If you walk by enough fences in your life, you pretty quickly build up an immunity to the feckless posturing of people's pets. For the most part, the murderer has been bred out of pet dogs, and you just know that once you get past the fence they nod their adorable widdle heads in self-approval at the inspired performance they just gave, lick for a few seconds the area where their nutsacks used to be, and trot back inside to get a hard-earned bellyrub and eat some food from their prissy, fire-hydrant-shaped bowls.
But not this dog. No one could love this dog. This dog was Hannibal Lecter, and his owners probably trapped him back there through some last-resort magic spell designed to restrain the abominations that we create but can't ever destroy. This dog longed to murder the outside world, and settled in the meantime for sodomizing any rabbits or raccoons that were dumb enough to wander into his accursed domain at night. But I just knew what the real prize was, and it was me. Then the world.
Anyway, every day for 50 feet of my walk home this dog would just go insane on that fence - barking and growling and snarling and baring his teeth through the wood's numerous knotholes, sprinting back and forth looking for some opening he might have missed the last thousand times he looked, knowing that if only he could find it, he could finally eat me and sprint down the street in freedom, frothing at the bloody mouth. And for the last 10 feet of fence, when he knew that I was about to be out of his jurisdiction, he would get even more frenzied and resort to just straight trying to knock the fence down, running up and kind of jumping into it, standing on his hind legs and pushing. And goddammit if every day that fence didn't wobble a little more. Of course, I imputed method to his madness. I pictured him toiling purposefully for years in anticipation of a future that must have initially seemed light-years away, like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption (I was a cultured little kid to think of this reference, especially because the movie wasn't out yet). I pictured him in a lab coat running leverage tests and shit, and circling the day on his calendar that all of his hard work would finally spring him from his penury. And then I imagined that he would plan to make it happen at the most fortuitous moment of that day, and that naturally he would choose the time when I was walking home from school playing with the yo-yo I bought at the assembly. He would just sit there calmly like an asshole of a dog statue while all the other kids went by. He would nod at the other kids, as if to say "Carry on." And when it was just me he'd topple the fence in one swift motion and tear me asunder, taking my tibia as a trophy to hang on his mantle in Mexico. And I was not Benny the Jet. I would not be able pickle the beast.
I can safely say from the adult world that it was kind of a quaint fear, at least compared to my current concerns, which include getting health insurance, figuring out what to do with my life, the ethical implications of accepting any comfort in a world where kwashiorkor is a thing, and Sarah Palin. But at 6 or 7 years old or whatever, worrying about being killed by a fenced-off dog actually represented a firm step in the direction of reality for me. Other items that would have appeared on a Threatdown in my early childhood:
1) The Jibboo
Of all the things you might think a child should be afraid of, I am guessing that a Dr. Seuss drawing would be in your bottom 5, and creepy pedophiles in the top 1. Enter cognitive dissonance, care of the Jibboo from Oh, The Thinks You Can Think!:
I think you'll agree that the Jibboo is not one of Dr. Seuss' more lovable characters. Sure, the friendly wave says "You can trust me," but the fact that it comes from a horrible shadowy birdthing wandering the barren streets at night effectively finishes that statement with "to touch your butthole." And the marks in the dirt behind his feet suggest to me that he has been dragging them, possibly due to the exhaustion of a long journey undertaken to beat the rap in some far away prosaic land. Here, he has stumbled upon an uncorrupted, whimsical Seussian utopia to which he doesn't belong, and that little kid knows it. And that little kid was me. When my parents used to read me this book, I would apparently scream at them in a panic to skip the Jibboo page (and it is just this one page - Seuss never offers an actual answer to the question). I will leave it up to you to decide whether that made me a sissy or a smart kid. But keep in mind before you answer that throughout my childhood I never got molested even once. Would this have been so if Dr. Seuss hadn't implied that you should never to talk to birdthings? Something to think about. So what would YOU do if you met a Jibboo? My advice, then and now: Fucking run.
(And luckily, my parents never sat me down and took me through Dr. Seuss' political cartoons, because this springmonster would have kept me up for weeks:
)
2. Deinonychus
What is Deinonychus, you ask? Take it away, "Wee Sing Dinosaurs" lyrics that triggered my fear!:
VERSE ONEOne of the most fearsome huntersWasn’t big at all,He measured close to ten feet long
And only five feet tall.
CHORUS (forebodingly, guys)Deinonychus,
With his powerful jaw,
Deinonychus,
With his terrible claw.
VERSE TWOStalking quickly through the woods,
He hunted with a pack,
When they spied a likely foe,
They’d race to the attack.
REPEAT CHORUS EVEN FOREBODINGLIER TO SCARE SHAWN DAVIS AND MAKE HIM LOOK LIKE A LITTLE BITCH
Here is Deinonychus engaging in dinosaur parkour. His mouth is open like he is roaring. It is of course impossible for people to determine for sure what color dinosaurs were, or what their voices sounded like, but to me this drawing suggests that Deinonychus' roar sounded like the opening scream from "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who.
Oh, but once upon a time Deinonychus scared the shit out of me, or at least that song did (the Deinonychus one, not The Who. Though speaking of pedophiles...). Which is admittedly very stupid, because even the dumbest little kids with the worst kind of irresponsible parents know that dinosaurs haven't roamed the earth for like 5,000 years, ever since they obstinately refused Noah's efforts to get them all on the boat. You can blame Noah if you want, but you just can't help a superorder that doesn't want to help itself, and dinosaurs were the Amy Winehouse of superorders.
I think the phrase "terrible claw" is what got me, though, because are there really two scarier words to put together? In fact, "terrible claw" is what "Deinonychus" means in Greek, which is much cooler and scarier than, say, what "Hadrosaur" means ("sad existentialist duckbilled pussy").
This is the "The Thinker" of dinosaur art. Suck it, Rodin.
If you're anything like me, you have by now wondered what it would be like to live in a world with Deinonychus. And thankfully, Wikipedia has a size chart that captures approximately how it would go:
Man: (jolly, Flanders-like) Oh, hey there Deinonychus. How's Brenda?
Deinonychus: (opening scream from "Won't Get Fooled Again," dashes forward)
Man: Well, I had a good run.
3. Bees
Actually, I guess this one is reasonable enough. But it's pretty rare that you can pinpoint the exact moment a fear developed, and I can do that with bees. I have a vivid memory of being in preschool in Ft. Meade, Maryland, and our class was doing the bees unit. And somewhere in the course of the unit, my teacher, Mrs. Dennison, made a point to tell me that bees are attracted to the color yellow, and by extension they are attracted to blondes: a dubious claim that I still don't know the truth of (though it would be funny if all bees are always having mid-life crises and chasing blondes), but one which nevertheless made me paranoid about bees for years until one day in my early 20s when I suddenly realized that I am at least 6 times their size (and also that life IS pain, and bees are the smallest of the small-time merchants, trading in a particularly fleeting and meaningless brand, y'know?). But still, there are times when any given bee will freak me out and I'll make some goofy noise and run away as if I'm doing it to be funny and over-the-top when in fact I'm doing it out of self-preservation and terror.
At first when I thought about it, I concluded that Mrs. Dennison was a horrible crone for messing with me like this, in spite of the fact that she gave us all seashells on the first day of school, and seashells are awesome. Then I remembered a few things from my preschool report card:
"Shawn is going through a fisticuffs time. He needs better negotiating skills."
"Shawn has trouble with rules. He sometimes thinks they are for 'the other kids' (his words). Therefore [they] don't apply to him. He forgets and acts on impulse."
And I remember a few times during recess or whatever when I was forced to sit in a chalk circle that she would exasperatedly draw on the ground because I was being an asshole to the other kids. In other words, I was the terrible person. I apparently tormented this woman and her class, and she probably used bees to give me some small measure of comeuppance. And I respect that. After all, I can't say that I am unhappy that bees supposedly die when they sting you, or that Deinonychus is extinct, or that the Jibboo is serving consecutive life sentences in a prison for imaginary pedophile birds no one cares about anymore. They are jerks, and that's what they get. And do you know how the dog story ends? I took a few steps away from the fence, then realized that there was no barking from which to recoil. Then I felt this weird, swelling sense of triumph. Because in that moment, I realized that though it may suck getting older and having less-fun fears and such, at least time also killed that fucking dog for me.
What an asshole.
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