Everyone who knew Gerald Stoltzfoos, a limited (pathetically so, really) network of neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, all agreed that he was a man destined for great things.
"Just talking with him-- you know, you could tell," they'd say.
Or, "Didn't you ever take a look in those intense green eyes? Fame was inevitable."
Of course, their responses were elicited after the accident. After their previously unheard-of midwestern village was bombarded by journalists hell bent on deciphering the mysteries behind the man who put his town on the map; the man who gave hope to millions; the man who captivated the nation for the sweltering summer of 1988; the man who called himself The Lightning Bug.
Despite the opaque memories of those who claimed they knew him, Gerald lived a quintessentially unremarkable American life. He paid all of his bills on time, voted religiously (even in those pesky local elections), and had a favorite professional football team. He lived in a quiet street off of the main drag in a small town, on the second floor of a common row house that had been divided up for tenants. His neighbors living in the apartments directly above and below him said that Gerald largely kept to himself. The only sign of life on his floor, they said, were the creaking floorboards they'd hear every morning and evening, signaling his preparation for and return from work. But even those were muffled, as if Gerald shuffled around in leather moccasins to minimize the impact his footfalls would have on the world around him.
Though he was not married, Gerald had frequent female companions, according to patrons who knew him from within the dim dusty light of the town's only bar, Murphy's Hole.
"Oh yeah, he would come around here every two weeks after getting paid and clean up," one rather tipsy fellow said.
"He definitely had a way with the ladies. I think it had something to do with his job - he was always boasting about how dangerous it was."
Indeed, Gerald's job succeeded in piquing the interest of a number of young femme fatales scattered throughout the county who just so happened to stumble into The Hole -- as the local's call it -- on one of Gerald's paydays.
"It was totally random that I showed up," said a frumpy brunette of 35, who insisted on remaining anonymous. "My friend was having her bachlorette party and she thought it would be funny to try out this total dive that she'd always drive by on her way to work. She was convinced it would be chock full of rednecks who we could poke fun at, or at least square dance with."
But often times, such unsuspecting women were wooed by the pathetic charm that oozed from Gerald like cheap, potent cologne. He was not what one might call an attractive man. With scrawny legs and irregularly balding black hair complementing a hunched, stooped look to his narrow shoulders, people often mistook him for a lonely, lost university professor. What saved Gerald, it seemed, was his smooth, elegant, loquacity, reminiscent of a young courting aristocrat.
"Could that boy talk," one woman said with a faint, distant smile, gazing up dreamily at a twirling ceiling fan. "You didn't really understand what he was saying, but them words felt like liquid butter being poured on fresh corn come harvest time."
Apparently it was his meekness, and the pity it invoked in female patrons, that earned Gerald these initial tense moments of awkward contact. But his sheepishness seemed to lower their guard; as Gerald spoke fluidly about his job, their pity turned to a strange fascination whose satisfaction - it soon dawned on them - required immediate sexual intimacy.
Gerald, as he quickly boasted, worked as a lineman for Northwest Gas & Electric Co., the region's sole supplier of electricity. Linemen, he loved to say, were not your grandmother's repairmen. No-- they went in when others would not, fixing high-voltage electric power lines while there was still a deadly charge surging through the cables.
Gerald - rightfully so or not - made himself out to be a hero. To protect linesmen, he didn't hesitate to mention, they were given a suit of heavy mesh metallic armor, which absorbed the electrical current and allowed them to work safely on whatever it was that was causing the problem that required their presence.
"I'm a modern day Lancelot," Gerald would say, often taking on a faint British accent depending on how many cocktails he had sipped by that point.
More often than not, he would explain, bird crap was responsible for contaminating the electrical signal after accumulating on conductors.
"Gods creatures, the winged ones and I, perched halfway to the heavens, " he also liked to say in his more poetic - or inebriated - moments.
These power lines draped across vast stretches of rolling, barren prairies in order to connect distant metropolises, so the company could ill afford to cut the lines for any lengthy period of time to allow for repairs.
"Those city slickers can't live a minute without their power," he'd reassuringly explain.
So there he'd dangle, 50 to 100 feet in the air, harnessed into a complicated series of ropes and pulleys that held him snugly against the stark metallic towers responsible for keeping the network of high-voltage lines aloft. He often thought of himself as a suspended repairman of some important artifact, like an ancient wall mural or Mt. Rushmore. Similar to the swords of their armored Medieval predecessors, linesmen were equipped with "hot sticks", car antenna-like insulated poles with attachments for tools to service the lines.
If a woman was still listening to Gerald's monologue over the din in the smoky Hole after getting this far into his description, then he would mention what was, for him, an infallible pickup line: he kept his suit of armor back at his house and would gladly don it in private, if they wished to see it. He also had a hot stick lying around somewhere, and they were free to get creative with how to use it.
It was almost too easy. In fact, Gerald was so successful that he never felt the need to exercise or wear a toupee or shop for clothes more fashionable than his decades old hand-me-downs. But like all things worth doing, this routine of bi-weekly jaunts of unabashed, albeit muffled passion was forever forestalled on the balmy, stormy evening of June 15, 1988.
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To learn what happens to Gerald, and how he becomes the envy of most conscious males with a yearning for power and glory, check out Part Two here!