Along Came a Spider
who was that eight-legged nightrider?
I grew up in the hot desert clime where tarantulas thrive. I’ll never forget moving away from the San Francisco Bay Area at ten and discovering these ponderous ogres traipsing the dusty trails that emanated from our new wilderness abode.
The hairy eight-legged vagabonds were as vast as my child’s outspread hand. I could put my hand near one and the slightly poisonous spider would crawl on to hitch a ride.
I found fluttery spider tickles thrilling.
Mom screamed when she ran across one of these black shaggy pets in my lunchbox where I left it on the kitchen counter for her to find.
Living in the wilderness this past decade, I would watch my dog doing a dusty tango with a tarantula, a long-stemmed rose near her snout.
One of my brothers survived his Vietnam War gig back in the seventies with only minor physical damage, but then got bit by a necrotizing brown recluse after he returned stateside.
Back then, nobody ever heard of a brown recluse.
This most poisonous arachnid soon became infamous in the USA.
My brother’s thigh was wrecked for months, festering like a war wound. Finally, he was left with a scarred crater big enough to cradle his fist.
After that, I would get the screaming willies any time I saw a spider. I seriously dread feeling the plasticine POP of those icky splattery guts when it comes time to whack one of these creepy pillagers.
Some spider infestations are so resplendent, it creeps ya out for years to come. Spidery visions crawling into one’s cranium at quivery moments.
I’ll never forget hiking with my dog Barley back in the nineties and we were just about to take a shortcut under the road. This culvert was big enough to walk through and at the last moment, I realized the inner sanctum was crisscrossed with a solid twitching mass of bulbous spiders.
Every time I spot a culvert, I still envision the squiggling festering mass of angry spiders within.
A fizzy jiggy whirligig of squirm brought to us by Gus Gresham:
Reading Gus’s piece, I began to quiver and quake. My eyelids kept twitching and my guts were pitching as I was thrown back into the waterlogged tent from my cross-country bicycle ride back in the eighties.
That night was a spiderific invasion of bewitching proportions.
Being from crispy California where it never rains in summer, I wasn’t expecting the seasonal deluges that frequently wrack the interior of this continent. My tiny pup tent, barely larger than my sleeping bag, was evidently the one dry spot, a fact broadcast to all spiders across the empty flooded campground.
My sodden flashlight in a puddle, I could not see the fiends. I could only feel creepy crawling sensations from head to toe. I ran to a lonely restroom screaming and swatting, hoping to catch a few winks before dawn.
Having graduated from a hicktown high school back in 1974, my small class of fellow graduates were privy to a rowdy party in the foothills. An ass-kicking all-nighter. Only hardcore rabble rousers need grace this four-wheel-drive ranch.
I was there wearing horns and no panties.
Other graduates may claim to attend such sentimental farewell parties as one last hurrah to that bunch of raunchy boneheads we had no choice but to hang out with for four years of high school. Fools we hope to avoid until we’re obligated to do some dumb boring reunion hobnobbing.
But I saw this grad party in the foothills as more of a last-ditch romp with all the football stars and bandmembers I never got a chance to nail during that hardcore debauchery fondly referred to as high school.
I couldn’t tell ya which guy’s sleeping bag I was in.
The pain in my armpit felt like a meteor had come flashing down from the starlit heavens to punish me for being such a flagrant slut that night.
Next day, a guy took one look at the purple Rorschach splotch covering my armpit and claimed it must’ve been a pa-ha-way-lah . . . a spider I have not been able to identify despite the vast internet available to us these days.
My armpit was purple that entire summer. Kinda like savoring a pair of panties. Sniff my armpit and reminisce about my grad party gambol.
Theodore McDowell has skillfully celebrated my defunk state of mind in high school and beyond:
