Batavia, New York
Summer, 1957
My grandfather appoints me an honorary Electrical Engineer for Niagara Mohawk power company. Not a bad job for a five-year-old kid.
“Of course, you’ll need training,” he tells me in a very serious voice. “Could take years.”
“Years?”
He pulls a filter cigarette from his shirt pocket and lights it. A blue smoke haze settles around his head like a forlorn halo. “Now don’t get excited,” he says. “I’ll teach you the ropes.” He snickers and looks around the way he usually does when he’s about do something that will annoy my folks. “To start with, an expert pole-jockey needs one of these.” He rolls up his sleeve and shows off a fading tattoo he got while in the Navy. The faded figure of a blue mermaid swims from elbow to wrist on Pa’s left forearm.
I stare down at my own skinny and painfully bare arm. “I don’t think dad would let me get a tattoo,” I say in a pleading kind of voice.
Pa comes to rescue, “No, I suppose not. Better wait until you’re a bit older. In the meantime, this’ll work okay.” He takes a ball-point pen from his short front pocket and draws a small lightning bolt on my upper arm. “What do think of that?”
Not quite a naked blue mermaid, but still pretty cool. “Thanks. So, am I ready?”
“Almost,” he says. He takes one final long drag off his cigarette and then flicks the smoldering butt out into the yard. “You need the right gear.”
I follow Pa out to the garage where he straps an oversized leather workman’s belt around my waist. He fills it with all the tools I’ll ever need—pliers, wire splicer, electrical tape, several screwdrivers and a small pocket flashlight—and then escorts me to the back yard to plan the power grid of the future.
I ask him why I would need a flashlight on an electrical pole.
“Just in case,” he tells me.
“In case of what?”
He shrugs, “Emergency. And you never know when you might need to look into some dark, creepy place. See that up there?” He points to the large, gray, tank-like thing near the top of the pole in back of the house.
“Yeah. What is it?”
“That’s a transformer. It takes the current from the power plant and kicks it down a notch. When one of them goes bad, it blows up. BOOM!” He picks me up and whirls me around. “Better leave those the experts, okay?”
Armed with the finest technology, I carefully chart the placement of power lines and poles, marking each one with a small stake that I drive into the ground. Soon the entire back yard is teaming with small stakes.
The Stevens girls, Kathy, Louie, and Linda, cross the fence behind my grandparents house into our yard and ask me what I’m doing. I am passionately in love with Kathy, the eldest sister, a stunning redhead with countless freckles, but not quite sure what to do about it except stammer and blush. I try to explain about bringing power to the masses with a network of overhead wires, telephone poles, and transformers. Kathy, the more sophisticated of the trio, tells me that the scheme can’t possibly work because there are no wires from the main line. I don’t get it, so she points to the telephone pole that sits on the property line between our houses.
“You need to get juice from somewhere, ” she says.
I should have thought of that, but rather than admit it, I tell her that I’m going to make a splice that very afternoon. They all think I’m joking, but I demonstrate my manly electrical belt and show off my tools to convince them. I suspect that Kathy is still skeptical, but she doesn’t show it. The girls bid me a fond bon voyage with a chorus of “Lipstick on Your Collar.”
I stand at the base of the pole and stare up—it’s miles high. There’s a transformer near the top. I check my engineering and decide that’s where I’ll make the splice. The Stevens girls sit on the fence awaiting my ascent. As I start up the pole, I imagine Kathy’s bright, green eyes following my dangerous path up the splintered pole and whispering “my hero” to her sisters.
My tool belt, designed for a body a whole lot wider than mine, hangs low around my waist and bumps against the pole at each step, making it difficult to balance on those short metal spikes that pretend to be a ladder. I finally reach the base of a large transformer; two more steps and I’m at the junction of high-tension wires. A light breeze sways the pole, and looking down I see that I must be hundreds of feet up. The Stevens kids looking like ants on a toothpick. I have an irresistible urge nail that wise-ass Louie with a major loogie. The temptation fizzles when I notice the transformer just below me is smoking. I look around for a likely cause. The wires all look like they’re attached okay so it must be something inside, but how to get in?
After a few moments thought, I find the large handle on top, the one marked “To Open—Pull Up.” I remember Pa’s advice about transformers, but a little peek won’t hurt.
It takes a couple strong pulls to flip open the top; a noxious cloud of green smoke spews out. I cough, wave away the smoke, and peer inside. Still can’t see a thing. I climb a bit higher for a better view, but my oversized belt catches on stray nail. A careful tug doesn’t help so I give the belt a hearty yank, loose my balance and tumble headfirst into the dark guts of the transformer.
“Oh Shiiiiiiit…” I scream in the darkness, as I tumble ass-over-teakettle in a seemingly endless free fall.
“There’s no bottom to this thing,” I say to myself after several minutes of descent. My words crackle with a hollow, metallic echo. All around me bolts of electricity dart around, coming from out of nowhere and disappearing into the distance. My own body glows, and doesn’t take too long to realize that I can flutter around like bolts of electric power.
“I must be riding the electric current.” I say the words aloud, delighting in the fiendish, crackling sound of my own voice. I grab a small bolt of current and an instant later find myself part of some machinery. Even though trapped and circulating about in the thing, I can sense where I am—inside the Stevens girls’ television set. The sensation is like looking out into a room through swirling layers of shattered glass.
They must have gotten bored waiting for me on that fence and gone inside. I wave feverishly, trying to attract their attention. Linda sneaks up closer to the screen. A second later she screams and bolts from the room. I have no idea what she saw, but it must have been pretty weird. Her sisters move in closer to investigate. Louie stares right at me; her mouth drops open in fear or amusement, I can’t tell which.
Kathy jumps back and shouts, “Mom, that Bacon kid did something to the TV.” She turns back to me and says, “What’s wrong with you?” A quick flip turns the set off, sending me back through the wires and killing my first romance before it ever gets started.
Another bolt screams by, bigger and more powerful than that last one. From my experience with the Steven’s girls, it seems like I’m inside another television set. My view is a jumbled mass of images, as if I were being tossed around in a tight loop. It stops suddenly, and through a pinhole view I see the inside of a living room or den. The scene is warped, like looking through a fishbowl, but I can see the figure of a little girl approaching the set. She screws up her face, staring at me. The little girl disappears from view and a finger appears. It pokes at my image several times. An instant later a tremendous crackling noise, flash of light and surge of power throws me back into the power grid.
In a cramped apartment across town, a little girl sits cross-legged in front of her TV set watching an episode of Mickey Mouse Club. The image flickers as cartoon characters sing, “Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me?” She sits up and stares at the set. The picture rolls, flutters, and then disappears into a tiny bright dot at the center of the screen.
The little girl walks over to the set and punches the on-off button. When nothing happens she calls out, “Mommy, the TV went off.”
Her mother answers from another room. “The mixer died too. Must be the power is out.”
“Darn it,” the girl mutters under her breath. She taps the top of the set and pokes at the center of the picture tube. Nothing happens, so she swats the side of the set, imitating the technique her dad had used last time the TV went on the fritz. A fuzzy image of a distorted face appears, followed by a pair of hands, as if someone were trapped inside and trying to get out. She jumps back, startled.
“Who are you?” she says to the screen.
The image starts to roll and flutter. The girl slowly approaches the set and leans close to the screen. “Come on, come on!” she says, hitting the side of the TV again. “Get out of there!”
“Diane Kaye, don’t,” her mom yells.
“There’s someone in there,” she shouts back.
“Leave the TV alone. You could break something.”
“I won’t,” she says, but hits it one last time.
At that moment a surge of power rips though the TV’s fragile electronics. The set is an older model Philco with a thirteen-inch screen. Diane’s dad had bought it a few years ago from a friend for twenty bucks and a beer. It was always acting up, but it was all the family could afford. A bang on the side usually nudged whatever was loose inside back into place—but not this time. The power surge fuses the circuit and blows out the tubes. They explode one after another like a string of fireworks. When the surge hits the picture tube, it fractures and explodes in a hailstorm of glass that blows the little girl across the room.
Her mother screams and runs in from the next room. “Diane Kaye! Sweetie, no!”
In a flash I’m running tight circles inside some other mechanical gizmo. I focus on my surroundings and realize that it’s grandpa’s electric shaver—the one with the “floating heads.” Since I seem to be stuck here, I decide to have a little fun at Pa’s expense. As he lifts the shaver, I take over and run over his face in random spots, and then start shaving his head. He grabs the shaver but I slip free like a bar of wet soap.
Pa yells wildly for my grandma. “Hannah come here. The shaver’s gone crazy.”
I vamoose as she runs into the room, leaving my poor grandpa to make a difficult explanation. No doubt he’ll blame poltergeists again.
This whole business makes me dizzy, so I decide to try to make it back home. But how the heck do I do that? I figure I’m doomed to forever ride bolts of electricity. Just then, another bolt carries me into more machinery. This time I seem to be in some sort of motor. I try to escape, yet the harder I try, the faster the motor runs. I can hear my grandparents’ panicky voices. They sound upset about something, and the harder I try to get out, the more upset they sound. I make one last push to escape. There’s a sudden, loud noise, like a balloon bursting, and then everything explodes in a shower of sparks and water. A moment later I’m sitting in a vast puddle of water surrounded by mountains of soap suds. I stare up, dumbfounded, at the open door of grandma’s washing machine.
Mrs. Warner bends over her daughter’s broken and bleeding body. The girls face and hands are impaled with thousands of glass shards; the stench of ozone from the set’s smoldering electronics fills the room. She cries, “Oh God no. Please, not my baby,” and puts an ear to her daughter’s chest. Nothing.
“Please don’t take my baby. Please…”
Crying, she runs to the phone, picks it up and listens. No dial tone. “Please God. Not now!” She clicks the switch hook with a prayer on her breath.
I try to explain what happened over a cup of hot Ovaltine. Grandma chews me out for playing in her washer, as if I had made the whole thing up. Pa listens absently. He’s hunched over a transistor radio listening to the local news.
“Power’s out everywhere,” he says.
“How’d that happen?” I ask sheepishly.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he grumbles. “Maybe something got into the wires.” He gives me an odd stare; I just shrug my shoulders.
My grandmother mumbles something that sounds like, “damn power companies,” and picks up the phone to call my folks.
“The phone is dead too,” she says, staring into the handset.
Copyright © 2010 Donald W. Bacon
revised 06-June-2010
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