(IN HONOR OF MY FATHER ON HIS 80th BIRTHDAY) NIGHTMARE, RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW 1
BY RICKY FAY
When I was little, my dad was a superhero. I'm not talking about the way in which most kids lucky enough to have a father figure brag about theirs ("My dad can beat up your dad!"), but how in my case the man actually saved my life. Twice.2
The first occurrence took place when I was probably three, at the outdoor aquatic center attached to what would eventually become my high school. He sat me on the edge of the water and very clearly instructed me not to move, then scooped up my brother Jim and helped him paddle out into the middle of the crowded pool. Though he could barely walk, Jim took to swimming like a duck. Together, they looked like they were having the grandest time ever. I glanced around and realized I was the only one there not having the best day of his life. It was FOMO thirty-five years before the phrase was coined, so I instinctually threw caution to the wind, disobeying Dad's simple directive as I leapt off the wall.
Predictably, I sank like a stone.
Frantic, thrashing terror dragged me to the bottom of what felt like a twenty-foot-deep watery grave. My eyes swung longingly back to the surface and its sweet, sweet oxygen, life's last bubbles drifting skyward, my lung capacity failing. I flailed weakly, feeling the Grim Reaper's skeletal, icy grip reaching up to claim me.
Suddenly, a shadow blocked out the sun. A powerful arm descended to wrap around my chest and hoist me back to the land of the living. It took me more than a moment (as I coughed up half the chlorinated pool I'd just inhaled) to realize what had happened.
Superdad had saved the day.
Psychosomatically connected or not, buoyancy remained an elusive skill for me over the next several decades. I remember with cringing humiliation how I was annually enrolled against my will in swimming lessons with toddlers while my fish-like younger siblings rocketed past me in the city's Parks & Rec classifications of aquatically proficient youth. Guppy. Minnow. Salmon. Dolphin. Shark. Meanwhile, I continued to languish hopelessly in the class that rarely left the wall, trying to master kicking our feet and forcing our panicked faces beneath the surface of the water.
* * * * * *
For years, bedtime in our house included a ritual of remarkably slight variation.
Option A: Complete with assorted sound effects, Mom reads us a story aloud. Or two. Or three.
Option B: In his deep voice, Dad serenades us with “Heart of My Heart,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” or another of the barbershop quartetesque songs his father had publicly performed many years before we were born.
(If it were one of our birthdays, we might be treated to dual headlining performances. If either Mom or Dad were feeling particularly sentimental, they might sing “Irish Lullaby,” a melody we loved, but whose lyrics made little sense to us when subjected to strict scrutiny.)
Our parents wanted household rules to apply equally to each of their children, so (despite the fact that I was the oldest) when it was bedtime for one of us, curfew was enforced for all. I'd stare with resentment at the bedroom ceiling Jim and I shared with our sister Annie, furious that we could hear the wild parties our parents were hosting in the other room as soon as they'd shipped us off to bed.
Okay, so they weren't parties, but their conversations sure sounded like it. During daylight hours, our folks gave the impressions of being the most somber, austere people in the world. There were occasional moments of laughter or silliness in our presence, but these were truly few and far between. Once their kids were in bed and they'd retired to an antechamber, however, they transformed into the funniest couple on Earth. It was rare to catch the words that touched off their uncontrollable gales of hilarity, but we could always predict and anticipate the cadence. One would be telling a story3 ... we could hear the momentum building4 ... then the dam would burst.5 And the walls of Jericho would come tumbling down as they both roared with merriment. I'd grip my sheets and grit my teeth as green-eyed envy mocked me,6 furious I hadn't been invited to join in the festivities or at least quietly observe.
And this routine happened every night.
Should we kids attempt to duplicate what we heard occurring in the other room and open our own comedy club, the authorities would quickly raid (and inevitably shutter) our fledgling establishment. Dad would burst in: “Okay, you guys, that's enough. It's almost nine o'clock.”
Nine o'clock. Every time. Even at age six, that sounded and felt early, yet he'd say it like none of us had slept for a week and were all flirting with the onset of fatal exhaustion.
(Oh, and it's important to the story that you know we were not allowed to leave our beds once we'd been tucked in, barring some sort of pressing emergency.)
Okay. Next slide.
* * * * * *
Perhaps the first live-action movie I saw in a theater was The Never Ending Story. For those who may be unfamiliar, there are parts that are surprisingly suspenseful. And when I say suspenseful, I mean it was a virtual two-hour fog bank of anxiety for a youngster as high-strung and precisely literal as I was.
Throughout the film, characters whispered with growing, trembling fear about the approach of a massive geostorm called The Nothing, an unpredictable, migrating maelstrom that functioned as a ground-level black hole.7 Escape attempts were futile. Bravery was futile. There comes a point in the film where a character (who happens to be made entirely of stone) just gives up, sitting down to accept his fate as the vortex of The Nothing approaches.
He's made of rocks, I thought, and he's resigned to his inevitable death at the metaphorical hands of The Nothing. What hope do the rest of us have?!
So, nearly every evening, I'd hear some sort of sound — whether it came from within the house or without, I could not tell — but, being the alarmist, literalist kid confined to his bunk that I was, I'd immediately call out for reassurance to my folks: “What's that?”
The comedy show in the other room would schedule a short intermission to soothe the shouted interruptions of their panicky oldest child.
“Nothing!” they'd cheerfully reply.
And I'd instantly
LOSE
MY
MIND with terror,
This ritual quickly escalated to a nightly ScreamFest. My folks couldn't seem to comprehend how or why their calm guarantees of security only further inflamed their eldest's anxieties. I couldn't comprehend their shared incomprehension.
After all, by their own admission,
The Nothing.
Was here.
In our house.
How could they possibly be so calm????!!!??
So, after sleepless months during which I failed to convince our parents of the looming, fatal peril they insisted on ghoulishly ignoring, I began to accept that my frequent night terrors would be occurrences I'd just have to cope with on my own moving forward.
Enter the Red Monster. A true Nightmare Walking8 if ever there was one for a kid predisposed to jumpiness and over analysis.
******
It’s helpful to what little remains of my sanity that my mother verifies there was indeed a character matching the police sketch who occasionally lurked in the background of Sesame Street skits. He never won a speaking role (or, as far as we could tell, had a name), yet his malevolent presence alone was enough to hijack my dreams for a decade.
I remember clearly the first time he introduced himself, seconds after I crawled down from the top level to investigate a persistent scratching and otherworldly growling deep beneath our bunkbed. Trying not to disrupt my slumbering siblings, I lay flat on my stomach and reached far back into the shadows, all the way to the wall. My fingertips brushed something that didn't belong and I pulled out a puzzle box, the completed image depicting a shaggy red monster with sharp horns and long fangs. He was smiling in a friendly fashion.
Then I flipped the box over. He was still there. He was no longer smiling.
My stomach downshifted. My body temperature dropped twenty degrees. A tangible, visceral energy wrapped around me, suffocating me in its miasma: fear and dread embodied, my own personal Red Scare.
His avatar lunged at me, breaking through the two-dimensional confines of the puzzle box cover. His sudden, hulking 3D presence filled the entire room.
Fangs and claws gleamed in the moonlight. As I watched with horror, his smile returned, but this wasn't a friendly one. He spoke not a word, yet his arrogant smirk shouted, “I'm going to eat you!”
Mindlessly shattering the most sacred of household bedtime regulations, I fled the scene, shrieking ...
Right into the arms of Superdad, who'd been making his way down the hall to investigate the details of tonight's predictable disruption. I flung myself against his chest, pale, sweating, nearly catatonic with terror. A detailed explanation was beyond my powers. All I could do was point and whimper, “Red ... Monster!!”
Superdad summoned his spouse and turned my wellbeing over to her. With no regard whatsoever for his· own safety, my heroic father rolled up his sleeves, set his formidable jaw, and dove into the monster's den with all the guts and swagger of John Wayne plowing through an unfriendly saloon's swinging doors.
Mom carried my limp form to the living room, where she allowed me to curl up on my favorite chair, a comfortable orange recliner usually reserved for grownups only. Then she melted away, turning her attention to the certain, rampaging carnage transpiring in the other room.
This is it, I thought, once my addled mind grasped that she was gone. My whole family's being devoured.
Minutes later, my somehow still-living father pried apart my quivering, fetal-positioned death grip to report the Red Monster was gone. I looked to Mom for confirmation.
“Yup,” she intoned proudly. “Your dad wrestled him to the ground, then drop-kicked him out the window and he scurried off, crying. Didn't you see him out the window, running down the street?”
I shook my head and began the long process of emerging from my fear coma.
* * * * * *
This was the first solid evidence presented to me that my father, who never spoke the words “I love you” aloud to his eldest son, maybe actually did. He'd risked his life to confront this terrible creature and in the process saved my life.
As tidal waves of adrenaline and cortisol began to ebb, I reflected on what I'd just experienced, considering for a moment the sobering possibility that Dad had invaded the monster's den for another reason entirely. Understandably, he didn't want some interloping crimson beast to eat his other kids, the ones still slumbering peacefully, the ones who could actually swim.
My father's courage that night was never in question. In recorded human history, however, it's doubtful that paternal compassion had ever been more on display than in this instance, largely because of what he didn't do. He didn't minimize or dismiss my inexplicable trauma. He didn't demand that his six-year-old “Grow up!” or “Be a man!” He simply removed the primary impediment to his son's peace of mind, allowing me to feel (for the moment anyway) a fraction more safe with the lights off.
For reasons I've never quite fathomed, the Red Monster made countless returns, regularly invading and interrupting my rest until the week I left for college. While his appearance always whipped up my instinctual feelings of frozen helplessness, he never hung around long enough to inflict any physical damage. Just knowing there was a superhero nearby who'd already thoroughly kicked his ass once seemed to shorten his visits significantly. | RF