Scared Witless

I can remember being scared of the dark when I was a kid, to the point that whenever I would walk into my bedroom, I would always be afraid there was “someone or something,” as they liked to say in those old grade B movies, behind the door. Unfortunately, the light switch was not on the wall near the door, so I had to walk into the “Chamber of Doom” before I was able to flick it on, and I was so certain I would be accosted by some blood-curdling apparition that I would actually see an amorphous white flash (Incidentally, that was my nickname when I played halfback in high school in 1957) shoot out from behind the door every single time I walked by it. Hallucination? Only time would tell.

Of course, after I frantically turned on the light, everything was just fine. Until it wsa time to go to bed, then I felt that “someone or something” was now under my bed, but I could easily fend it off simply by covering myself up completely with my blanket and, at the same time, making sure neither of my hands or legs was hanging over the side of the bed. If nature called during the night, I could protect myself from Satan’s minions by wrapping myself up in the same demon-proof covering, even though I wouldn’t see where I was going.

My feeling that these coverings were impervious to the assaults of Asmodeus and the like led to a game I would play with my cousins on the screened porch or my grandmother’s beach house in which we would take turns covering ourselves with five or six layers of heavy bedclothes and walk about bumping into anything in our way. Inevitably, we would hit walls, trip over our chairs or beds, and topple over onto the floor like one of those people in the giant wiener suits after being whacked on the head by a just-kidding-around baseball player, with the six inches of cloth protecting us from injury. It was amazing, really, for even when we would fall onto the corner of one of the iron-framed cots, there would be no pain or injury.

Incidentally, one ponders, or more accurately, I do, about the term “bedclothes.” Why would a bed have clothes? And if it does, then are table cloths “table clothes,” slipcovers on sofas “sofa clothes,” and doilies (I’m dating myself, a phrase that sounds like a prelude to self-gratification) on any kind of furniture “furniture clothes”? Please forgive the Wal-Mart Seinfeld Stream of Consciousness digression.

In retrospect, I should have gotten this information about the protective qualities of these bedclothes to the DOD so they could have issued them to our troops, at least until they invented Kevlar. And think of the psychological impact of soldiers covered in layers of camouflaged blankets, mini mountainous forms with helmets on top. (They would still need to project a military air), slowly progressing across the battlefield. The enemy would be as confused as Dubya at a spelling bee (fourth grade). We would just have to be sure that we weren’t fighting anyone who had seen those old Flash Gordon serials, since there might be a tendency then to view the Blanket Brigade as a throwback to some of Flash’s goofy looking foils, and the anticipated terror and befuddlement would be displaced by ridicule and certain defeat.

My scariest moment, without a doubt, occurred when I went to see the first version of “The Thing.” It was 1950, I was ten years old, and, for some inexplicable reason, had decided to go by myself, an act oddly similar to the characters in the horror movies in those days who always insisted on venturing out into the dark, howling night to “see what that noise was” or even just taking a look outside because “it’s quiet—too quiet,” and of course, always unarmed—and inevitably dead. It was the dramatic build-up to finding out that this evil plant creature was that primed me for maximum terrification. (I know it’s not a word, but it should be.) I can remember thinking it was the reporter simply because he was the oddest looking member of the cast, and then I finally saw “The Thing” walking down that dark corridor, his features still undecipherable, even before he burst into flame. No matter that this menacing cousin of the Phil O’Dendron family had been defoliated; my five block walk home was a solitary march of misery. The term “scared sh*tless” comes to mind, a description that, of course, demands some serious tangentializing. How this could literally happen to someone, I can’t imagine, but apparently, their gastrointestinal tracts were evacuated before they, themselves, could be. But if this were factual, you would think some enterprising individual would have come up with a non-invasive substitute for laxatives: “Yes, I’ll take a package of ‘Scared Sh*tless’,” which would be an over-the-counter product, consisting of nude pictures of unprepossessing celebrities such as candid shots of Rosie O’Donnell doing honeymoon poses or maybe a limboing, bethonged and well-oiled Abe Vigoda. It would be a money-maker, believe me. Fortunately for me at the time, the term was only metaphorical and my only problem was that I was so scared that I walked the entire five blocks home backwards (not having my trusty blanket), ensuring that if “someone or something” was loping after me, at least, I could see it coming and close my eyes real tight before impact.

Except for a brief setback resulting from “The Exorcist” experience, my fears have fortunately taken more mundane, middle-class manifestations such as road rage (me, not them), spiraling beer prices and the threat of age-related impotence, in reverse order of important, although I have recently been having a terrifying recurring nightmare in which Karl Rove and I are in the finals of “The Apprentice” program, but it suddenly turns into a Pilsbury Doughboy Look-alike Contest, and, of course, I’m trounced, in fact, I come in third after Scott McClellan. Next I’m chased by a nude, knife-wielding Jeff Gannon (see James Guckert), whose Dick Cheney-hockey mask I pull off at the last minute and I awake “scared stiff,” which, of course, is both scary and incriminating due to the Gannon factor. Considering the content of this last paragraph, I’ll end this, based on the shocking discovery that writers can apparently be “scared witless.”