by Len Vlahos
Lucky was tall and lean and had a thick mane of blond hair with one shock of gray arching up from his forehead. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, and he had a slight quiver to his thin lower lip. The rosy hue of his cheeks stood out against the ghostly pallor of his skin. I thought maybe he was a teacher or a professor because his tweed blazer had patches sewn on the sleeves.
I wondered if Lucky was disappointed that I wasn’t actually struck by lightning, that I was hit by a falling, burning tree struck by lightning. In a lot of ways my life would’ve been easier if I’d received a direct hit. To be the boy almost struck by lightning was like finishing second in the big race. You ran, but no one cared. But if Lucky was disappointed, he didn’t let it show.
“Had the lightning hit you directly,” he told me, “your burns probably would have been much less severe.” He had a very civilized way of speaking, like a career diplomat, like Winchester from M*A*S*H. “That’s not to say you would have come through unscathed. Electricity flows through a human body, which, unlike a tree, is quite a good conductor of current. It is like being inside a microwave oven, for just an instant.” Microwaves weren’t all that common in 1976, but I knew what they were and I formed a mental image of bubbling soup.
“The concentrated surge of energy,” he continued, “eviscerates the nervous and autonomic systems.” I didn’t know what eviscerate meant or what autonomic systems were, but he had my attention. “Our brethren, those souls fortunate enough to survive a lightning strike, often suffer terrible maladies.”
“Maladies?” I asked, sounding out the word
“Illnesses,” he answered.
“Like what?”
“Oh, from simple things like headaches, dizziness, and vomiting, to more serious ailments like amnesia, depression, and suicide. In very brutal strikes,” he said, “the heart can stop, depriving the brain of blood and oxygen. When it restarts, the victim is something of a vegetable. No, wait,” he smiled, “not a vegetable, a piece of toast.”
My mother, who’d been sitting quietly in a corner of the room, got quickly to her feet. I guess talking about depression and suicide to an already distraught eight-year-old wasn’t what she had in mind when she invited Lucky to our house. But then Mom looked at me and saw something in my eyes—a spark of life, a flicker of hope, or maybe just plain old interest—that she hadn’t seen since before the storm.
The truth is my mom’s a saint. She sacrificed everything for me after the storm. She used to play tennis, she used to be in bowling leagues, hell, my mom used to write. All of that went up in smoke with me and that dogwood tree.
It took me a couple of years to figure out how much the lightning strike had been affecting the people around me, and when I did I felt awful. Mom saw me moping more than usual one day and asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said.
“No, really honey, what is it?”
“I’m just sorry is all.”
“Sorry for what?”
“For ruining your life.” I have a flair for the dramatic when I want to, but I meant what I said. I really did.
Mom looked at me and burst into tears. “Don’t ever, ever, ever apologize again,” she said to me. “Never.” She hugged me and held on to me for as long as I would let her, which that day was a long time.
So when my mom saw me connecting with Lucky, or rather, saw Lucky connecting with me, she knew enough to let it play out. She sat back down.
“A piece of toast?” I asked Lucky. He nodded, and then shifted gears.
“Do you know, young man,” he asked, “what can happen when one little butterfly flaps its wings in China, all the way on the other side of the world?”
I didn’t, so I shook my head.
“When those little wings flap,” and here he extended his gangly arms and made slow, graceful flapping motions, “they move little molecules in the air. Do you know what molecules are?”
I was pretty sure I did, so I nodded.
“Good, good. Now picture those molecules moving and bumping into other molecules, which bump into other molecules, which bump into other molecules. All these molecules affecting the course of those that surround them, changing them, moving them in different directions, just because a butterfly flapped its wings.” He could see I was confused. “So a butterfly flapping its wings in China in April can cause a thunderstorm in New York in July,” he finished.
I thought about this. Was Lucky trying to tell me that my thunderstorm was caused by a butterfly in China? Or was he telling me that things like thunderstorms are so random that there’s no point trying to make sense of them?
“You see, Harry, even the tiniest little event, something that can happen so quickly that you would miss it were you to blink your eyes, can have long-lasting, far-reaching consequences. One little thing can cause so many other things to happen. And here is the secret.” He leaned in so close I could smell the aftershave on his neck and the peppermint chewing gum on his breath. “All these things that happen, if you don’t control them, they will control you. It is up to you, Harry.” He held my gaze for a moment, waiting to see if I understood. I wasn’t sure I did, though I knew what he was telling me was important.
Lucky took my hand in his and told me to keep my chin up. I took him literally, and despite the pain of healing burns and structural damage to my neck, I managed to sit up a little straighter. With that he got up to go.
He left me a card with his phone number and told me I could call him at any time for any reason. “We are brothers,” he said, “brothers of the storm.”
I never saw Lucky again, and I never called the number, but I’ve carried that card with me my entire life. It’s like a Valium prescription, always at the ready, just in case.
BAD BRAIN
(written by Dee Dee Ramone, Joey Ramone, Johnny Ramone, and Marky Ramone, and performed by the Ramones)
Life after the lightning strike was a blur of car rides and waiting rooms. I was shuttled from neurologists, to infectious disease specialists, to plastic surgeons. Teams of doctors floated over me and tried to fix my broken body. They stuck me with hypos and IVs to fight the bacteria nesting in my wounds, they used low-level electric stimulation to repair my damaged nerves, and they performed countless surgeries in a vain attempt to make me look like someone’s idea of “normal.” I was Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. Only I wasn’t, because the whole thing turned out to be a big fat waste of time.
Well, mostly.
Dr. Kenneth Hirschorn, or Dr. Kenny as I came to know him, was young and edgy; he had longish hair, wore his shirt untucked, and had Sharpie drawings of rock stars ringing the walls of his office. He was a pediatric psychiatrist and his assignment was to wean me off the pain meds to which I’d become addicted. He would talk to me about Lou Reed, Janis Joplin, Syd Barrett, and any other rock star he could think of who had abused drugs.
“By getting off the junk now, Harry,” and yes, Dr. Kenny taught me to call it junk, “you’re already way cooler than they ever were.” I was probably the only kid my age to know all the words to the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man.” He guided me through the misery of controlled withdrawal like a shaman initiating a warrior in the ways of battle.
It was dumb luck, Faceless Admissions Professional, that Dr. Kenny and I found each other. (“Faceless Admissions Professional” is a heck of a mouthful. Okay if I just call you FAP for short? Good, thanks.) If I’d been sent to any other psychiatrist, I would’ve been weaned off the methadone, pronounced mentally healthy, and sent back to the front lines of the fourth grade. No matter that I was grotesquely disfigured, or that I was unable to sleep, or that I would fall to the floor crying like a little girl in the lightest summer drizzle.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder still wasn’t listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the mid-1970s. The profession of psychiatry was barely past the days of electroshock therapy and lobotomies. Besides, I was a kid, and kids are supposed
to heal.
Dr. Kenny knew better.
Once I was pronounced drug free, he suggested we continue our sessions, “Just to talk.” My parents agreed.
Dr. Kenny never mentioned the storm or my injuries in those first few years, and neither did I. He never made me recount the day of the lightning strike, never made me tell him about the hospital stays, and never asked me about the kids who’d tied me up.
When my parents and the police tried to get me to identify the little cretins that had done this to me, I pretended not to remember. But I did remember. Of course I remembered. I didn’t tell anyone because I was scared shitless of those kids.
The funny thing is, I think those kids were more afraid of me than I was of them. They wouldn’t look at me or talk to me. They wouldn’t even pass by my house without first crossing the street. I guess they knew what they had done, and it kind of haunted them. You’d think that would’ve made me feel better, but really, it didn’t.
Anyway, like I said, Dr. Kenny never asked me about any of that stuff. He didn’t need to. Somehow he always managed to steer our sessions back to my relationships with other children, my feelings about fire, or worse, lightning.
“I don’t like it,” I told him, withdrawing into myself.
“Why not?”
“Because, it’s stupid?”
“Why is lightning stupid?”
“Because it’s dumb!”
“Why is it dumb?” Ask a nine-year-old a series of uninterrupted questions, and eventually you can steer the conversation anywhere you want. Try it some time.
“I dunno, because it hurts people.”
“Okay then, Harry,” he said, “the best way to avoid getting hurt by something is to understand it.”
Dr. Kenny and I spent the next five sessions learning everything we could about lightning—from how a lightning bolt can be hotter than the surface of the sun, to how clouds turn into huge capacitors during electrical storms, to what a capacitor actually is. Whether he meant to or not—and I’m pretty sure he meant to—Dr. Kenny set in motion a lifelong pattern of learning for me. Analysis, logic, and calculation became my defense mechanisms against the world. I trained myself—strike that, Dr. Kenny trained me—to find comfort in tearing a thing down to its basic elements and building it back up in a way that I could understand. When things got really bad, I could wrap myself in a security blanket of cold, hard facts.
In the last of those five sessions, Dr. Kenny showed me a chart he’d found in a library book. It was a list of every kind of lightning known to man. I can still picture it clearly to this day.
“Harry,” he said, “do you think you can remember this list?” He saw me look confused, so he continued. “A lot of grown-ups use little tricks to help calm themselves down when they’re upset, or when they’re sad or frightened. Sometimes they’ll count to ten, sometimes they’ll try to remember the lyrics to a song. They use lists so they’ll be distracted from whatever is bothering them.”
“That works?” Dr. Kenny could see I wasn’t really buying it.
“Just try it.”
I did:
Intracloud Lightning
Cloud-to-Cloud Lightning
Cloud-to-Ground Lightning
Cloud-to-Air Lightning
Bolts from the Blue
Anvil Lightning
Ball Lightning
Bead Lightning
Forked Lightning
Heat Lightning
Ribbon Lightning
Streak Lightning
Triggered Lightning
It worked. I couldn’t believe it, but it worked. The list became a kind of incantation for me. Anytime I was upset or scared, I would repeat it in my head over and over again until I calmed down.
Intracloud Lightning
Cloud-to-Cloud Lightning
Cloud-to-Ground Lightning
Cloud-to-Air Lightning
Bolts from the Blue
Anvil Lightning
Ball Lightning
Bead Lightning
Forked Lightning
Heat Lightning
Ribbon Lightning
Streak Lightning
Triggered Lightning
The Lightning List was the first of hundreds of lists that I’ve memorized over the years. They’re like a slap in the face when anxiety hits. No strike that, not a slap in the face. They’re like a reset button, like the ones they have at bowling alleys. The lists somehow manage to jolt my brain from being a jumbled mess and back into a functioning state.
Dr. Kenny was my Obi-Wan Kenobi, and my sessions with him were the best fifty minutes of my life each week. Sad but true.
As for those other doctors, the ones trying to fix my flesh and bones, well, let’s just say those visits didn’t go quite as well. After five years of intense treatment, I was, and there’s no other way to put it, a monster: splotches of discolored skin were mottled across my thirteen-year-old face and neck. Thick, pink ridgelines ran from my right temple to the base of the flattened snout that was my nose. Crinkly flesh replaced my eyebrows and eyelashes, giving me the look of a startled albino. It was all capped off by an obvious and unrealistic wig hiding spotty patches of hair, some of it black, some of it gray like dust. The sum total of my appearance formed the contour map of a strange world where even I wasn’t welcome.
Between the war crime that was my face and the absences for doctors’ visits, I was a ghost to the other kids at school, the boogeyman. No one knew what to make of me. The kids who were more or less nice—the ones who did their homework, played the clarinet or flute, and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch—left me alone.
The other kids did not.
WAITING ON A FRIEND
(written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and performed by The Rolling Stones)
I was sitting outside of Henry David Thoreau Middle School, eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, when a behemoth of a seventh grader—who could’ve passed for an eighteen-year-old, with facial hair, a husky voice, and a vague scent of aftershave—sat down next to me. He started rummaging through my lunch bag.
“Juice, banana … here we go, cupcake.” He took the cupcake and smiled at me. I could hear his friends, a group of devoted henchman standing outside my field of vision, laughing and snorting. Bruised noses, bruised ribs, and a bruised ego taught me the only safe response: pretend it’s not happening. I started to think my way through the New York Mets active roster: John Stearns, Dave Kingman, Doug Flynn.
The behemoth stood to go. “Thanks, freak.”
Hubie Brooks, Frank Taveras, Mookie Wilson.
“I said thanks, freak,” a bit more emphasis the second time. “I said …”
“That’s enough, Billy. Give it back.” It was a new voice, coming from somewhere behind me. I stopped my list and turned around.
A kid half Billy’s size, even smaller than me, was standing there with his hands on his hips. His posture, while not exactly threatening, left no room to question his intentions.
Billy looked at me, looked at the new kid, and then back at me. “Whatever. I was just foolin’ ’round anyways.” He tossed the cupcake in the air—landing it in the outstretched hand of my benefactor—and walked away.
“Don’t mind him,” the new kid said. “He’s harmless. I’m Johnny.” I was so caught off guard that it took me a beat to register his other hand, the one not holding a cupcake, stretched in my direction. I shook it.
“I’m Harry Jones.”
One of the more interesting exercises Dr. Kenny had me go through was the creation of something he called a People Catalog. “How do you see the rest of the world, Harry?” he’d asked. “How would you describe other people?”
“Describe them?”
“Find things they have in common, and put them into groups. You know, kids who are into sports, or adults who yell too much. That sort of thing.”
Naturally, I built that catalog around my scars and how other people saw them. I’m guessing tha
t’s what Dr. Kenny wanted:
Potsies. Named for the hangdog character from Happy Days, a Potsie can’t figure out if he’s supposed to look at me or look away. For a long time I thought this was pity. It’s not. It’s shame and guilt at being normal, in not having to bear my burden. It’s why people look at the ground when they see someone with Down’s syndrome, or a homeless person, or a kid with palsy. At some subconscious level most of you think that you—because of some horrible thing you’ve done, will do, or want to do—deserve a more sinister fate than me.
Nazis. A few people, like Billy the Behemoth, stare at my face, focusing on my scars. They see opportunity in my deformity, something to exploit and control. What they’re really doing is responding to a Darwinian urge awakened at the genetic level, its goal to weed out evolution’s mistakes. They’re trying to purify the race.
Faints. The name is shorthand for “Faux Saints.” This is the “holier than thou” crowd who want desperately to live on the moral high ground. They try to prove they have no prejudice by locking their gaze to mine, when in fact their discomfort is written in the stillness of their eyes: See Harry, I’m treating you normally … I’m not staring at your scars at all.
Freaks. There’s a small group that likes to sneak furtive glances at my face, imagining, I suspect, a long tale involving muggers, terrorists, or pirates. It’s like they get a boner at the thought of what I’ve been through. (Seriously, this happens.)
Friends. Then there’s the truly rare breed, like Johnny McKenna, who don’t seem to see the scars at all.
Thoreau was a two-year middle school, and with nearly three hundred and fifty kids in eighth grade alone, it was impossible to know everyone, so Johnny was a stranger to me. He had curly blond locks spilling over his forehead and framing a pair of ocean-colored eyes. And it was those eyes you noticed first. They commanded attention. No wait, they demanded attention. They were why I remained glued to the spot even though every fiber of my being was telling me to run.
Johnny sat down and we started talking. Strike that, he started talking. I didn’t say two words. I was so unresponsive that I must’ve seemed weird or at least ungrateful, and I wondered why he didn’t just walk away. Maybe he figured I was still reeling from the whole thing with the cupcake. Whatever the reason, Johnny stayed.