Childhood Fears

Ink // 2010

My earliest memories were of a very uneasy, uncertain time in a loud urban environment where there always seemed to be some kind of threat looming not too distantly. I remember living with my aunt & uncle and their two children and seeing my parents for what seemed like only an hour or two per week. Adding to the everpresent sounds of tires screeching outside the window and the ebb and flow of police sirens, everyone swore up and down that the house we were living in was haunted, so every time the house settled or a light flickered, it was just as likely to have been the work of a poltergeist than anything else. My cousin Mark and I would play endless Nintendo games and often run screaming from the game room after playing 'Friday the 13th' for too long. We'd squabble over whether Freddy Kruger or the grim reaper would win in a fist-fight. He and his father Mickey would usually succeed in terrifying me just by describing an abstract situation. Uncle Mickey, with his long black hair teased out and always wearing a torn-up band t-shirt emblazoned with the staple imagery of 80's heavy metal which I found unquestionable frightening (Eddie, razorblades, etc.), always maintained a distance from the world and had a detailed answer for every question we asked him, giving him a very scholarly demeanor. That being said, he kept a clove of garlic when driving through the Holland Tunnel, and threw it out the window at the precise moment because he insisted that a vampire was trapped there. All these things were fun while they were happening but I remember everything reaching a fever-pitch one night and I felt overwhelmed by the myriad spookiness and started crying. Uncle Mickey showed up and listened to me spout all these worries about criminals bursting in through the windows and ghosts and vampires and other spooky shit, to which he responded in so many words that the best way to keep a threatening presence away from you is to become even scarier than the threat itself. He reassured me that any thug or manifested specter that entered his house had to deal with him before anyone else, which is why he wore such scary shirts. A short time later something happened behind the scenes and I didn't see any of them again until my late teens, so I was no longer privy to that distinct imagery for a long time. I was a bit surprised when found out that these insane shirts Uncle Mickey wore were Iron Maiden shirts and not the festering symbols of death and fear that my child brain remembered, but at least I knew then that he had pretty good taste.

Here's to you, Uncle Mickey, wherever you may be.