Chapter 6: The Perils of Experience

June 22, 1980

It was a Sunday morning, eleven days following my ... transition, or whatever you wanted to call it. I was in my bedroom, getting dressed for church. Going to church was a weekly routine in our family; my parents were practicing Catholics, and even though you almost never heard them preaching the gospel or anything like that, they did adhere to the Catholic doctrine which states that one must attend Mass every Sunday.

Although it was the second Sunday since that infernal event which I still couldn't wrap my brain around, this would be my first trip to church. I'd skipped out on Mass the previous week, at my parents' insistence.

"Too soon after the accident," Mom declared sympathetically. It had, after all, been the morning following my release from the hospital. "Why don't you stay home and rest?"

I had been more than willing to go along with that suggestion, and it had nothing to do with the fear of being struck down by a thunderbolt from heaven. (Besides, that had already happened to me. What's that about lightning striking twice?) Sundays at church were as much of a social thing as a means of worship, and even with the amnesia excuse, I wasn't yet up to socializing.

But after a week of silent research into my situation, accomplished through combing the house for clues and listening to family conversations, I now had a firmer understanding of where I stood. Oh, I still had no insight whatsoever with regard to the means that had landed me in this timeline. I'd discovered quite a bit about the state of my family, however, and that made me considerably less nervous about venturing out into public.

My dad, an assembly-line worker in the other world, worked for the same employer in this world. However, he was now in upper management. My mother, a stay-at-home mom in the other timeline, was now a part-time real estate agent. She worked about thirty hours a week, which allowed her the time to fix dinner and shuttle us kids around to wherever we needed to go. These changes explained the improvement in our standard of living and our swanky residence. But how did the changes come about? As of now, I had no clue.

My sister, Eileen, was shy and self-conscious, though I attributed some of that to her age. She did have friends, though; there were four or five girls who were regular visitors at our house. It took me a couple of attempts at conversation to figure out that we weren't as close as some siblings are, though I got the feeling we had been close when we were younger. I wanted to remedy this if I could; remember, I'd been an only child in the other timeline, and I'd often dreamed of having a brother or sister.

Eileen was a member of the church choir, and had a beautiful singing voice. She would practice daily at home, and I silently admired that voice of hers. Of course, I could sing too (and had many more years of experience, in two lifetimes, to draw on). But even so, at fifteen, she was already a better singer than I was. She also played the piano; here, the situation was reversed, and I was definitely her superior. I quickly realized that music was a potential area of bonding between Eileen and I, if only she would allow it to happen.

The situation with Seamus, my kid brother, was different. Simply put, he had always viewed me with hero worship. I'd seen evidence in the hospital that he loved to torment his sister. What became apparent in the subsequent days was that I'd often been a co-conspirator. Now, I wanted nothing to do with that kind of behavior. During the past week, he'd attempted to put pepper on her pillow before bedtime, and to put a running tape recorder under the living room chair while she was talking on the phone. Both times, I told him to knock it off. In a way, I felt sorry for the kid. He didn't know it, but his big brother had effectively been replaced by a 44-year old man. Naturally, from his point of view, the change had been disappointing. I even overheard him telling Mom that he liked me better before I got struck by lightning.

In addition to all this, I had made yet another discovery with far-reaching implications. I happened to find my final report card from the just-completed school year. I'd gotten decent grades, but the big surprise was what was written on the top of the report card: St. James Parochial School. In the other life, I'd attended Fairfield High, a public school! However, upon further reflection, this didn't surprise me at all. It was yet another by-product of our higher standing of living. My parents had the income to send me to the expensive private Catholic school, and they'd opted to do so. I also learned that Eileen attended St. James, and that Seamus went to a nearby Catholic elementary school.

I wasn't sure what to think about attending St. James instead of Fairfield. It would take more than a few days to consider all the changes that were in store. But I realized that there was one incredibly fortuitous aspect to my situation ... I'd "arrived" just after the end of the school year. Imagine having to deal with a new school in the middle of the year. I don't know what I'd have done. Thankfully, I had the entire summer to prepare myself. Whoever, or whatever, had done this to me had not been entirely ruthless.

That Sunday morning was bright, sunny, hot and humid. Our family of five piled into Dad's car, heading for St. James Catholic Church, which was affiliated with the high school I was attending. My parents were in front, and my brother, sister and I sat in in the back. Seamus was in the middle, and no sooner had Dad started the car when my brother let loose with a loud belch.

"Eww, gross, you little pig!" shrieked Eileen. I looked at Seamus with bemusement. Dad just shook his head. Mom turned around and told him sternly, "We'll have no more of that!"

"Aren't you glad I got the gas out of my guts now?" Seamus grinned impishly. "Imagine if it had come out during Mass."

"Cut it out, Seamus. Do it again, and you're going straight to your room as soon as we get home."

Seamus kept his mouth shut, and was on his best behavior throughout the entire service.

After Mass was over, I had to field question upon question from friends and acquaintances about my mishap, something that got very old, very fast. Nonetheless, that was a memorable day for me, because I ran into two old friends. One, actually, was more than just a friend: the aforementioned Diana Caldwell, my on-again, off-again girlfriend during my last two years of high school. It became immediately apparent that we were currently in an "off-again" phase, but that she wished to go back to "on-again".

"I heard you got struck by lightning," Diana said, affectionately rubbing my forearm. Her long fingernails, painted pink, danced fleetingly against my skin. "Did it hurt?"

"I don't remember," I said with a smirk.

"You don't remember?"

"Amnesia," I replied, tapping the side of my head with my finger.

"Oh, that's right. I heard about that."

"Who told you?"

"It's all anyone's been talking about for the past week. How does it feel to be number one on the gossip list?"

My relationship with Diana had been a roller coaster ride, full of amazing highs and depressing lows. First, the lows. She was jealous. She was possessive. She had an infuriating knack for taking my words or actions completely out of context, and getting angry with me about it. And when she got angry, she stayed angry, resulting in long periods of disagreement, or worse, not speaking to each other at all. In short, she was frustratingly unpredictable. She could be a total sweetheart for days at a time, even weeks – the perfect girlfriend – and then something would set her off, and we'd be on the outs again. This lasted until the end of senior year, when she broke up with me for the final time during the St. James senior prom, which I'd attended as her date. We'd agreed to switch dance partners for a few songs, and I ended up dancing with a girl she didn't like. She made a huge scene, disgracing no one but herself, and that was that. Believe it or not, I never saw her or spoke to her again after that night.

As for the highs ... well, first of all, there was her physical appearance. She was a stunner. Medium-length blonde hair, deep blue eyes, flawless fair skin, full kissable lips, with a slender figure, yet amply endowed in the breast department. I still remember what my Dad told me, upon meeting Diana for the first time... "Pat, you picked yourself a winner there."

Her other positive attribute was something Dad wouldn't have approved of. S-E-X. She couldn't get enough. She loved sex, and even more than that, she was good at it. She hadn't been the one to take my virginity ... that had been a girl named Nancy Phillips, back in tenth grade, who I'd screwed twice. (I wondered if that had been true in this reality as well.) But most of my early sexual experience was with Diana, and it was with her that I learned many of the things that would serve me so well later on, in my life as a middle-aged playboy.

Diana's parents both had full-time jobs. She had one sibling, an older brother who was away at college. That meant that she was home alone on a frequent basis, and we took full advantage of that, using her house as the setting for our sexual encounters. To make matters even better, she was on the pill ... her mother, perhaps aware of her daughter's predilections, had insisted that she go on the pill from the time she was sixteen. Easy, convenient sex with a talented, beautiful girl who loved it? What more could any teenage boy want?

It made all of the other bullshit worth putting up with ... most of the time.

Diana gave me a saucy look that was quite out of place in the foyer of a church after a Sunday service. "Want to come over to my house tomorrow?" she said slyly.

"I'll be there," I told her with a smile. I was in a different world now, but a leopard can't change his spots that easily.

The other old acquaintance I encountered at church that Sunday? None other than a teenage version of Dave Mancuso, my lifelong friend and drummer for Activation Energy.

Now this was a strange experience. I'd last seen Dave a matter of days ago, in a relative sense. He'd left me with an evil grin and a couple of groupies in tow. Now, here he was, a gawky seventeen-year-old, as I hadn't seen him in twenty-seven years, wearing his Sunday church clothes.