The Bad Scare

Have You Ever Bathed With A Piranha?

When I was told they were in our pipes, I was afraid to take baths

Thankfully, piranhas don’t eat children in their beds. If they did, I would’ve been terrified to go to bed and certainly would’ve ended up with sleeping issues.

I blame my cousin Randy for creating the bad scare that scarred me for quite some time. My parents trusted him enough to babysit me one fateful night. I was maybe six years old, trusting and innocent. He was 14 years old and didn’t want to be at our house on a weekend night.

Movie night

The 1978 cult film Piranha was on T.V., and he convinced me it was a great movie about kids swimming. “You like to swim, don’t you, Joy?” he’d asked.

I’d had my doubts because he’d been known to do mean things, and he had a certain glint in his eyes. Many years later, the movie A Christmas Story came out, and I saw a kid who resembled my cousin. The mean local bully in the movie, Scut Farkus, had red hair, a pale complexion, and that crazed look in his eyes; that was my cousin.

But Randy had built up this great flick, and I was eager to watch a nice movie about kids going swimming. It sounded Disney-like. “Yes, I like to swim,” I’d responded with trepidation.

Movie becomes horror film

I’d begun watching the film about teenagers enjoying themselves at a lake until they were eaten alive by the razor-sharp teeth of hundreds of human-eating fish that would strip their bodies of all soft anatomy within minutes.

Before long, I was cowering behind one end of the couch in tears, begging him to turn off the movie. Laughing hysterically, just like Scut Farkus, Randy told me that piranhas had made their way into our water system recently.

He was an ornery kid. He had two older brothers who terrorized him, so here was his chance to terrorize me. The more scared I got, the more he thought it was funny and the more elaborate his story became.

He convinced me that piranhas were in bathtub drains and would come out if I took a bath. They would also come up through the toilet and out of the sink. They were in every water pipe or drain he could think of.

The aftermath

I was too terrified to bathe, wash my hands, go to the bathroom, or do anything related to water or pipes. I had nightmares about those human-attacking fish constantly. I talked about piranhas nonstop for the next few months. My cousin caused a very bad scare with a simple movie about kids going swimming.