The Scar Boys (2 page)

The first bolt of lightning wasn’t a bolt at all. It was
a flash, like a camera’s flash, bringing every atom of the world into stark relief for a nanosecond. My mother taught me to count “Mississippis” when I saw lightning, so I did. There were nine before I heard the first rumble of thunder. I forgot what that meant, but I knew the heart of the storm was still far away, and as long as there were at least nine in the next group of Mississippis, I’d be safe.

The rain started falling harder, the noise surrounding me like freeway traffic. There was another flash and I started to count again.

One Mississippi. The wind was blowing little pieces of our neighborhood across the lawn: an unsecured lid from a plastic garbage can, a red kickball, a white dress shirt liberated from someone’s untended clothesline.

Two Mississippi. A latticework fence supporting tomato plants was bending sideways as the rain, now waving in translucent sheets like see-through shower curtains, pooled into muddy lakes around the yard. My brain turned to jelly and my bladder let loose.

Three Mississi—a sonic BOOM slammed my head against the tree. My skin and clothes were drenched in a cocktail of rainwater, sweat, and urine. The heart of the storm—now a living, breathing thing—had moved closer.

Another flash and I started my count again, this time out loud.

“One Mississippi!” My voice, choked by its own sobs, only carried a few feet forward where it was swallowed by
the torrent of water and wind. I began writhing like a fish on a hook, trying to loosen the nylon cord and slip free.

“Two Mississippi!” I noticed a cat, its tortoiseshell hair matted flat by the deluge, hiding beneath a stack of lawn chairs that was pushed up against the house in front of me. Its legs were pulled tight under its waterlogged body, and its eyes were open wide, darting back and forth and looking for some escape. It spotted me, held my gaze, and wailed like a banshee, loud enough for me to hear through the rain.

“Three Mississippi!” Seeing the cat calmed me down. I wasn’t alone. As long as we were together, me and this cat, we were going to be okay. I regained control of my voice. The wind died down just a little. Even the fence with the tomato plants wasn’t bending so far forward.

“Four Mississippi!” No lightning. No thunder. The storm was moving away.

“Five Mississippi!” I thought I could hear my mom’s voice calling me. She sounded far away and she sounded scared. I tried to call back, but my voice still wasn’t carrying. I shouted again, as loud as I could: “MOM!”

“Six Missi—” Before I could say “ssippi,” before any thunder from that flash reached my ears, and before I had any idea if my mother heard me calling out to her, a new spear of lightning found me. It struck the tree just above my head.

In the instant before everything went black, just before I was sure I’d died, I looked up and saw that the cat was gone.

The lightning bolt sawed the top of the tree cleanly off. A large shaft of the trunk, a piece like a battering ram, landed on my head. It fractured my skull, dislocated my shoulder, and knocked me unconscious. What was left of the tree—enough that I was still loosely bound to it—caught fire, leaving third-degree burns on my shoulders, neck, face, and scalp. My mother found me dangling there in just enough time to pull me free, call an ambulance, and save my life.

I didn’t remember any of it.

I woke up four days later in a dimly lit hospital room that smelled like Bactine. Whirring machines and blinking lights formed an eerie halo around my body, pieces of which, including my face, were wrapped in gauze. My view of the world was restricted to a small, cotton-framed slit.
At first I was disoriented. I wondered if I was on a submarine or a spaceship. But as soon as I tried to move, the pain went coursing through the millions of exposed nerve endings, and I passed out. I regained and lost consciousness like that often the first couple of weeks.

The treatments during my “recovery” were the kind of nightmare from which you just can’t wake up. The worst of it was the changing of the bandages. The nurses tried to make it a game by calling it the Changing of the Guard. “You know Harry, like at Buckingham Palace.” Only I didn’t know what Buckingham Palace was, and even if I had known, it wouldn’t have helped. The balm slathered on my wounds acted like glue, fusing the sterilized cotton pads to the fleshy meat of my neck and head, leaving the nurses with no choice but to rip the bandages off. And when I say “rip,” I mean they would grab an end of the gauze and pull it like they were trying to start a gas-powered lawn mower. I would put up such a fight that they had to strap me down. They had me on a morphine drip for most of my hospital stay, and I took an oral version of methadone hydrochloride for many months after. It was supposed to help manage the pain in a less addictive way. It didn’t entirely work.

My memory of the doctors and nurses is colored by images of generals and admirals—a group of authoritative yahoos trying to inspire me back to full health, telling me
to “buck up,” to “be brave,” to “never give up hope.” I lost count of how many times they told me it was a miracle I wasn’t killed and that I should be grateful to have spent only forty-five days in the hospital. They had no answer for the burns, which, while they did heal, left me badly and irrevocably scarred, or for my memory loss, which left gaping holes in my personal history that had to be rebuilt by others.

By the time I got home, I was inconsolable. People talk about the resiliency of children, but those same people have never tied those same children to a tree during a thunderstorm to test the theory. I refused to eat, refused to speak, even refused to watch television. My parents tried all manner of carrots and sticks to coax me out of my funk, but nothing worked.

Nothing until I met Lucky Strike the Lightning Man.

Years earlier, Lucky had been working as a groundskeeper on an estate north of where we lived when a wayward thread of lightning struck him on the top of the head.

It was something between a miracle and a fluke that Lucky’s injuries were as minor as they were. He spent eighteen hours unconscious, and woke up with a mild headache and strange gaps in his memory. For example, he couldn’t remember the name of his cat, so he eventually renamed it “Bolt.” The cat, Lucky would tell me, never answered to the new name. It seemed instead to be waiting
for someone, anyone, to call it by its proper name. No one ever did.

Lucky found himself spending every free minute reading about lightning, researching storm systems, and attending meteorology classes at the local community college. He needed to understand how and why he’d been singled out. Lightning became his great white whale.

Through this obsession, Lucky met and was embraced by an underground network of natural disaster fanatics—tornado chasers, earthquake junkies, hurricane watchers, even one lonely devotee of tsunamis. When they founded the Society for the Study of Natural Phenomena, it was no surprise that Lucky—the only one of the group to have experienced his natural disaster firsthand—was asked to serve as the group’s president.

The first official function of Nat-Phen, as they called themselves, was a presentation at a local library on the dangers of weather. Using blowups of photographs and acetate slides shone on a mammoth screen, the session—titled
Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Lightning: What You Don’t Know Just Might Kill You
—was a smashing success. The
Putnam County Weekly
called it “an eye-opening, hair-raising ride,” and singled out “Lucky Strike the Lightning Man” as a “fellow who knows his stuff.” Other libraries caught wind of the group, and Nat-Phen was invited to give a series of presentations all around southern New York State.
My mother read about one of Lucky’s presentations, and that was how he and I met.

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.

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.