Arachnophobia: The Art

I hate bugs. For the record, I am NOT afraid of bugs; I detest them. Spiders, on the other hand, make my skin crawl. I am absolutely terrified of them, and thousands of dollars worth of therapy will not lead me to believe that my fear of them is irrational compared to the actual threat they pose.

I am considerate of them when I am out-of-doors. I am in their territory; however, when they are in MY territory, I want them GONE. I don’t care how.

Anyone who thinks my fear of spiders is ridiculous should consider this: Spiders hang out in bathrooms watching humans doing their private things in there. The fact that they are voyeuristic freaks should scare people. I admit this fear of mine is illogical, and I laugh at myself because of it, but I will stop short of almost nothing to remove myself from their company. Some of those incidents have been hilarious.

There was the time I was at The Big Box Store That Shall Not Be Named, looking at movies. My husband had wandered off somewhere. A strange man spoke to my youngest daughter, “Honey, brush that bug off your mom’s back.”

I thought it was maybe a friend of my husband’s and he set me up.

Daughter, very shy in her younger years, just looked at her feet.

But the man repeated himself and seemed earnest, so I started to get mildly nervous. He said bug, so I was grossed out, but not panicked. I asked Daughter if there was anything on my back, but she didn’t move or say anything. I now really thought he was just kidding. Suddenly, I hear, ‘…it’s a spider…,’ and before I could rip my shirt off in the middle of the store, someone hit me on the back. Hard. I whirled around to see the stranger’s companion.

“Why’re you just standin’ there, lettin’ that thing crawl up this lady’s back?”

I barely stammered a thank you, and when I looked down, there was the carcass lying on the floor.

And The Big Box Store That Shall Not Be Named seems to be the place to go for spiders. Twice I was attacked when I was with my son after leaving the store.

The first time I was driving. We had just turned out of the parking lot and were doing nearly 40 mph when a spider sprang from the dashboard. I simultaneously screamed, slammed on the brakes and jammed the transmission into park. In one fluid motion, I released the seatbelt and jumped out of the car in the middle of Bridge Street in East Syracuse.

My son jumped from the car, too, and started running down the road. I couldn’t figure out where he was going. Imagining how this scene must have looked, I started laughing. I walked around the front of the car to the curb and yelled to my son. He sees me doubled over in laughter and starts walking back toward the spectacle.

“Well, you screamed and slammed on the brakes, so I thought there was a bomb in the car.”

This only made me laugh harder. When I finally caught my breath, I told him he had definitely seen too many movies that summer. (Can you say “Speed” and “Blown Away?”) I asked him to perform a seek-and-destroy mission. He refused. I asked him what he had purchased in the store.

“Ping-pong paddles,” he said.

“They’ll work just fine,” I said, and took them from his protesting hands. Luckily, the critter had shimmied over to the passenger side of the dash, and I got him with the first hit. Son cleaned the dash, and we got out of Dodge before the cops showed up.

The next time Son was driving. It was my first time in his new car. This time we were still in the parking lot when a spider began its descent toward my arm by the window. I didn’t even have time to scream. All I could do was repeat, “It’s gonna get on me; it’s gonna get on me!”

I was trapped between the door and a very high console. I pulled the door handle repeatedly to no avail. It wouldn’t open. Everything was electronic, and I couldn’t find any of the buttons to open anything. I braced myself as much as possible against the console while Son used his therapy voice to try and keep me calm.

“Mom, I’m stopping the car. I will get him.”

About the time I was going to crawl over Son (who, by the way, was only a couple of days post-op after an emergency appendectomy) and out the driver’s side door, he carefully parked and ran around to my side of the car and threw open the door. I was ripping my jean jacket off before the door even opened. I jumped out and threw the jacket to the ground. He claimed to have found and murdered the monster. Since I didn’t see a body, I stood in the parking lot, refusing to pick up the jacket or return to the vehicle. It took him more than 20 minutes to convince me to get back in the car.

A couple of years ago, I was typing in the dining room when a shoe suddenly came flying through the air and landed with a loud “whoomp” on the floor next to me. I literally jumped out of my seat, staring at the shoe. As I stood next to my desk, I looked up toward the living room to see my husband sitting there with a huge grin on his face.

“What was that?” I demanded.

“A shoe,” he replied, barely able to contain himself.

“Well, what’s under it?”

The panic was rising in my stomach now, and he wouldn’t answer me. I saw a couple of legs moving from under one side of the shoe, and I jumped up on the chair.

“What’s under it?” I repeated, nearing hysteria.

He started laughing. I kept yelling at him to tell me, and he laughed harder and harder.

“I saved your life!” he stated indignantly.

I stepped up on top of the desk, and yelled that whatever it was, get out here and kill it because it is crawling out from beneath the shoe. At this point, my youngest came down, saw me standing on the desk, rolled her eyes up in her head and turned around and went back upstairs.

These days I try to remember the wise words of David Spade’s character in the television sitcom “Just Shoot Me”: “I have legs. And they work.”