Fraidy Cat

I get afraid of stuff just like everybody else. When someone says, "He's afraid of his own shadow," I can relate. Shadows aren't inherently scary, but because I'm high-strung, a sudden something in my peripheral vision can startle me. Sometimes that can be a shadow. So sue me.

The first two scary entities in my life were women (sort of). My parents gave me a yellow 78 r.p.m. record of someone reading "Snow White" when I must have been three or four. The evil queen terrified me. I remember an aunt and uncle coming over to visit and my parents telling me to put the record on, but I wouldn't. I didn't even feel safe with four adults in the room, and I stopped eating apples. Right around that time, I had a dream in which I was trapped in our building's basement with a female mannequin who wanted to kill me. I tried to talk her out of it by inviting her to become part of our family. If she'd known my family, she would have run screaming to the nearest department store.

That was when I lived in New Jersey until the age of five. In Miami, where I did my growing up, my sister and I discovered the horrifying world of tropical bugs. Worst of all was the palmetto bug, basically a giant flying cockroach. Terry still won't go back to Florida. Some bugs you could find anywhere, like wasps. Why did God make wasps? I can't figure it out. However, just last week I read about a newly discovered species of wasp that actually does serve a purpose. It injects a venom into cockroaches that renders them nearly immobile, then eats them. I forget which country this is in, but Terry might like to go sometime.

I lived for movies and television, and I had a love/hate relationship with my favorite movies and TV shows because they were all scary. I was a masochist even then.

Five early films fried me:

Psycho (1960) (not even Mother was as unnerving as that psychiatrist in the last scene)
13 Ghosts (same year) (I lasted about 45 minutes)
The Haunting (1963) ("Whose hand was I holding?" -- scariest line in movie history)
Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) (so scary I actually peed in other people's pants)
Wait Until Dark (1967) (so much fun watching all that popcorn go airborne during the climax)

These three TV shows -- and three episodes in particular -- also destroyed me:

The Twilight Zone ("The New Exhibit" -- wax figures of famous murderers come to life -- eek!)
The Outer Limits ("The Zanti Misfits" -- ants from space with human faces -- yikes!)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (which became The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962) ("An Unlocked Window" -- dead of night, old dark house, serial killer on the loose, the biggest shock ending of its time for TV -- holy crap!)

I also had an unnatural fear of quicksand in those days. Blame it on Tarzan movies.

I enjoy flying on airplanes, but it's an enjoyment mixed with dread. I never, ever remove my seat belt. Absolutely any occurrence out of the ordinary, besides the occasional turbulence, and the words "next of kin" start floating through my head. What's worst is that I've yet to be on a plane when something unusual happens where the crew actually tells us what's going on. I was on a flight that had just taken off but didn't climb for what seemed like two whole minutes. Dogs were chasing us below. Yet the flight attendants said nothing. On another flight, we were this close to landing when, instead of doing it, the plane rose back up and completely circled the area before finally setting down. No word from the pilot. I just hate when that happens.

Oddly, I don't share the fear of public speaking that others have. I've read my poems in cafes and bars in New York City and stood before a decade's worth of classrooms in Kansas. The fear turns into adrenaline in those instances, and I feel almost a kind of power and control, because, unlike with airplanes, if anything's going to go wrong, the fault is only mine. I learned a lesson about fear through one of these experiences: Before giving a reading in a public library, I told myself that the adrenaline I was feeling was silly -- I was mistaking it for fear -- and I repressed it. Lousiest reading I ever gave. The lesson was that fear serves a purpose, and now I embrace it. Not that you'll ever catch me reading in public or teaching these days -- I mean, I'm not an idiot.

Maybe I live in  Idaho because it's a catastrophe-free zone. Here are the natural (and not-so-natural) disasters that have threatened me all my life:

Florida: hurricanes
New York: smog so thick that sometimes you can't see across the Hudson from Jersey to Manhattan
Kansas: tornadoes
Washington: earthquakes
Maine: Nor'easters and Governor LePage

So far I think the worst I've had to fear in Boise are temperature inversions and the occasional stray mountain lion. And oh, of course, my shadow on sunny days.