Childhood Fears

"Wouldn't it be nice to be a kid again?" Hattie asked me a few weeks ago.  We were on the phone, as we often are at night since we're both insomniacs.  "Not, like, gym class or anything, but think about it.  No bills."


"No bills," I said dreamily.


"No job.  No responsibilities.  No worries."


"Seriously," I said.  "What was your biggest worry when you were seven?  We didn't have worries!"


"Exactly!" Hattie cried.  "We were worried about, what?  What Santa Claus was going to bring us that year?  Maybe the boogeyman."


"For me it was the alligator who lived under my bed and wanted to shoot my feet with a laser beam."


Hattie started to laugh.  "The what?"


"There was an alligator who lived under my bed.  He was a very learned alligator.  He'd invented his own laser beam to shoot my feet with.  Only, it wasn't very versatile.  He had to use a different computer program to make it shoot depending on where I was in the room and how many feet I was standing on at the time, and all the programs were on different floppy discs that weren't very well organized because his wife was a bad housekeeper.  I jumped around a lot to thwart him."


Hattie was silent for a long time.  "I don't even know what to say about that.  And what the hell is a floppy disc?"


I sighed.  Hattie's a decade younger than me and very often I have to explain things that existed before the nineties.  "They were five inches wide.  They flopped.  They could hold up to 140 kilobytes."


"Megabytes," she corrected me.


"Nope.  Kilo."


"Really?  Like, seriously?"


"You're trying to avoid the alligator that lived under my bed."


"I'm trying not to think you needed therapy even as a child."

"I'll draw you a picture of the genius alligator so you understand," I told her.  "I was also afraid of the ghost that lived in my clock."


"You were not."


"And volcanoes.  I was terrified that I'd be playing at the park one day and a volcano would erupt and I wouldn't be able to save my book in time."


"Why would you have a book at the park?"


"You've met me, right?"


"Yeah, okay.  Volcanoes?"

"Mount St. Helens erupted when I was a child.  I was emotionally scarred.  Oh, and Russians."


"Russians what?"


"I was afraid of the Russians."


"Why?"


"They were a superpower.  They were going to kill us all."


"People were afraid of the Russians?"


"I hate you," I told her.  That's what I tell her whenever she makes me feel old.  Then I listed off all the other things I worried about as a child.  I worried about a polar bear eating me.  I worried about my dog running away.  I worried about a polar bear eating my dog.  The fact that I lived nowhere near polar bears didn't matter, since my sense of direction and understanding of distance were pretty much nonexistent until I learned how to drive.


I was afraid that the zombies from Michael Jackson's Thriller video were going to get me.  I worried about forgetting my lunch money.  I worried about starving to death if I forgot my lunch money.  I worried about falling off the monkey bars.  I worried that my dad would get hit by a car.  I worried that my dog would get hit by a car.  I was terrified of clowns which, okay, I still am, because clowns are evil and I was a smart little girl.


I listed off all my childhood fears and anxieties, and Hattie laughed her ass off because she is also evil.  "Mostly, though, I was afraid of the man in the hat who lived in my basement."


"You had a man living in your basement?" she asked.


"He wasn't a real man.  He just looked like a man.  Sort of.  He was all black.  More of a shadow than a person, but really, really dark, not like a normal shadow.  He had a long coat and a fedora and he would watch me when I was playing.  I always wanted to run up the stairs when he showed up, but I was too afraid so I just kept playing, like if I pretended I didn't know he was there he wouldn't get me."


Hattie was silent.  I sighed and waited for her to start laughing.  "Dude," she said.  "That's real."


"I was a neurotic child, okay?  I know this, I--"


"No, seriously.  That guy with the hat, he's a shadow person.  Like, thousands of people have seen him."


"Fuck you," I said.


"Google it," she said.


I googled it.  I was not happy with the results.  I prefer to believe that I was just neurotic and that there wasn't really a malevolent shadow being watching me all those times.


I am not going to draw a picture of the man in the hat who lived in my basement, because he was scary as hell then, and I strongly dislike the idea that he might have been real.  Instead, you get a portrait of me and Hattie, just to end things on a lighter note.

This might seem like it's just a really shitty drawing, but it's not.  We actually look exactly like this, only I'm even taller.  And I'm eating nachos right now.