My Bedroom

My Bedroom 



I was twelve years old, the summer of 1978,  when my mom let me move my bedroom into the basement of our house. I no longer had to share a bedroom with my little fag brother. In 1978, at twelve years old, to call someone “fag” was as bad as it gets. He was only ten and didn’t even know what fag meant but it sure pissed him off when I called him it, so I never stopped for that whole year. To tell you the truth I don’t think I knew what fag meant but that didn’t matter.

  The basement of our house was just one big open unfinished space; the furnace and hot water heater in one corner, two small windows high up one wall, and boxes of old crap my mom had been dragging around for years but never looked at. I had to move the boxes around a bit to clear a space under one of the windows as this area would now become my new bedroom. I hung  white sheets from the floor joists above to act as walls, ran an extension cord from one of the two outlets in the basement so I could plug in my lamp and radio, and decorated the cold concrete wall below the window with my “Stoned agin” and Farrah Fawcett posters.

  My mom and dad had divorced a couple summers before so my brother, my sister, and I learned to take care of ourselves a lot. My mom worked in a bar at night and we went to school during the day so a lot of the parenting was left up to me, as I was the oldest. What a mistake that was, I was pretty much a sadist; I turned the two of them into my personal slaves. Anyone who says the world would be a better place if children were in control is completely out to lunch. It would be total anarchy; civilization would be extinct within a generation.

  My mom’s boyfriend Conrad helped me move my bed and a dresser into the basement and I had my brother and sister help me move the rest of my stuff the next day after school. I was now a real estate owner, my own bedroom at last! My mom’s crap was pushed to the far wall and replaced with my crap. A couple of books that I tried to read, but with the attention span of a doorknob, never finished, a stack of comic books, some toys that I hadn’t played with for years, and a couple of playboy magazines that my best friend stole from his older brother and gave to me.

    I didn’t usually read many of the articles in the playboys but one did catch my attention. It was an interview with Christopher Reeves who was staring in the upcoming movie “Superman” that would be coming out at Christmas time. To me, this was a must see; I could hardly wait. The article talked about the special effects and how the flying scenes were the most realistic ever filmed. There was also non-sense about working with Gene Hackman and questions about any hanky panky with Margot Kidder, but that stuff just bored the hell out of me, I didn’t even know who these people were. It was only the end of June, and by the time “Superman” came to our little theatre it would probably be into January of next year. How was I going to wait seven months?

    Our house was across the street from Cranberry Lake resort, this was a little park with a sandy beach and a good size playground with a soccer field. All the kids in the neighbourhood spent the summer playing and swimming there. The lake itself was very small, weed infested, full of bullfrogs and water snakes, and had a bird sanctuary on the far end. The frogs and snakes didn’t bother anyone because they stayed hidden in the lily pads and bull rushes, but the birds on the far end of the lake brought duck lice. When the wind blew from the bird sanctuary towards the park everyone swimming would end up with what we called “the itch.”This was a very itchy skin rash caused by duck lice burrowing under your skin, and if not treated would cause you to scratch your skin until it bled.

    This particular summer I seemed to get the itch far worse than any of my friends, even on days that we didn’t go swimming I would end up with itchy, painful pocks. Some of the spots would become infected and very sore. My mom tried many different lotions and salves; I also remember having to take baths with some kind of oatmeal mixture added to the water. This was supposed to draw the little buggers out from under my skin. It helped quite a bit, but within a few days, new abscesses would erupt. This went on the entire summer of 78. By fall my mom began to get worried when the blisters would return even though we had not swum in the lake for almost two months. Enough was enough; my mom decided it was time to go see a doctor.

    The doctor was not convinced that the spots had anything to do with lice. He lanced one of the large puss filled boils, drained it onto a swab, and inspected the infected cavity that remained. He was very concerned with the decay level of the surrounding flesh and the signs of blood poisoning that had begun. Immediately, he started me on an intravenous battery of anti-biotic and other medicines. The doctor and a nurse then began the painful treatment of lancing, draining and cleaning the remaining 15 carbuncles.  I spent the next seven days returning to the hospital in the morning and evening for intravenous treatment. By the end of the week, all of the pustules had shrunk and dried to scabs that itched like mad.  It looked like we had finally beaten this mysterious malady.

    One Saturday morning, a couple of months after my last visit to the hospital, I woke up with the strangest sensation on my face. I could barely see out of my left eye or breathe out of my nose. When I put my hand to my face, I discovered what the problem was. My upper lip was inflated to the size of a banana, my eye was swollen nearly shut, and the skin of my nose felt as taut as a drums skin. I ran up stairs to get a look in the bathroom mirror but my mom was already in there. When she finished, she opened the door took one look at me and screamed, which of course made me scream, and then I began to cry. For the first time I was scared of what was happening to me. She told me to go get dressed, that we were going to the hospital.

    I went downstairs and found my cloths in a heap on the basement floor. I put on my pants then pulled my “KISS” t-shirt over my head. As I was tucking my shirt into my pants I felt a movement and then a fiery sting on my right nipple. I yanked at the neck of my t-shirt so I could see what was causing the pain. With my one good eye, I was straining to get a look over my enormous lip and down into my shirt. What I saw I have never forgotten; a spider, the color of butter and the size of a marble with short stout legs. It was positioned face down, ass up, and its fangs buried into the flesh of my nipple. When I pulled open the neck of my shirt it withdrew its dagger like fangs and scampered straight up my chest towards my face.

    Now to say that I panicked would be a little understated. I would say it started out as panic but quickly progressed into absolute terror then to shit fit and finally mental meltdown. I flailed and swatted, danced about and ran in circles. I was unable to scream because I couldn’t breathe, I sure wanted to scream but not a squeak. It was at about this point that everything went from grey to black and I fainted. The next thing I remembered was my mom shaking me, I opened my eyes and she looked relieved. My brother and sister were also standing there looking down at me, grinning, the domination I once had over them gone with this performance over a little bug. The fog in my head cleared and it all came back to me, “The Spider?” I had yelled. Apparently I had killed it while thrashing about; I had squashed it against my neck. My mom picked the dead spider off of me and put it in a little jar so we could take it with us in case the doctor had to know what kind of spider had bit me.

    By the time we had arrived at the hospital the swelling of my face had started to go down slightly but my right nipple had puffed-up to the size of a golf ball. I don’t need to tell you how bizarre that looked in my tight t-shirt. My brother would later in life make fun of me about looking like the elephant man with one boob. As it turned out the spider in question was not really that dangerous to people but I was having allergic reactions to the venom that got worse with every bite; 25 bites in total. My avoidance to all vegetables or anything healthy, for that matter, left my immune system a little worse for wear and made it hard for my body to resist infections. I had to take intravenous treatments again, but this time it made me feel very sick to my stomach. To make things worse that Saturday was the last night “Superman” was showing in our theatre and I was supposed to go watch it with all my friends but I was feeling so crappy that I couldn’t go. Everyone told me how cool the movie was later; that hurt a lot, I really wanted to see it.

  When we arrived home from the hospital, my mom and Conrad had a close look in the basement. There must have been a hundred of these spiders nesting amongst the floor joists. They used a vacuum cleaner to suck up all the spiders and their webs. It was too late; I was too scared to go back down there. I had to move my bedroom back up stairs. From that day on, I have been terrified of spiders. Nothing in this world scares me more than spiders, I can close my eyes and think of a spider and feel my heart rate double. I am a six feet one inch, two hundred and thirty pound heap of “Jello” when a spider is anywhere near me. If a spider happens to be crawling on me, I will faint. I have owned two houses, both without basements.

The End

Word count: 1862