Lightning Strikes and Republican Love

It seemed like it was gonna be a good day when I woke up one morning three weeks ago. I'd forgotten to set my alarm the night before, so I got a little extra sleep and still managed to get up in time for work. I took my head off my pillow, looked outside, and, for the first time in weeks, the sun was shining, causing the icicles outside my window to drip, drip, drip.

I got out of bed and revved up the shower, and goddamn, if it wasn't one of the best showers I'd ever taken. I was singing "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," which, ok, is normally kind of a downer, but not if you sing it lounge style ("I can't believe the news today...Hey! I can't close my eyes and make it go away...Good to see you!") and snap your fingers along with it. I got out, brushed my teeth, got dressed, and hit the road.

As usual, I stopped into the coffee joint for my morning sustenance, and, also as usual, the dude behind the counter looked at me distastefully and pretended he'd never seen me before. "Can I...help you?" he asked, pausing for that extra beat of condescension between "I" and "help" as he wiped his hands on the black apron covering his tight black shirt and straight black pants.

"Yes you can," I said. He was unamused, but I went on. "Gimme an extra large regular and an everything bagel, untoasted, with cream cheese." I always kinda feel like a jackass repeating that because I order the same damn thing every morning, and, four days out of five, he's the one who takes care of me. But he never seems to remember, making me think he's either fucking with me or the youngest Alzheimer's victim in history. It's sad, really.

He poured my coffee and put it down on the counter. He shouted at the crunchy chick who prepares the food, "Toasted sesame bagel with butter!"

"Actu -" I started to correct him, but only got out two syllables before someone else cut me off.

"Jesus God! What're you, some kind of incompetent?" The voice came from the sugar-and-cream counter six feet behind me and it was withering enough to fool a tree into thinking it was fall.

I turned around. The voice's owner, back turned to the counter guy and me, was a vision of cold in sensible shoes and a navy business suit. Even her hair was cold -- blonde and Nordic and curled in angrily at the collarbone. Somehow, the turqouise Hello Kitty purse she held tightly made her seem even tougher.

The counter guy looked wounded. "I'm standing behind this guy and even I heard him," she said, still without having turned around. You were staring straight at him, and even if you're totally deaf you could've read his lips. Ev-er-y-thing ba-gel with creeeeeam cheeeeese."

And with that, she left, leaving the counter guy and I to stare at each with our mouths hanging open.

I wanted to chase after her, but, being fat, I also wanted my bagel. I tapped my finger on the counter impatiently, and after another two minutes, my bagel came and I ran out.

I got out the door and hung a quick Tom and Jerry-style, hopping-on-one-foot left turn onto State Street. She was already nearly two blocks ahead of me, and, with my flat feet and Camel Lights-addled lungs, I knew I was gonna be hard-pressed to catch her. I got another 25 feet when James, my local homeless guy, popped out from under a stoop.

"Dan! How you -"

"No time!" I said quickly, throwing him a buck (Actually, for all I know, it could've been a twenty. Truth be told, it could've also been a crumpled receipt or something.) and ducking around him OJ-style.

To my surprise, despite my senior citizen speed and her aggressive walk - feet aligned perfectly, stepping foot landing three feet in front of the planting foot -- I was making up ground. A car stopped at a stoplight, and, through it's illegally tinted windows, I could see the silhouette of someone shaking with laughter.

I didn't care. I may have been out of breath and I may have started to sweat, but I was getting closer.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm a huge weather buff. I can spend hour after hour watching the Weather Channel, spending entire evenings and weekends transfixed by the talking heads in the middle of massive hurricanes and thrashing tornadoes, or going over the kinky points of El Nino and his sister. If you've spent even a fraction of the time as I have in front of the Weather Channel, you've probably seen them covering the Haagen effect, something that seems to be, at least in North America, exclusive to New York's capital region.

The Haagen Effect is actually named after a distant relative of mine, the 17th century Dutch explorer Amsterdam Pietr van der Haagen. Pietr was the first person to try to walk across present day New York State. He started from New Amsterdam and headed north, following the Hudson, to a point about 30 miles above Albany where he planned on hanging a left.

His plans changed quickly one unseasonably warm day in March, 1632. I think it was 1632, anyway.

Amsterdam Pietr had stopped in a clearing for a quick bite to eat. Noting how at peace he looked as he basked in the glorious weather, the two local Indians who had been following him decided that that moment was the perfect time to inquire about trading for his turquoise stockings. Having spotted Pietr by his stocking, the Indians found them intimidating and useful in telegraphing their toughness.

They marched into the clearing and greeted Pietr in their native dialect, which sounded terrifying to the shocked Dutchman. He just stared, mouth hanging unhinged. The Indians did what any modern day American would do in this situation: glanced at each other and repeated what they'd said to Pietr more loudly and slowly. After their fourth go round, Pietr yelled loudly in Dutch, "Save me, God!"

At that precise moment, in the atmosphere directly above all three players, the leading edge of an impressively cold, heavily-charged weather front streaking south-southeasterly like a wide receiver out of Canada was lowering its shoulder into the trailing edge of the warm, wet air looping in from the Atlantic. I'm sure some of you science types are itching to fill us in on why this is, but the effects and coordinates of this phenomenon are such that a) thunderclouds come flying in out of nowhere, producing violently erratic -- and heavily localized -- storms; and b) this only happens in a 32-mile radius roughly centered around Albany.

Amsterdam Pietr and his new companions were about to experience it first hand. Just as Pietr, still seated some 20 feet away from the Indians and starting to finger his knife, got ready to lunge at them, a thundercloud literally popped into the sky, sounding first like a dropping bomb and then a bomb detonating. Everything flashed to white, and, the next thing Pietr saw was one of the two Indians, burnt like an unattended hamburger, lying on the ground. Freaked out by what he deemed o be some sort of divine missile, Pietr hightailed it back to New Amsterdam, and gave name to the Haagen effect.

I was in mid-emphysematic stride some forty feet behind the coffee shop chick when the Haagen Effect kicked me full on in the junk. I don't know how this was even possible given the fact that I was on a sidewalk in the middle of a city, but one second I was priming my vocal chords to primally shriek after her, and the next second I was crumpled up against a dented purple Neon with a "Witches Heal" bumper sticker and a community college parking tag.

I gotta be honest: if it weren't for having been slammed against a crappy-ass American car at high speed and having my hair singed off, I'd've felt pretty good at that moment. The surge of electricity was refreshing, like a full body millisecond enema. Yeah, my shoulder hurt, yeah, my New Balances were half melted, and, yeah, I still wasn't sure what "Witches Heal" meant, but I was feeling like a champ.

I looked up and around to get my bearings, but I already had them. What I got instead was a second to digest the fact that this chick, the only other person on State Street, was running towards me, black overcoat flapping behind her like a fabric tail rippling in slow motion. Her eyes were wide, her arms were pumping, and her mouth was in the middle of forming the first of many "HO-LEE SHIT!"s.

As soon as I saw her coming near me, I closed my eyes again. Within four ticks of a too-slow clock, she was prodding my shoulder gently with her index finger on her left hand as she called 911 with a cellular phone embedded in her right. "Holy shit! Oh my God! Are you OK? Holy shit!"

I was having a hard time keeping a straight face, and truth be told - heh - this still makes me all chuckly. I opened my eyes sloooowly. I lolled my head 12 degrees to either side in a "Whoa! Where the hell am I?" sort of roll.

As my head, on the second leg of its west-to-east tour, rolled to the right, the chick was in what I would've thought to be a seemingly uncharacteristic panic. She was damn near hyperventilating, and her lungs were straining against the restraints of her sleekly cut business suit and her coat to suck down liters of air. With the exception of exclamation points, she spoke to the 911 operator without using any punctuation.

"HolyshitI'mouthereonStateStreetthisguythisguyhe
justgothitbylightningwithhiseverythingbagelyougo
ttagetananambulanceouthereandohitlookslikeheswa
kingupabitandandohshitheyareyouokwoahcanyouh
earmeohshit!"

I closed my eyes again when she hit "upabit."

"Ohshitohshitohshithe'sbackoutagainI'monStatene
arLarkwhenareyougonnagetsomeoneoutherehe'sdy
ing!"

My eyelids rolled up slowly again, and then slowly rolled back down, and then they repeated the process one more time before doing one-two-three-four-five-six-seven more quick blinks.

On the last one, they stayed open and alert and fixated on her face. The shock I registered on my face was perfectly accentuated by my still-smoking hair. I looked like Yahoo Serious.

She knelt over me and this was the first time I’d ever seen her face. Her hair was pinned back above her temples, so the bottom half, unrestrained, curved towards me. Her eyebrows, carefully tweezed to an eighth of an inch thick, were at the angle of tent poles. She was the concerned but rambunctious older sister of the cute blonde girl everyone knew in high school.

“He’sawakehe’sawakehe’sawakeanditlookslikehe'ss
tayingawakejesusthat’ssomethinghejustgothitbyli
ghtningyeahyeahyeahI’mstayingcalmgoddamit!”

“It’s,” I said softly before pausing for effect, “It’s…you! From the coffee shop!”

See, the beautiful thing about being such a slow runner is that it gives you plenty of time to plot what you’d say in any given situation. “It’s you” fell under ‘near death'. Had she, say, dropped her coffee, I would’ve offered her mine and said, “Here. Take mine. I’ve got a cushy job with all the coffee I can drink.” Had she started to walk into the New York State Alliance for the Mentally Disadvantaged, I would’ve said something like, “You work here? You guys did so much for my brother.”

I wasn’t expected to whip out the “It’s you,” but, goddamn, it worked. She suddenly regained use of spacing and periods.

“Yeah, oh my God. Are you alright? You just got hit by fucking lightning! I’m on the phone with 911 and they’re sending an ambulance. What’s your name?”

“It’s…uhhh…shit. Buffalo Springfield? Something like that. Hold on. Lemme check.”

I pulled out my wallet, which had melted into a bi-fold jumble of low-grade plether. My three credit cards had fused, mashing my buying potential into one thick Vistercard, but my driver’s license was still OK.

“Nope, check that,” I said. “Apparently, it’s Albany D. Patterson. What’s yours?”

“Lenore. Wellington. Are you OK?”

“I…I…I don’t know,” I said. “My head kinda hurts. So, you live around here?”

“What? Oh, uhh, yeah. I live over on Hudson. Jesus! Where the hell’s the ambulance? What a bunch of fucking incompetents! You should sue the hell outta these people for this.”

Lenore put her phone back to her ear. “What the hell’s going on there? This guy could be dying on the street here, and your fucking ambulance crew is off playing Connect Four? You wanna get fired over this?” Oh, that sweet, sweet rage I loved so much! It gave her face the harsh, insistent pink of a supermarket carnation.

She pushed the ‘END’ button on her phone and said to me almost apologetically, “Sorry. They say it’s coming.”

“Ehhh, don’t worry about it. I’m fine.” I made a half-assed attempt to get up and fell back against the Neon.

“No, no, no, no, no! Don’t get up! Wait for the ambulance to get here! You could paralyze yourself or something.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. What kind of music you listen to?”

“Music? I don’t really…I don’t know. Opera, I guess.”

Opera?

“Opera?” I asked.

“Yeah. Puccini. Verde.”

“And you’re, what, 24? 25?”

“26.”

“And you like fucking opera?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.” Not only did that throw me for a loop, it threw me completely off plan as well. Based on the careful haircut and the sort of euro suit, I was banking on something else. “How do you feel about jazz? My cousin’s got a little place up in Cohoes. We should go check it out sometime.”

“Ucch. No. I can’t stand jazz. There’s nothing to it.” She looked down at her watch and stood up straight.

I was in crisis mode. The plan was totally shot and the scream of the ambulance siren was getting quickly louder.

“Was that a no to jazz or no to maybe going out some time?” The ambulance pounced around the corner and stopped 15 feet from us.

“What? I guess it was a no to jazz.”

“So we should go grab drinks together sometime. No jazz at all,” I said.

“Ummm…maybe. We’ll see. Look I want to ride with you to the hospital. Now that these guys are finally here, I just wanna run inside and tell my secretary.”

“Oh, yeah, cool. Totally. Go ahead.” Lenore started jogging down the street, and my eyes started jogging with her.

The two-member ambulance crew, which had a total weight of nearly 750 pounds, rolled out of the cab of the ambulance, equipment in hand. While one was a man and one was a woman, both of them were wearing white shirts that were two small for them, the buttons of which looked about ready to give up on life. They looked like they could potentially make a big splash as a World Wrestling Federation tag team.

They came over to me and started going to work. The male one, whose nametag simply read ‘Murphy’, asked me, “So how’re you doing?”

“Y’know,” I said. “Looks like I might’ve just gotten myself a date, so I’m doing pretty damn good considering.”
Lenore was two doors before the end of the block when she took a left up some stairs and my stomach went south. I knew exactly which building it was, and it broke my heart. I may not have been able to physically see the sign above the stairs from where I was, but I knew what it said: New York Republican State Committee.

Oh, it was all just too much for me. I let loose with a terrifying “NOOOOOO!”

A Republican. A young Republican at that. I felt betrayed, bewildered. I thought there’d been chemistry, a connection, and that very thought scared the hell out of me. A connection with a Republican? Is that even possible? What did that say about me?

“Does that hurt?” asked the female ambulance crewmember, whose name was apparently “Galackiewicz.” It was a trick question: my shoulder, which she was pushing, didn’t hurt, but my sense of self worth did. Republicans are cold, unfeeling monsters, and I fell for one. I should’ve put the clues together sooner. I only had myself to blame.

Lenore came back five minutes later. I was loaded on a stretcher and she stood over me.

“I was thinking,” she said. “We should definitely go get drinks sometime. Can’t say I’ve ever met anyone who’s been hit by lightning. I want to see how you’re doing.”

I saw her in a whole new ugly light. Suddenly, her eyes seemed too far apart. The pores in her face grew to the size of Afghan caves. Her eyebrows, which once looked impressively groomed, now looked like twin ropes.

“Yeah, well, listen. It looks like I’m gonna be in the hospital for a while, and then rehab’s gonna take even longer than that. So, I don’t know if this is gonna work out. I’ll call you.”

“No,” said Murphy. “I think you were only grazed. You should be out in two, three days tops.”

“Hey, man,” I said. “You can’t tell that just from looking at me. I’m pretty messed up I think.”

“Whatever,” he said, as he and his partner put me in the idling ambulance and closed the first of the two back doors.

He was about to close the other when Lenore said, “Hey, wait. I’m going with to the hospital.”

“No, that’s probably not such a good idea. I, uhhh, don’t want you to see me like this. Yeah.”

“OK, well at least let me give you my phone number,” she said, sounding taken aback and a little hurt. I knew that was a deception, though, since Republicans are incapable of feeling anything. I stood strong. Metaphorically, anyway.

“It’s 4-7-9 –“ That was as far as she got before I hooked the door with my foot and pulled it closed.

I’d never felt worse, but I’d never felt better.

Posted by albanydan at March 01, 2002 01:20 AM