Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  Lightning

  EDWARD CONNORS, on assignment for Folks, set out to interview nine people who had been struck by lightning. “Nine?” he said to his editor, Penfield. “Nine, ten,” said Penfield, “doesn’t matter, but it has to be more than eight.” “Why?” asked Connors, and Penfield said that the layout was scheduled for five pages and they wanted at least two people who had been struck by lightning per page plus somebody pretty sensational for the opening page. “Slightly wonderful,” said Penfield, “nice body, I don’t have to tell you, somebody with a special face. Also, struck by lightning.”

  Connors advertised in the Village Voice for people who had been struck by lightning and would be willing to talk for publication about the experience and in no time at all was getting phone calls. A number of the callers, it appeared, had great-grandfathers or grandmothers who had also been struck by lightning, usually knocked from the front seat of a buckboard on a country road in 1910. Connors took down names and addresses and made appointments for interviews, trying to discern from the voices if any of the women callers might be, in the magazine’s terms, wonderful.

  Connors had been a reporter for ten years and a freelancer for five, with six years in between as a PR man for Topsy Oil in Midland-Odessa. As a reporter he had been excited, solid, underpaid, in love with his work, a specialist in business news, a scholar of the regulatory agencies and their eternal gavotte with the Seven Sisters, a man who knew what should be done with natural gas, with nuclear power, who knew crown blocks and monkey boards and Austin chalk, who kept his own personal hard hat (“Welltech”) on top of a filing cabinet in his office. When his wife pointed out, eventually, that he wasn’t making enough money (absolutely true!) he had gone with Topsy, whose PR chief had been dropping handkerchiefs in his vicinity for several years. Signing on with Topsy, he had tripled his salary, bought four moderately expensive suits, enjoyed (briefly) the esteem of his wife, and spent his time writing either incredibly dreary releases about corporate doings or speeches in praise of free enterprise for the company’s C.E.O., E. H. (“Bug”) Ludwig, a round, amiable, commanding man of whom he was very fond. When Connors’ wife left him for a racquetball pro attached to the Big Spring Country Club he decided he could afford to be poor again and departed Topsy, renting a dismal rear apartment on Lafayette Street in New York and patching an income together by writing for a wide variety of publications, classical record reviews for High Fidelity, Times Travel pieces (“Portugal’s Fabulous Beaches”), exposés for Penthouse (“Inside the Trilateral Commission”). To each assignment he brought a good brain, a good eye, a tenacious thoroughness, gusto. He was forty-five, making a thin living, curious about people who had been struck by lightning.

  The first man he interviewed was a thirty-eight-year-old tile setter named Burch who had been struck by lightning in February 1978 and had immediately become a Jehovah’s Witness. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Burch, “in a way.” He was a calm, rather handsome man with pale blond hair cut short, military style, and an elegantly spare (deep grays and browns) apartment in the West Twenties which looked, to Connors, as if a decorator had been involved. “I was coming back from a job in New Rochelle,” said Burch, “and I had a flat. It was clouding up pretty good and I wanted to get the tire changed before the rain started. I had the tire off and was just about to put the spare on when there was this just terrific crash and I was flat on my back in the middle of the road. Knocked the tire tool ’bout a hundred feet, I found it later in a field. Guy in a VW van pulled up right in front of me, jumped out and told me I’d been struck. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, I was deafened, but he made signs. Took me to a hospital and they checked me over, they were amazed—no burns, nothing, just the deafness, which lasted about forty-eight hours. I figured I owed the Lord something, and I became a Witness. And let me tell you my life since that day has been—” He paused, searching for the right word. “Serene. Truly serene.” Burch had had a great-grandfather who had also been struck by lightning, knocked from the front seat of a buckboard on a country road in Pennsylvania in 1910, but no conversion had resulted in that case, as far as he knew. Connors arranged to have a Folks photographer shoot Burch on the following Wednesday and, much impressed—rarely had he encountered serenity on this scale—left the apartment with his pockets full of Witness literature.

  Connors next talked to a woman named MacGregor who had been struck by lightning while sitting on a bench on the Cold Spring, New York, railroad platform and had suffered third-degree burns on her arms and legs—she had been wearing a rubberized raincoat which had, she felt, protected her somewhat, but maybe not, she couldn’t be sure. Her experience, while lacking a religious dimension per se, had made her think very hard about her life, she said, and there had been some important changes (Lightning changes things, Connors wrote in his notebook). She had married the man she had been seeing for two years but had been slightly dubious about, and on the whole, this had been the right thing to do. She and Marty had a house in Garrison, New York, where Marty was in real estate, and she’d quit her job with Estée Lauder because the commute, which she’d been making since 1975, was just too tiring. Connors made a date for the photographer. Mrs. MacGregor was pleasant and attractive (fawn-colored suit, black clocked stockings) but, Connors thought, too old to start the layout with.

  The next day he got a call from someone who sounded young. Her name was Edwina Rawson, she said, and she had been struck by lightning on New Year’s Day 1980 while walking in the woods with her husband, Marty. (Two Martys in the same piece? thought Connors, scowling.) Curiously enough, she said, her great-grandmother had also been struck by lightning, knocked from the front seat of a buggy on a country road outside Iowa City in 1911. “But I don’t want to be in the magazine,” she said. “I mean, with all those rock stars and movie stars. Olivia Newton-John I’m not. If you were writing a book or something—”

  Connors was fascinated. He had never come across anyone who did not want to appear in Folks before. He was also slightly irritated. He had seen perfectly decent colleagues turn amazingly ugly when refused a request for an interview. “Well,” he said, “could we at least talk? I promise I won’t take up much of your time, and, you know, this is a pretty important experience, being struck by lightning—not many people have had it. Also you might be interested in how the others felt . . .” “Okay,” she said, “but off the record unless I decide otherwise.” “Done,” said Connors. My God, she thinks she’s the State Department.

  Edwina was not only slightly wonderful but also mildly superb, worth a double-page spread in anybody’s book, Vogue, Life, Elle, Ms., Town & Country, you name it. Oh Lord, thought Connors, there are ways and ways to be struck by lightning. She was wearing jeans and a parka and she was beautifully, beautifully black—a considerable plus, Connors noted automatically, the magazine conscientiously tried to avoid lily-white stories. She was carrying a copy of Variety (not an actress, he thought, please not an actress) and was not an actress but doing a paper on Variety for a class in media studies at NYU. “God, I love Variety,” she said. “The stately march of the grosses through the middle pages.” Connors decided that “Shall we get married?” was an inappropriate second remark to make to one newly met, but it was a very tough decision.

  They were in a bar called Bradley’s on University Place in the Village, a bar Connors sometimes used for interviews because of its warmth, geniality. Edwina was drinking a Beck’s and Connors, struck by lightning, had a feeble paw wrapped around a vodka-tonic. Relax, he told himself, go slow, we have half the afternoon. There was a kid, she said, two-year-old boy, Marty’s, Marty had split for California and a job as a systems analyst with Warner Communications, good riddance to bad rubbish. Connors had no idea what a systems analyst did: go with the flow? The trouble with Marty, she said, was that he was immature, a systems analyst, and white. She conceded that when the lightning hit he had given her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, pe
rhaps saved her life; he had taken a course in CPR at the New School, which was entirely consistent with his cautious, be-prepared, white-folks’ attitude toward life. She had nothing against white folks, Edwina said with a warm smile, or rabbits, as black folks sometimes termed them, but you had to admit that, qua folks, they sucked. Look at the Trilateral Commission, she said, a perfect example. Connors weighed in with some knowledgeable words about the Commission, detritus from his Penthouse piece, managing to hold her interest through a second Beck’s.

  “Did it change your life, being struck?” asked Connors. She frowned, considered. “Yes and no,” she said. “Got rid of Marty, that was an up. Why I married him I’ll never know. Why he married me I’ll never know. A minute of bravery, never to be repeated.” Connors saw that she was much aware of her own beauty, her hauteur about appearing in the magazine was appropriate—who needed it? People would dig slant wells for this woman, go out into a producing field with a tank truck in the dead of night and take off two thousand gallons of somebody else’s crude, write fanciful checks, establish Pyramid Clubs with tony marble-and-gold headquarters on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. What did he have to offer?

  “Can you tell me a little bit more about how you felt when it actually hit you?” he asked, trying to keep his mind on business. “Yes,” Edwina said. “We were taking a walk—we were at his mother’s place in Connecticut, near Madison—and Marty was talking about whether or not he should take a SmokeEnders course at the Y, he smoked Kents, miles and miles of Kents. I was saying, yes, yes, do it! and whammo! the lightning. When I came to, I felt like I was burning inside, inside my chest, drank seventeen glasses of water, chug-a-lugged them, thought I was going to bust. Also, my eyebrows were gone. I looked at myself in the mirror and I had zip eyebrows. Looked really funny, maybe improved me.” Regarding her closely Connors saw that her eyebrows were in fact dark dramatic slashes of eyebrow pencil. “Ever been a model?” he asked, suddenly inspired. “That’s how I make it,” Edwina said, “that’s how I keep little Zachary in britches, look in the Sunday Times Magazine, I do Altman’s, Macy’s, you’ll see me and three white chicks, usually, lingerie ads. . . .”

  The soul burns, Connors thought, having been struck by lightning. Without music, Nietzsche said, the world would be a mistake. Do I have that right? Connors, no musician (although a scholar of fiddle music from Pinchas Zuckerman to Eddie South, “dark angel of the violin,” 1904–1962), agreed wholeheartedly. Lightning an attempt at music on the part of God? Does get your attention, Connors thought, attempt wrong by definition because God is perfect by definition. . . . Lightning at once a coup de théâtre and career counseling? Connors wondered if he had a song to sing, one that would signify to the burned beautiful creature before him.

  “The armadillo is the only animal other than man known to contract leprosy,” Connors said. “The slow, friendly armadillo. I picture a leper armadillo, white as snow, with a little bell around its neck, making its draggy scamper across Texas from El Paso to Big Spring. My heart breaks.”

  Edwina peered into his chest where the cracked heart bumped around in its cage of bone. “Man, you are one sentimental taxpayer.”

  Connors signaled the waiter for more drinks. “It was about 1880 that the saintly armadillo crossed the Rio Grande and entered Texas,” he said, “seeking to carry its message to that great state. Its message was, squash me on your highways. Make my nine-banded shell into beautiful lacquered baskets for your patios, decks and mobile homes. Watch me hayfoot-strawfoot across your vast savannas enriching same with my best-quality excreta. In some parts of South America armadillos grow to almost five feet in length and are allowed to teach at the junior-college level. In Argentina—”

  “You’re crazy, baby,” Edwina said, patting him on the arm.

  “Yes,” Connors said, “would you like to go to a movie?”

  The movie was “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears,” a nifty item. Connors, Edwina inhabiting both the right and left sides of his brain, next interviewed a man named Stupple who had been struck by lightning in April 1970 and had in consequence joined the American Nazi Party, specifically the Horst Wessel Post #66 in Newark, which had (counting Stupple) three members. Can’t use him, thought Connors, wasting time, nevertheless faithfully inscribing in his notebook pages of viciousness having to do with the Protocols of Zion and the alleged genetic inferiority of blacks. Marvelous, don’t these guys ever come up with anything new? Connors remembered having heard the same routine, almost word for word, from an Assistant Grand Dragon of the Shreveport (La.) Klan, a man somewhat dumber than a bathtub, in 1957 at the Dew Drop Inn in Shreveport, where the ribs in red sauce were not bad. Stupple, who had put on a Nazi armband over his checked flannel shirt for the interview, which was conducted in a two-room apartment over a failing four-lane bowling alley in Newark, served Connors Danish aquavit frozen into a block of ice with a very good Japanese beer, Kirin, as a chaser. “Won’t you need a picture?” Stupple asked at length, and Connors said, evasively, “Well, you know, lots of people have been struck by lightning . . .”

  Telephoning Edwina from a phone booth outside the Port Authority Terminal, he learned that she was not available for dinner. “How do you feel?” he asked her, aware that the question was imprecise—he really wanted to know whether having been struck by lightning was an ongoing state or, rather, a one-time illumination—and vexed by his inability to get a handle on the story. “Tired,” she said, “Zach’s been yelling a lot, call me tomorrow, maybe we can do something . . .”

  Penfield, the Folks editor, had a call on Connors’ service when he got back to Lafayette Street. “How’s it coming?” Penfield asked. “I don’t understand it yet,” Connors said, “how it works. It changes people.” “What’s to understand?” said Penfield, “wham-bam-thank you ma’am, you got anybody I can use for the opening? We’ve got these terrific shots of individual bolts, I see a four-way bleed with the text reversed out of this saturated purple sky and this tiny but absolutely wonderful face looking up at the bolt—” “She’s black,” said Connors, “you’re going to have trouble with the purple, not enough contrast.” “So it’ll be subtle,” said Penfield excitedly, “rich and subtle. The bolt will give it enough snap. It’ll be nice.”

  Nice, thought Connors, what a word for being struck by lightning.

  Connors, trying to get at the core of the experience—did being struck exalt or exacerbate pre-existing tendencies, states of mind, and what was the relevance of electro-shock therapy, if it was a therapy?—talked to a Trappist monk who had been struck by lightning in 1975 while working in the fields at the order’s Piffard, New York, abbey. Having been given permission by his superior to speak to Connors, the small, bald monk was positively loquacious. He told Connors that the one deprivation he had felt keenly, as a member of a monastic order, was the absence of rock music. “Why?” he asked rhetorically. “I’m too old for this music, it’s for kids, I know it, you know it, makes no sense at all. But I love it, I simply love it. And after I was struck the community bought me this Sony Walkman.” Proudly he showed Connors the small device with its delicate earphones. “A special dispensation. I guess they figured I was near-to-dead, therefore it was all right to bend the Rule a bit. I simply love it. Have you heard the Cars?” Standing in a beet field with the brown-habited monk Connors felt the depth of the man’s happiness and wondered if he himself ought to re-think his attitude toward Christianity. It would not be so bad to spend one’s days pulling beets in the warm sun while listening to the Cars and then retire to one’s cell at night to read St. Augustine and catch up on Rod Stewart and the B-52’s.

  “The thing is,” Connors said to Edwina that night at dinner, “I don’t understand precisely what effects the change. Is it pure fright? Gratitude at having survived?” They were sitting in an Italian restaurant called Da Silvano on Sixth near Houston, eating tortellini in a white sauce. Little Zachary, a good-looking two-year-old, sat in a high ch
air and accepted bits of cut-up pasta. Edwina had had a shoot that afternoon and was not in a good mood. “The same damn thing,” she said, “me and three white chicks, you’d think somebody’d turn it around just once.” She needed a Vogue cover and a fragrance campaign, she said, and then she would be sitting pretty. She had been considered for Hashish some time back but didn’t get it and there was a question in her mind as to whether her agency (Jerry Francisco) had been solidly behind her. “Come along,” said Edwina, “I want to give you a back rub, you look a tiny bit peaked.”

  Connors subsequently interviewed five more people who had been struck by lightning, uncovering some unusual cases, including a fellow dumb from birth who, upon being struck, began speaking quite admirable French; his great-grandfather, as it happened, had also been struck by lightning, blasted from the seat of a farm wagon in Brittany in 1909. In his piece Connors described the experience as “ineffable,” using a word he had loathed and despised his whole life long, spoke of lightning-as-grace and went so far as to mention the descent of the Dove. Penfield, without a moment’s hesitation, cut the whole paragraph, saying (correctly) that the Folks reader didn’t like “funny stuff” and pointing out that the story was running long anyway because of the extra page given to Edwina’s opening layout, in which she wore a Mary McFadden pleated tube and looked, in Penfield’s phrase, approximately fantastic.