A man drives off a cliff, drunk, with a bottle of bourbon sitting in his lap. The car crashes and burns, and along with horrific third degree burns over most of his body, the man’s penis is completely singed off when the bourbon fans the flames. The horrific description of the crash and the result take up the first five pages of the book. And you’re hooked.
Our narrator is a former porn star and producer — once beautiful and astonishingly well hung, now unrecognizable and unable to have intercourse.
From that point, the book takes us into the hospital where the man must undergo a series of tortuous debridements, skin grafts, surgeries, therapies, and later, operations, if he is ever to regain even a semblance of his old life back. “Following my accident, I plumped up like a freshly roasted wiener,” he writes, “my skin cracking to accommodate the expanding meat. The doctors, with their hungry scalpels, hastened the process with a few quick slices. The procedure is called an escharotomy, and it gives the swelling tissue the freedom to expand.”
He will always be disfigured, however, and a source of disgust and fright in those who look at him. It is no wonder that his first idea is to get just enough better to kill himself. Is this a tale of despair? Of punishment for a life led in hedonism and selfishness? The author/narrator further regales us of the story of his sad and dispiriting growing up, and what it was that led him to a life as a pornographer. He wakes from a two month coma and wants to cry but his tear ducts have been burnt shut. Soon he is on his way to being hooked on morphine, a substance he may use, along with razor blades, sleeping pills, a rope — whatever he can get his hands on — when the time is right to take himself out when the time comes. It is hard to know just what to expect.
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