When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,80
What are the rules? Do I have to wait a certain amount of time, or can I just jump, or, as the case may be, seep right in?
During the period that I had my boil, these questions seemed particularly relevant. The pain was always greater after dark, and by the sixth night I was fairly certain that I was dying. Hugh had gone to sleep hours earlier, and it startled me to hear his voice. “What do you say we lance that thing?” he said.
It’s the sort of question that catches you off guard. “Did you just use the verb to lance?” I asked.
He turned on the light.
“Since when did you learn to lance boils?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “But I bet I could teach myself.”
With anyone else I’d put up a fight, but Hugh can do just about anything he sets his mind to. This is a person who welded the plumbing pipes at his house in Normandy, then went into the cellar to make his own cheese. There’s no one I trust more, and so I limped to the bathroom, that theater of home surgery, where I lowered my pajama bottoms and braced myself against the towel rack, waiting as he sterilized the needle.
“This is hurting me a lot more than it’s hurting you,” he said. It was his standard line, but I knew that this time he was right. Worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it, a horrible custard streaked with blood. What got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like. How could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside of him? And so much of it! The first tablespoon gushed out on its own power, like something from a geyser. Then Hugh used his fingers and squeezed out the rest. “How are you doing back there?” I asked, but he was dry-heaving and couldn’t answer.
When my boil was empty, he doused it with alcohol and put a bandage on it, as if it had been a minor injury, a shaving cut, a skinned knee, something normal he hadn’t milked like a dead cow. And this, to me, was worth at least a hundred of the hundred and twenty nights of Sodom. Back in bed I referred to him as Sir Lance-a-Lot.
“Once is not a lot,” he said.
This was true, but Sir Lance Occasionally lacks a certain ring.
“Besides,” I said. “I know you’ll do it again if I need you to. We’re an aging monogamous couple, and this is all part of the bargain.”
The thought of this kept Hugh awake that night, and still does. We go to bed and he stares toward the window as I sleep soundly beside him, my bandaged boil silently weeping onto the sheets.
The Smoking Section
Part I (Before)
One
The first time someone hit me up for a cigarette I was twenty years old and had been smoking for all of two days. This was in Vancouver, British Columbia. My friend Ronnie and I had spent the previous month picking apples in Oregon, and the trip to Canada was our way of rewarding ourselves. We stayed that week in a cheap residence hotel, and I remember being enchanted by the Murphy bed, which was something I had heard about but never seen in person. During the time we were there, my greatest pleasure came in folding it away and then looking at the empty spot where it had been. Pull it out, fold it away, pull it out, fold it away. Over and over until my arm got tired.
It was in a little store a block from our hotel that I bought my first pack of cigarettes. The ones I’d smoked earlier had been Ronnie’s — Pall Malls, I think — and though they tasted no better or worse than I thought they would, I felt that in the name of individuality I should find my own brand, something separate. Something me. Carltons, Kents, Alpines: it was like choosing a religion, for weren’t Vantage people fundamentally different from those who’d taken to Larks or Newports? What I didn’t realize was that you could convert, that you were allowed to. The Kent person could, with very little effort, become a Vantage person, though it was harder to go from menthol to regular, or from regular-sized to ultralong. All rules had their exceptions, but the