

Other then that I lay there, no more zoned out then on a mellow day at the beach, as the time slipped by. A couple of times the phone call dimwit had to come back since, no surprise, she had still screwed up, after all those slow l-e-t-t-e-r - b-y - l-e-t-t-e-r explanations I had given her. Otherwise things just meandered along. The eye guy had come back, a bit late of course, and after a brief exam he concluded that, surprisingly, I was just fine. No damage whatsoever.
Man, it's good to be a mutant.

If my fuzzy memories are correct, people came by more than once to check in and apologize for how long it was taking for me to get moved to an actual hospital room. Over time I would learn that no hospital bed in the known universe can be moved into in less than several hours.
But at long last the time came and yet again we wheeled our way through the maze that seems to characterize most hospitals. I was disappointed that the orderly was able to so smoothly get the doors open before we passed through, pausing to let go of the bed, walk over, hit the big ol' button set there for that very purpose, grab hold of the bed and push us through. I wanted more of the drama of the T.V. shows, with every door being slammed open by the front of the stretcher and us moving along at a fierce clip. It was all far too easygoing. Too, well, normalized.

And into the room we came. It all seemed entirely cut off from the outside world. A completely separate world, from the colors of the paint to the clutter of equipment to the people, all in full scrubs and masks and gloves.

And yet again the disorienting grabbing by a team of orderlys and nurses, the lift and pull and drop. Then away went the mobile bed and as they started hooking me up to various tubes and enough machines for a science lab I fell into a sleep that would hold me in its grip, to some extent or other, until I would wake up several weeks later.

- Rustin

So this cartoon thing: what a lot of donkey shit. Awww, bummer, some guy in Denmark drew a cartoon. Clearly grounds for the end of the world. Get a fucking grip.

First of all, neither the cartoonist nor the newspaper nor the Danish government have anything to apologize for.

Second, anybody with a clue should be able to tell that this has little at all to do with the cartoons. When were they published? When did the rioting start? This is a manufactured crisis, folks.

Third, I'm sorry but the every Western nation by now should have fifty or sixty troops and a few M-50s per embassy or consulate, not to mention at least a dozen Muslim rabble rousers on the payroll per city so that when this sort of mental illness gets out of hand they've got local supporters to back this down and, failing that, a full-on willingness to reduce anybody stepping on their ground to a warm, red paste.
You get six feet. That's enough to let you climb the fence, feel wonderfully outlaw and like you're really sticking to the Man. Start heading towards the buildings and you're compost. Oh, and did I mention placing five or six cameras facing the embassy from locations a few blocks away so any idiocy of this sort is fully documented?
In truth, these days we have the technology to go really science fiction and mount a few industrial fucking lasers facing along the perimeter, with mirrors pointing them back and forth across the area behind the fence. With all the smoke this kind of event reliably involves the range would be safely short but man, it would do no favors at all to anybody near that beam. Failing that, well, we've got all sorts of non-lethal riot control techniques these days; why the fuck weren't they deployed? A hundred gallons of slippery stuff poured around the embassy as the protesters approached would have been handy.

And lastly, am I the only one outside of Al Jazeera to notice how conveniently this acts as cover for a very serious series of Afghanistan attacks by the Taliban?

In short, as long as we've got hundreds of millions of illiterate, impoverished, ignorant yahoos with no stake in much of anything in a world of painfully attenuated divides between rich and poor, we're going to keep having to live with this sort of shit. Don't talk to me about cartoons. This isn't about cartoons. They'll find something to riot about. Doesn't really matter much what.

That's all.

-Rustin

Hmm. writing these entries about the fire seems to be getting under my skin a bit.
In fact, as soon as I started typing in this window I felt my chest tighten and start to hurt.

A few hours back I had what felt an awful lot like a minor heart attack. (Not feeling so good right now.) Chest pain. Impressively so. Left arm going numb. Dizziness. Tightness of breath. When I pressed my hand to my chest I seemed to feel my heart palpitating, though the fast little vibrations under my hand seemed to come from oddly close to my shoulder rather than down where I'm used to my heartbeat being. The left side of my neck got more and more painful.

Not a delight.

It didn't take me long to decide that I had to get up and do something. For a few minutes I walked around the apartment, with one hand pressed against my chest and the other holding my cordless phone, wondering if I should dial 911.

I didn't. Just sat on the floor of the kitchen clutching the phone and trying to figure out who I could call who wouldn't freak out on me.

Called Lizz in Portland. She talked me down. Smart cookie.

Why didn't I call 911? The usual reasons. Thought it was probably just stress. Didn't want to sit in an emergency room for hours, especially since I had a friend coming over. No health insurance. Didn't want to bother all those folks, have it turn out to be indigestion, and then feel stupid.

Well, that was hours ago. I feel mostly okay now. I've told my apartmentmates, both of whom are EMTs, in case anything happens.

Maybe I'll explain the details tomorrow.

I'm going to bed.

-Rustin

Well, getting back to the living room, getting closer to the fire, which was already visible from both sides of the kitchen, I could see that the fire stood between me and the telephone. It also was between me and my big ol' office-sized fire extinguisher though I don't remember thinking of it even once that day.

So I ran out the door and over to the door of my next door neighbors, the Ruizes.

This would probably be the time to say what I was wearing. Or rather not wearing. It was August. I was hot. I was tired. I hadn't showered yet or even been up that long. So my entire attire that day was a pair of novelty boxers from Old Navy. In fact, if I remember correctly, they may even have had penguins on them.

So keep in mind for the rest of this what everybody looking at me was seeing. A manic guy, muscular from years of moving equipment, including a just done gig emptying a three story mansion, fat enough to have a jiggly belly with that belly bisected by an eight inch vertical peritonitis scar, with singed hair sticking up, probably burned off eyebrows and lashes, bright red skin with flaps of it hanging down here and there, wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, running around yelling variations on "fire! there's a fire!"

It must have been quite a sight.

So I hammer on the Ruiz's door yelling, "Fire! My kitchen is on fire! Call 911!" They open the door, I yell it at them again. We talk for a minute, they ask what's going on, I explain. One of them calls 911 while they start gathering the kids in the apartment and I scream that I need a pot.
A big pot. Or something. Full of water.
They look at me, already in over their heads and say, "what?"
I need a pot or something else big, full of water to throw on the fire.
They give me one.
I run out the door and spill most of the water in the hallway.
I throw the dregs on the fire.
I run back, hammer on a few more doors and yell, then go back to the Ruizes, ask for more water, run back to the fire, slip on the water on the hallway floor, fall on the ground on my back, again spill most of the water, again throw the remaining thirty percent or so on the fire, run back, get more water, rush back (a bit more carefully, not falling, though almost), finally have the satisfaction of throwing a big soaker up at the top of the flames, which are now starting to reach the huge slab of folded shipping boxes and oversized paper stock along the top of my four foot long Metro shelving unit.

The fire retreats a tiny bit. Maybe five percent of it gets slowed down.

On the other side the flames envelop the sideboard and are rising up along the wall of wine crates that I have mounted as shelving from waist height to the ceiling. The fifty gallon Civil Defense water container that I had been keeping full of styrofoam peanuts, bubble wrap, and other packing materials looks like the exhaust from a jet engine, a blowtorch flame the nearly two foot width of the container blasting up several feet from a blackened steel mouth. Various bags and bins full of materials along the floor can't even be seen within the flames rising from them.

I run back out, run down the stairs, hammer on more doors. Since many of my neighbors don't speak much English at the best of times, even if they're home our conversations are pretty garbled.
At one apartment I again plead for a water-filled container, run back up the stairs with it, and just keep going, back and forth, though the fire keeps advancing. After what I estimate as about fifteen minutes I decide that it's time to back out.
I stand at the apartment door for a minute, with it ajar and the sounds of the fire just beginning to impinge on my awareness. As I pause there the first firemen arrive, clambering their way towards me, unrolling fire hose as they come. The first comes sans hose, reaches me and yells at me "IS THERE ANYBODY IN THERE?!" NO, I respond, loud but not as loud as he is. I was the only one in there, I say. The fire is in the kitchen, I say.
He stands there, looks at me, yells again as if I hadn't spoken at all, "IS THERE ANYBODY IN THERE?!" NO, I yell back, I was the only one there. I'm sure.
"WAS THERE ANYBODY ELSE IN THERE?' he yells at me again. No, I say again. Just me. The fire is mostly in the kitchen though it's spreading to the living room. It's most serious to the back, I say.

He goes past me into the apartment and as I walk away I hear the sound of my possessions being hammered and hacked to shards.
I know that some steel grids had fallen over and are blocking the doorway. I think of going in and telling him how he can move them aside. Ah, fuck it.
I pass the other firemen still getting the fire hose to the door down the fifty foot hallway. They pass me without comment.

I get to the area where the elevators are but my increasingly fuzzy brain is remembering what we've all been told, that you don't use elevators during a fire. So I walk down the thirteen flights to the lobby, the painted surface of the stairwell cool under my bare feet. Some remote part of my brain thinks that I seem to be a bit shaky and that it might be nice if I ran into somebody else who could help me down.

I reach the lobby, stumbling a bit on the last few stairs and walk past the few dozen people milling about and sit down on the floor by the building entrance. The moment people see me they want to know what's going on. Maybe one in three ask how I am, maybe half of them seem to pay any attention to what I say. But they all want to know what's happening. By the time I reach the corner and curl my legs up to my chest I've spoken to eight or nine people. They don't seem to notice me as much down here.

A few neighbors come over, most notably the Hoopers from down the hall who ask if I'm okay, if there is anything they can do. I ask them to get bottled water to pour on my hands and face. As we're discussing it the fire chief comes over and agrees that yes, that is a good idea.
I sit there, people still want me to explain things to them. In fact, after a few minutes Rudy, one of the building staff, comes over and in a loud voice with a patronizing tone asks what happened up there. I say that there was a fire in my apartment, that the firemen are there. He wants details. He wants to know how it started, if the apartment is damaged. I say that I don't want to talk about it. He asks yet again, even louder, even more insistent, with more specific questions. I say, in the most sarcastic tone I can manage that I'm really not in the mood to chat right here at this moment. Luckily the Hoopers are back by then and as he starts to ask again, start yelling at him to leave me the fuck alone. In another minute the Ruizes come over and tell him to back off.
I can guarantee you that if I were to stay in this building another fifty years the only chance that Rudy would ever have of a Christmas tip from me would be if he publicly ripped off his left arm and presented it to me as an apology.
The Hoopers pour water over my upraised hands and face and even through the gallons of adrenaline sloshing about inside me I can feel that the water helps. A Poland Spring benediction. As we wait there and the firemen pass back and forth through the lobby, the Hoopers and I think somebody else go get more water and keep washing me down.

Eventually the ambulance arrives and I walk out to the middle of the closed off three lane avenue where I step up onto the stretcher and they wheel me over and in. For a bit I see out past the open doors, the several fire trucks parked askew as if noboby else has any use for a main Manhattan thoroughfare in the middle of rush hour. The view of the empty lanes reaching out to the rise over a mile away is surreal enough to make me want to sit up for a minute for a better view.

Well, from here it's obvious that my luck is taking a turn for the better. Both paramedics are cool, efficient and capable. As knowledge from friends and a few months later personal experience let me know, this is far from a given. They close the door, the guy goes into the front, and I'm left talking with the woman, a good-looking blonde in her thirties. Not bad. I like. They've asked the obvious medical questions as they wheeled me over and in; now it's time for the really important one - what is my health insurance?

Nope. Nothin'. I've got nothin'.

She's polite but this is clearly not a minor issue.

So for at least ten minutes we sit there, parked across two lanes of traffic, going nowhere, with the paramedics talking to each other, the firemen, and, for all I know, the Metropolitan Museum, figuring out where they're going to take me.

Meanwhile the paramedic with me is looking me over, trying to get an I.V. line in (I've got uncooperative veins), and chatting. She asks me if it's okay that she's going to cut off my boxers, I say, of course, seven bucks at Old Navy, no big deal. She slices them off while saying that actually they're kinda nice. We chat a bit about how serious the burns are with her big initial point being that third degree burns are usually grey and waxy, which mine aren't, so I'm probably fine. We probably spend almost five minutes going over nothing but my allergies and asthma. Since I've just gotten not only a dandy case of smoke inhalation but also a hearty dose of toxic fumes, chances are that my lungs are gonna get pretty unhappy anytime now.

We chat some more, and meanwhile they reach a conclusion about where we're going. Evidently Harlem Hospital got millions in funding to build a burn unit back when the slums were all being torched but now that Harlem real estate is worth gobs of money, it mostly sits empty.

As we drive off, the paramedic gets serious. She says that the burns could be worse, but they are still really bad. I say that I know; I lie there in full deep geek mode, doing my very best to be calm, objective, knowledgable. I let her know that I've heard that burn pain is just about the worse there is. She says yes, that right now I probably think I'm going to be in the hospital for a little while, get better, and go home. But it doesn't work like that. She says that I may be in the hospital for months. I'll probably be recovering for years. That I may never recover fully. That I should make my peace with this right now. Better to understand from the very beginning.
Through the adrenaline and drugs this all sinks in.

In a way I guess that the real divide in my life pre- and post-fire is not when the fireball went up or when I woke up in the burn unit or when I first tried to walk. The real divide is between the first little period lying in the ambulance, having this friendly chat with a good-looking blonde after yet another Rustin mishap and what happened to my brain, to my understanding of my future and my body and who and what I would be from now on as it became real to me that this time I really had done it. I'd just come damn close to being burned alive and was now shredded inside and out. My old life was finished; whatever I had from this point forward would be built on the foundations on what shape I was in right then.

-Rustin

Whew! Been waiting to get that down on paper just right for quite a while now. And, yeah, I meant it; all those explosions you see in the movies are way too loud. I'd seen some littler ones before, been near plenty of summer grilling mishaps and the rest and now, having stood right in the middle of one of those fuckers I can definitively say, folks, it ain't like the movies.

Don't try this at home.

Rustin

Okay, so this is what's happened.

I was really tired. It was the middle of the Republican National Convention, and I headed back to my apartment to get some sleep. I got up and decided that even though I was already in the middle of doing runs of posters (which means tall piles of paper scrap as well as posters with varnish drying on them scattered everywhere)

and I had just a few days before packed up massive quantities of recycleables (read big bags o' stuff in the kitchen and by the door),

and I was packing up stuff for my move and hence had moving boxes (filled and empty) and moving supplies all over,

and was in the middle of inventorying all my computer equipment, much of it just purchased, before packing it (so CPUs and drives and cables and registration cards and manuals all along one wall),

and the place was even more cluttered than usual since I was pulling out lots of other things to see what got kept/shipped/replaced

that, in any case, it made sense for me to make room for a few protestors to sleep over.

So first I moved a few things off to the side and finished packing the stuff to be thrown out.
Then I cleared the path from the kitchen to the balcony so folks could go and hang out outside.
Then I decided to clean up the kitchen a bit to make it all a bit less obviously Mad Scientist.

As I was cleaning I found myself irritated at this one area along the front of my kitchen counters. In the area around the sink water tended to overflow and the varnish there had been looking more and more grody since the late seventies. I'd spent a bit of time once trying to sand it down but it was hard as a rock. I'd tried some light-duty paint stripper and it had taken forever to make any progress at all.

I was in a rush. I was annoyed. Enough of this shit.
I pulled out a liter bottle of rubbing alcohol (90%). Glug, glug, glug. Right down the front.
Tried sanding a bit, kneeling there in the heady aroma. Still no dice.
Oh, c'mon, this is bullshit. I don't have the time for this. I've got to get back downtown. I've already blown most of the day. I brought a one gallon jerry can (I had two) full of Bestine out from my bedroom.
Glug. Glug. Glug.
That should do it.
I stood up and looked at the counter, wet with solvent and surrounded by a large pool of mixed chemicals. At the wall of yellow-orange that seemed to rise from the floor as slowly as a garage door opening. At me standing inside of this laconically expanding ball of fire.

Woomph!

It was actually quite a modest sound. Or so it seemed to me. It would be months before I would wonder why I never heard the three hundred and fifty-odd square feet of window glass imploding.

Time then snapped back to normal speed as I found myself able to see nothing but a bright orange glow, thinking that this was the last thing I would ever see. That at this very moment my eyeballs were melting out of their sockets.
I turned and ran, heading away from the center of the fire, towards the edge of the kitchen, towards the bathroom. I reached the edge of the kitchen and emerged from the fireball. I briefly noted that I could see again. My gratitude at that, at a scale that would normally be overwhelming, was a minor note beneath the screaming drive to run. I made it to the bathroom, got in the shower, turned the cold water on full, stood under it for a few seconds, then looked down to see what sort of shape I was in.
At that moment my mind was full of the possibilities, of the chance that I would find charred, exposed bone or raw, bloody, bubbling flesh. So when I say that I was deeply relieved to see what looked pretty much like my normal legs, but with greyish triangles of skin hanging down over reddish dermis, each hanging bit about three or four inches long, trust me, then and there that constituted good news.
It meant that I wasn't about to die. It meant that I could fight back. My full-throated yell of resistance echoed off the bathroom tiles as I stood there and thought, "okay, here we go!"

Fuck the world, I'm standing firm.
I ran back to fight the fire.

Rustin

This is my new stealth journal. I'm too busy to reactivate my "real" one. I'm too stressed to want to deal with people.

So I'm hiding out here. Getting a few things written that I've got rumbling around in my brain. Puttering away.

Maybe I'll reactivate my multigeek journal soon. Maybe not.

Oh, well.

Rustin