The Enemy is Fear – Gandhi

The week before Halloween, many streaming sources offer many classic and modern horror movies and for free. I love that; these days I’m fascinated by horror movies, and I can jump between Wolfman and Friday 13^th and The Ring and The Blair Witch Project to my heart’s content. But for a long time I couldn’t do any horror movies, or for that matter anything I thought might be a horror movie.

When I was very young, my mother took me to an animated Mickey Mouse film,  Mickey Down Under, featuring a large and ferocious ostrich which was trying to stomp Mickey into the dust. Mickey made it through the experience but, apparently, I didn’t, and kicked and struggled and screamed at the top of my lungs until mom took me home and fed me cinnamon toast with applesauce on top to settle my nerves. But no amount of cinnamon toast ever got me to go back.

‘Course, being a nervous young fella, it wasn’t just movies that scared me. Dogs and bullies worked, too. And running from things and crying worked in both cases. A year or so after the theatre incident I was visiting my Aunt Joy and Uncle Bob on the Monterey Peninsula, where I felt quite safe and got to wander freely. But I traveled this time past their property lines and onto the turf of the neighbor’s small dog. He began barking and chasing me, and the property owners, bullies all, sat on their deck howling with laughter as the little mutt, about the size of a yam, yipped and snapped and sent me running, shame-faced, back to my own turf. (Today if that happened to one of my kids I would go over and scare the crap out of the neighbors just to see how they like it. But in those days I was taught not to make waves, so I just sucked my fears up and lived with them, like always.)

Later, I found new and better things about fear. For instance, some stuff that scared me then was also fun. In my teen years the biggest fun was to jump from the canyon rock faces into the Arroyo Seco River south of Salinas, Ca. Before all the droughts this was still a good-sized river, 100 feet across or more, and up in its canyon it was all great cliffs and pools and small beaches, so pretty. It seemed even higher looking down but I’d still bet our jumps from the Canyon rock faces were a good 30 to 40 feet down to the river.

Jumping then also took some agility as you didn’t want to jump from just anywhere. You were jumping into very black and deep pools and (setting aside for a minute my fear of what lived in these pools) there was always a strong possibility of hitting underwater ledges and boulders and logs that could rip you up. And so we’d edge carefully out across the cliff face, using roots and little cracks in the rock face, inching along like strange rock climbers who only went sideways, and we would wait for the sun to push through clouds and provide a good look down, and if the pool below us seemed clear all the way down, we’d take a breath and push off and go, arms tight at our sides, yelling all the way down out of sheer terror and just for the joy of it.

Hitting the pool was a big jolt, and then it seemed I was sinking down through ice, it really was that cold. I was so jacked up that I didn’t really care until my feet hit the sandy bottom and I started swimming, hard, towards the light. But by the time I got to the top, swam to shore and climbed out I was shaking so hard my teeth were clacking.  My first stop was my towel and I’d dry myself ferociously until my skin had some circulation again. And then I’d climb up and do it again; we all did, until at last the sun slid down over the Canyon’s ridge and sucked away the warmth and as one we’d all quit.

Big fun, and as I said, after a while I welcomed that fear. But in the back of my mind the other fear, the movies, were always waiting, and eventually, I decided to deal with it. These were the kind of thing the older kids wanted to go see, and I wanted to be climbing into the trunk of Dave’s dad’s giant Oldsmobile and sneaking into the drive-ins with the rest of the gang someday. So I organized a little emersion therapy for myself. My pal Roger (my only confidant) and I decided to go see The Fly and The Creature from the Black Lagoon on a double bill. We’d see these two movies first, week one, and if I could do those OK, then we’d go see Psycho (which Rog said people said was really, really scary), which was coming to our little town theatre the following week.

The first 45 minutes of the Fly was OK but nothing about the movie scared me overly-much until the guy and the fly got stuck in the transporting machine together and the part with the tiny human head and the fly body was caught in the elevator screaming “help me, help me”, which for some reason terrified me as much as it apparently did the folks in the elevator.

Its other part, with the huge fly head and the normal human body except for the one hairy fly “arm”, was pretty gross, too, and the scientist mutating into a whole and really awful fly was more than my system could take. Before it was over I had visited the bathroom four times, at least per Rog, who was good at counting as well as being sworn to secrecy.

(Ed Note: In researching this bit I found out several things I didn’t know. For instance, did you know that not only was there the original 1958 The Fly movie but a year later, in 1959 there was The Return of The Fly and in 1965, even  The Curse of The Fly? And lest we forget, in 1986 we had the remake, The Fly, and in 1989 Fly 2, both movies so horrific I don’t even link them here. Plus there is the possibility that with classic horror being reprised again this year, Flies, the third movie in the sequel series, could be made.)

I lucked out a bit on The Creature. It was so un-scary that even I, with my hyper-active imagination, couldn’t work up much anxiety around it and the “monster” was so obviously just a guy wearing a plastic suit more on the level of something you might rent at a party store. So I stuck that one out, pretty easily, and Roger and I went off and got Foster Freeze Triple Burgers with Secret Sauce and a chocolate milkshake to celebrate. And the following week Rog and I went to see Psycho.

You know what everyone says about high-fiving too early, right? Big mistake. HUGE mistake.  Psycho, with its chilling story and compelling characters and wonderful scenes (remember the shower scene? The long walk up the stairs?) was certainly far and away scarier than the Fly or the Monster from the Black Lagoon. In fact, sixty years later, it’s still considered the all-time best thriller-chiller. And I was the worst movie-goer possible.

One of the worst parts (okay, okay, the best part) was the music. When something was gonna happen in the movie, I could tell just by the music ten minutes beforehand that this wasn’t going to be good, and my anxiety levels ratcheted up just like (apparently) all the other movie-goers’, and by the time the grandmother swung around in her rocking chair in the basement we all as one leaped to our feet and began screaming and (you were expecting this, right?) I had to go home.

But since my mother wasn’t available to give me a ride, I had to walk, and it was already dark, and, worst of all, that night I had to ask my dad if I could leave the adjoining door open so I could hear him snoring because if HE was snoring, Anthony Perkins wouldn’t be able to get me.

It took several months for me to get over that and sleep peacefully at night.

So movies still got me, and I was still a teen-ager contending with different fears. At about fifteen I copied our family’s car key. In the dark of night I could push open our garage door ever so slowly on its well-oiled hinges and push our car, a clean white 1953 Ford with a little flathead V-8, back down the driveway, rolling easy on a slight downward slope, and fire it up at the end of the driveway and go for great, full-speed runs around the outskirts of town, just racing against time and thinking all the time about having to push the car BACK slightly uphill into the garage in just a little while.

Pushing the car back into the garage was very slow going and maybe more scary than most anything else I ever did, as it took forever and I kept waiting for my dad to hear me and come out. My dad was quite protective of his car, you know? So that’s a last story, and as I said maybe it was my scariest story of all, but I’d bet it’s still not any scarier than yours are for you, am I right?

These days, nothing fictional on television phases me much. Reality is far worse than television.  Oh, sure, I jump when a skeletal hand protrudes out of a grave site when it shouldn’t. Or I’ll quickly avert my eyes when, say, the murdering psycho (Anthony Hopkins) in Silence of The Lambs is preparing to “have an old friend for dinner”.

But now, even with horrors on television every day and with reality TV showing stuff far worse than anything I saw back as an early teen, I don’t run away quite as much. And I bet many of you reading this have gone through just about the same thing, learning to address your fears. Feel free to chime in. (Just don’t talk about learning about sex. This is a family blog, and anyway that really was the MOST scary subject for me back in my day – and a subject for a later discussion.)