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Nothing to fear but stupidity itself

Posted Tuesday, September 2, 2008

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I understand how fear works on the body. How the release of adrenalin produces a surge to fuel your fight or flight, and how that is followed by a release of endorphins, to reward you for winning, or getting away, I guess.

Endorphins feel great, and don’t have any side effects. If they could be manufactured, they’d replace alcohol, tobacco and recreational drugs in popularity.

There are several ways to get your body to give you endorphins. Exercise does it. Some foods, like hot peppers, horseradish and wasabi, will do it. I’ve read that chocolate does, too.

And fear, of course, will trigger an endorphin release. That’s why people like extreme sports, roller coasters, and scary movies. Scary movies, especially, because they get their fear safe and sanitized that way, without incurring any real risk.

When I say people I mean, “other people.” I don’t like scary movies. And you’d have to give me a whole handful of something way stronger than endorphins to get me on a roller coaster.

I don’t like being scared. It isn’t fun. It makes me mean.

Scary things—real scary things—have happened to me, mainly at work, where I got assaulted a couple of times, shot at once (they were actually shooting at some drug dealers I was interviewing, and probably didn’t even know I was there, but it sounds cool to say I got shot at), and I can’t count the number of times I faced imminent doom at the hands of other drivers on Houston’s freeways.

I don’t remember bursting into songs of joy after any of those incidents. I remember swearing and bitching a lot, sitting in emergency rooms for hours, and wishing I had chosen some career where you don’t get dirty and have to run a lot.

Maybe I’m immune to endorphins. Maybe I never got any because I was hopelessly oblivious to the danger I had been in—maybe nature doesn’t reward stupid people with endorphins.

The time I (i.e., the guys I was with) got shot at, I was standing in an empty lot in Sunnyside talking with a guy, while three or four of his friends stood around listening. Something caught my eye, and I saw little puffs of dirt flying up from the ground about eight feet away. Intrigued, I wandered over to look. “Did you see that?” I turned to ask the guys. They were all gone.

To his credit, the guy I’d been interviewing came back after the sound of the gunshots stopped (they don’t sound like they do in movies, the noise isn’t impressive at all). He got me by the arm and told me to go home, in a tone that said he believed I was too stupid to be out on my own in the world.

Later, I tried to think about how one of the bullets could have hit me, and I could have died, or been really hurt, but as far as my brain was concerned, there were just these interesting little puffs of dirt flying up for no reason. I never was able to get scared over the incident. So, no endorphins for me.

The times I got assaulted, I was never scared. I was just mad as hell, and busy assaulting right back. If I got endorphins for those, they were lost in the monotony of report-making and emergency room-sitting.

Maybe that’s why people watch scary movies—so they’ll know when they’re supposed to be scared (when the music gets creepy and some character even more oblivious than me is going into the basement with a candle to see why the lights went out), and not accidentally miss their endorphin release.

I did get a really powerful endorphin rush after the Scariest Thing That Ever Happened To Me. I felt it, and I remember it. The STTEHTM was in about 1978 or 1979, I guess, right after we had moved to a house in Shady Acres, outside Brazoria.

We had lived on Surfside Beach since moving down here from Oklahoma in 1975, and the move inland was hard to adjust to for a week or two—I’d gotten accustomed to the constant surf noise, and I had trouble sleeping without it. And Shady Acres, back then, was one of the quietest, darkest places I’ve ever lived. Our nearest neighbors were too far away to see lights from their houses. The road we lived on only held a few houses, so there was almost never any traffic sound. At night, the only noise was from owls and cattle. It felt very lonely, and isolated.

That’s how I was feeling one night in the front yard of our Shady Acres house. It was really dark, and I was standing in the light from the front porch when I heard a noise along the side of the house, where the light didn’t reach.

I stopped breathing to listen, because it was definitely footsteps coming toward me along the side of the house. They were uneven, dragging footsteps, that scraped up leaves as they came. I stared at the corner of the house where whatever it was would first emerge into the light, and I was genuinely terrified. I was alone, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere.

Then I saw it: It was light colored, had no discernible head, and moved in a completely bizarre, stumbling zigzag manner right for me. My brain tried for long seconds to sort out the image, and failed. I was frozen with terror. I, who have never been a screamer, preferring instead to become very small and quiet in times of great fear—I very nearly screamed.

It was a medium-sized white dog with its head stuck in a restaurant-sized mayonnaise jar. It was walking backward, swinging its oversized, mayonnaise-jar head from side to side as it stumbled along. I don’t know how long the poor baby had been stuck, but its neck had swollen and I had to use tin snips to cut the plastic jar away from its neck—and boy, did that dog’s head stink. He drank a little water and trotted off, probably to find something else to stick his head in.

To this day, the memory of that incident is clear and vivid. I remember the fear of seeing something I could make no sense of, and the rush of endorphin-laced relief when it sorted itself out into an emergency I could deal with.

It will probably always be the Scariest Thing That Ever Happened To Me, despite its turning out to be a small dog with its head in a mayonnaise jar.

One note before I go: At all times of great stress and fear, whether I recognized the situation as mortal threat or not, I have used profuse amounts of profanity. This causes me to despair of leaving behind meaningful, poignant last words when I die—most likely, I’ll invite fate to perform some horrible, unnatural act, or spout semi-lucid crap about my dinner being under the porch.

Maybe I’ll scream.

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