It’s been 6 years since a devastating fire scorched 80% of Jimmy Nute’s body. Now, he’s trying to be a kid again. : Learning to Live

Even now, more than six years and a dozen operations later, Jimmy Nute feels the unforgettable heat of the back-yard fire that scorched his body and scarred his life.

He senses the flames in the searing stares of adults who gawk at his injuries--until he lashes out in shame and anger by such actions as knocking clothes from their racks in stores.

At school, the 11-year-old endures the even crueler heat of playground name-calling: Crispy Critter, the other boys call him. Burned Bub. Monster. Pigskin. Scarface. Freddy Krueger.

Mostly, though, the unending operations--skin transplants and scar-tissue removal--remind Jimmy of the flash fire that in seconds stripped his little-boy innocence, exposing him to a pain few will ever feel.

His mother assures him that, despite deep burns to half his body, transplanted skin still raw to the touch or thickening scar tissue that stiffens his body unless he moves constantly, Jimmy is no different from his friends.

Now a fifth-grader who plays Pop Warner football, surfs and rides his in-line skates after school, he is indeed no longer the child whose seared hands doctors considered amputating.

In a slow and frustrating progression, he relearned to walk, to extend an arm and a leg, to move fingers with the dexterity of the past--enough to master once more the video games he played before the accident.

His is a comeback story normally the province of time-tested athletes, of adults with the will and perspective to right their lives after a numbing adversity. It is not usually the stuff of 11-year-old boys.

Although most of Jimmy’s facial burns have healed, the fire has left its mark just about everywhere else. Jimmy says the patchwork of skin grafts looks as if somebody stepped on him with tire-track soles:

“It kind of looks like the desert, where the sand has blown real hard and it makes lots of ripples.”

These days, Jimmy often struggles--constantly fighting reminders of the March, 1985, blaze that erupted as he played with two plastic lighters and a can of bug killer he found in a canyon behind his home.

Often, the memories return with something as simple as looking into a mirror. Or with the nervous questioning from curious new classmates that marks each school year.

“I get tired of repeating the story over and over again,” he says, fidgeting on a couch in the office where his mother works as an accountant. “No matter how much I talk about it, there’s always a new question. Sometimes when they ask, I just say, ‘house fire’ and walk away.”

And then there is the lawsuit.

Since 1988, when a product-liability suit on Jimmy’s behalf was filed against one of the nation’s largest pesticide manufacturers, he has sat through depositions and cross-examinations, answering attorneys’ pointed questions about the fire and its physical and emotional aftermath.

The family’s attorney claims that a discarded 64-ounce canister of Raid Professional Strength Ant & Roach Killer--an insecticide product without child-proof packaging--caused the injuries that have cost more than half a million dollars to treat.

Apparently mistaking the can’s plastic hose and spray-gun trigger for a water sprayer, the then-4-year-old sprayed the highly flammable petroleum-based compound on a small back-yard fire he had started with the lighters, says attorney Kevin Quinn.

In the process, some insecticide leaked onto Jimmy’s hands, Quinn says. Within seconds, the fire engulfed his body.

Lawyers for Raid’s manufacturer, S. C. Johnson & Son, say the fire started when one of the two butane lighters that Jimmy was playing with ignited the other.

Moreover, they blame the injuries on a negligent mother who, they say, should have kept a closer eye on her impetuous preschooler and kept him away from lighters. And they claim she is trying to get rich quick at Raid’s expense. “There are people,” says attorney Jack Henriksen, “trying to make a lot of money out of this child’s injuries.”

Jimmy’s case will soon go to court--for the second time.

In January, 1990, after a monthlong trial that Henriksen called his most fiercely contested verdict in 20 years as a lawyer, a San Diego Superior Court jury ruled against the family. But the judge overturned the jury’s conclusion.

A new trial date will be set Dec. 13. The amount of damages sought is unspecified.

Jimmy’s mother, Sherry Fontaine, recalls that overcast afternoon six years ago when she watched her only son run toward her with hands extended, burning like two torches:

“I had been folding clothes. And then I saw him in flames--burning from head to toe.”

The doctor who first examined Jimmy in the burn unit at UC San Diego Medical Center described him as “fried.” Another said his skin looked like “a hot dog left too long on the fire”--some of it white and lifeless, the rest charred, blackened, swollen.

Each year, more than 2 million people nationwide are burned seriously enough to require hospitalization--most from overexposure to the sun or from hot-water scalds. Of the 400 admitted annually to UCSD’s burn unit, a third are children, many of whom require skin grafts.

But Jimmy’s case, says renowned plastic surgeon David H. Frank, was one of the most severe burns he has ever treated on a child. More than 80% of his body was burned--more than half of it third-degree, the most serious kind.

His neck and torso were worst. But immediately, doctors worried about Jimmy’s hands, charred so badly that at first they feared they might have to amputate his fingers.

For 17 days, Jimmy remained in intensive care as doctors began the process of scrubbing away his damaged skin--often down to the muscle. With so little unburned skin on his own body to harvest for transplant, doctors used a temporary solution--attaching cadaver skin with large staples.

He spent three months in the hospital. And for the next year, he returned daily for arduous physical therapy. It was then that Jimmy began showing the scrappiness and strength of heart that helped him through the agony of the dozen operations to follow.

At first, Jimmy rebelled, screaming at doctors and nurses and using profanity few had ever heard from a preschooler.

“He would scream and cry so loud,” recalls fellow burn patient and former schoolteacher Betsy Holmgren. “He thought he was going to lose his hands. And he’d keep asking why they had to hurt him. He was so little, and he couldn’t comprehend why they had to put him through so much pain.”

Doctors say his fierce reaction actually helped his healing.

“Jimmy let it all out,” says Dr. John Hansbrough, director of the hospital’s burn unit. “It was tough, but he didn’t withdraw like so many people do. It’s natural for a burn patient to refuse to face the world, to curl up into a little ball. But Jimmy was willing to go through with things.”

Adds Frank: “We had a child willing to come back and be hurt time and again--on the mere promise that things would be better in the future. To me, that seems like an awfully adult perspective for such a little boy. Most kids live for today. And I think that’s what helped save him--Jimmy sees things in the long run.”

His mother says that’s when Jimmy went from fire victim to fire survivor.

In those days, he looked more like a mummy than a little boy. Virtually his entire body--hands, neck, wrists, chest and legs--were wrapped in bandages and pressure braces designed to minimize scarring.

His mother recalls that he walked like a “little old man--all hunched over”; he dragged one leg.

Then Jimmy met Joe Apodaca, a 50-year-old north San Diego County man who had been badly burned in a car-engine explosion. Apodaca remembers that during one of his first days in therapy, as he wept in pain, a boy suddenly appeared by his side.

“I was crying like a baby and, compared to him, I wasn’t even burned that bad. And here’s this little guy who’s trying to console me. That boy was so brave. He taught me something.”

The two became fast friends. When he couldn’t feed himself one night because of bandaged hands, Apodaca says, “Jimmy spoon-fed me--even though his own hands were in braces, like two big catcher’s mitts.”

He recalls how Jimmy rode his Big Wheels up and down the burn-unit hallways and how they eventually chummed around the hospital. “I remember one day we walked through the cafeteria, and all these people were staring at us. Jimmy was limping with his foot turned in like some war victim.

“But he never looked back. Nothing bothered that kid. Boy, he was a tiger.”

At home, though, the bravado finally let down.

Each day brought a routine of painful rubdowns with cream and dressing changes. At night--in a practice he keeps to this day--he slept with an electric fan directed toward his body to ease the maddening itch from his burns.

While awake, Jimmy had to wear the cumbersome braces. He often begged his mother to take them off--especially the neck brace that covered most of his head. She finally relented, but he shrieked in agony when she eventually put them back on.

But for every screaming nightmare, says Jim Nute, Jimmy’s father, there was a countering time of strength.

On his first day home, Jimmy dragged himself into the family’s front yard to play Frisbee. He even played Nintendo, which later proved vital therapy, by at first using a special device to move the joy stick with his mouth.

“Often, we’d sit around and try to think of things to do--but we couldn’t go to the beach because the sand would get in Jimmy’s dressings,” Jimmy’s dad remembers.

“Then, one day, Jimmy says he wants to go ice-skating. You should have seen him skating around with his pressure garments on--like a little Mummy Man. It was the first sport he found he could do. . . . The other kids laughed when he fell, but Jimmy didn’t care. That’s when I knew that he was going to be OK.”

Several months later, Jimmy’s parents divorced. His father moved to New Hampshire and remarried. Jimmy still blames himself for the breakup.

Jim Nute, 37, an air-conditioning salesman, says that it had more to do with him and Fontaine--who he says changed after Jimmy’s injury. “She became so focused. Jimmy was everything to her. To the exclusion of everything and everyone else.”

After a while, Fontaine sold the Encinitas antiques business she ran with her sister so she could spend more time with her son. Soon, the bills stacked up. Fontaine went on welfare.

Eventually, she had to sell the house where she lived with Jimmy and his older sister, Janae, moving to a series of different apartments, different schools.

That caused its own problems. Even though his skin finally returned to its natural color after years of showing hues of red and purple, Jimmy stood out.

Once, in third grade, his classmates refused to hold his wrinkled hands in a school-yard game. The next year, to head off inevitable questions, he stood up in front of class the first day of school and described his injuries.

In time, the curiosity and fear of other children has turned to taunting, he says. And, as he gets older, Jimmy has shown less tolerance for unkind remarks.

There have been fights at school. Now he is taking karate lessons. “That way, when I get older,” he says, “I can do more damage.”

His respite is time at home. Or the weeks spent this summer in a camp for burned children--the places where no one asks questions or makes remarks. “It was kind of neat,” he says of camp. “When I was there, I knew what it was like not to be burnt.”

Jimmy’s body literally continues to outgrow its own skin. About once a year, doctors transplant fresh layers of unburned skin to help stretch areas where scar tissue has hardened, which allows increased movement. The therapy and cosmetic surgery will continue as long as he grows.

The medical bills have been paid by private insurance and, for a time, by Medi-Cal. Jimmy’s father contributes child support and money to help with other medical costs that aren’t covered by insurers.

Meanwhile, Jimmy visits a psychiatrist regularly, preparing for the emotional pain he will face at puberty and beyond, when looks will carry even more importance.

“Right now, he still sort of wears his injuries like some badge of battle,” his mother says. For Halloween this year, he went as the son of Freddy Krueger--that horrible-looking movie murderer. “He’s wearing his shirt open and a flashlight so people can see his scars.”

Jimmy spends his after-school evenings playing sports or cuddling his pet rat, Robbie. Recently, his mother rented a house not far from where he was burned.

Sometimes, he takes friends by the place, talking nonchalantly about his past there. “It’s the place where I got burned and the place where my dog died.”

The house reminds him of when life was good--before the accident. But things are changing. Jimmy has begun to see his father again. Next summer, they will take a trip together.

New signs of understanding have even come at school. In May, after an operation on his hands, Jimmy received cards from his fourth-grade classmates.

He particularly cherished one from a playground friend, which read: “Jimmy, you’re a brave dude.”