The first and last time I saw Leszek Chromniak was in 2004. I was in the Denver City Council chambers, watching longtime firefighter Andy Archuleta talk to young people who’d been caught playing with fire.
Chromniak walked in as the kids were confessing their various misdeeds. As they talked, he strolled to the front of the room and stood there in a cap and sunglasses. We took in his missing ear, his bandaged arm, his hand. Imagine a closed fist. Imagine the folded fingers melted into the palm. That’s what we saw.
Chromniak began to speak. He had an English accent. I remember thinking, “What a beautiful voice.”
Chromniak had first walked into Archuleta’s office three years earlier. He was with his 15-year-old son, Angel, who’d been accused of tossing a firecracker at school. It wasn’t me, Angel told Archuleta. I’d never mess with fire. I know what it can do.
Archuleta shifted his gaze to Chromniak. What happened to you, he asked. Most people never asked. They saw Chromniak and then looked away. They made their bodies small when he passed. You have to wonder what was worse for him — the people who could not hide their horror, or the people who kept their expressions blank, as if he were not present at all. Chromniak holed up in his Capitol Hill apartment with his dog. The dog didn’t care what he looked like.
Chromniak told Archuleta he had a car accident in 1997. He fell asleep at the wheel and plunged off a mountain road. He suffered third-degree burns over 85 percent of his body. Suffered is a verb overused. In this case, it is exactly the correct term.
Will you talk to the kids in my fire-setter class, Archuleta asked him.
Theirs was a friendship born of a mutual need. Archuleta wanted young people to see what fire could do to a person. What Chromniak had to gain was less clear. Archuleta was asking him to use his appearance, the very thing that caused him so much grief, to shock — and there is no other word for it — young people. Archuleta was asking a man accustomed to hiding to reveal himself.
Tell me, would you have said “yes”?
“He said ‘yes,’ but he was hesitant,” says Angel, now 23 and living in New York. “He told me, ‘I have a hard enough time.’ He was very depressed. At first, he was thinking about not doing it, but when we went to the class, he saw some of the kids laughing, and that’s what changed his mind. He thought he could help.
“He never could have a relationship that was based on pity, and with Andy, well, he found someone who treated him as a human being, as a man who could be a teacher.”
A teacher Chromniak became. He visited school classrooms with Archuleta. He spoke to the juvenile fire-setter class once a month, even after Archuleta retired in 2006. His manner with young people was always calm and direct.
“He spoke from the heart,” Chromniak’s good friend, Travis Thurow, tells me. “Some speakers want to get out there and shock kids. That wasn’t Lesz’s approach. He just told his story, and he was reliving the whole thing every time he told it. By the time he was done, literally once he left, he would have to sleep the rest of the day and sometimes long into the next. It took that kind of toll on him.
“He had a car accident, but being burned is being burned, and he never wanted the kids to go through what he was going through.”
“I would give up a year of my life not to be burned,” Chromniak said that day in 2004. “To have a second chance, I would sit in a darkened room and not talk to anybody. I would do it in a heartbeat.”
As he spoke, he removed his hat and his sunglasses, and a woman near me began to cry.
“When I dream,” Chromniak went on. “I almost always dream that I am not burned. And when I wake up, this is what I see.”
For eight years, Chromniak served this city. He did so as a man made both visible and invisible by his burns. He could have succumbed to his isolation, to his pain pills and his tiny apartment. He did not, and he never asked for anything in return. What he wanted seemed beyond the power of many people to give.
“All people saw was this Frankenstein, this monster,” Angel says. “But he wasn’t a monster. He was the man who took both me and my mother in, who raised me as his son, even after he and my mom divorced. He was always part of my life. Every day, he was in pain, but he fought through it. He made me want to strive to be a better person.”
In late September, Chromniak was admitted to the hospital with flulike symptoms. Thurow said tests came back positive for H1N1. With his compromised health, the flu became pneumonia.
Leszek Chromniak died on Oct. 12. He was 41.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
