WHY I'M NOT AFRAID OF THE DARK
by P.J. O'Rourke

When I was a child, I was, as most children are, afraid of the dark. I insisted on a night-light in my room *and* a lamp left on in the hall. I did not like to go to the basement after sundown or into the attic at any time of day. The stairway to this attic, in fact, opened into my bedroom, and I could not comfortably get in bed until I had checked the door lock at least three times. I hated to look into a dark window from a lighted room, and if I was left home alone, I would pull the shades and drapes. Outdoors the dark was somewhat less fearsome, at least when I was accompanied or there were plenty of streetlights around. But to be outside by myself on, say, a windy night without moon or artificial illumination was horrifying. So much is not unusual. I understand it is considered normal and even healthy for a child to feel this way. But when I grew older the fear did not diminish. On the threshold of puberty I was more frightened of a dark room than I had been when I was five. As my mind developed and my imagination improved, nameless dread gave way to vivid phantasmagoria, and general mental unease was replaced by specific terror. I was no longer afraid of just the dark; now there were *things* in that dark. Summer camp was agony. Staring out the cabin windows, I slept so little watching the wolf ghouls and bear ogres formed by the breeze in the treetops that I had to be sent to the infirmary and there slept not at all on a bunk above a boy who had been bitten by a spider and claimed his leg was rotting. I could smell it all night long. I once spent my Christmas vacation with an aunt and uncle and had to share the bed with a younger cousin who had the disquieting trait, as some people do, of sleeping with his eyes open. I would have killed him if I hadn't been sure he was one of the undead already. I developed a custom during those two weeks of getting up and going to the bathroom six or seven times after I'd gone to bed -- in order to be back in the light with the adults. It was a habit that took years to break. And when I was fully thirteen years old I could not fall to sleep in a Florida motel room because the owner had decorated the place with a luminescent picture of Jesus on the Mount of Olives and the phosphorous paint formed horrible patterns in the dusk. the thing was awful on the wall, worse under the bed, and still unacceptable facedown in a dresser drawer. It finally wound up outside behind the ice machine, and if the owner of the Gulf View Courts in Pensacola would like it back, it's probably still there now.

The fear, of course, was unpleasant, but the embarrassment at having it was worse. I was, I thought, for all practical purposes an adult. I would be in high school the next year. Soon, I hoped, I would be taking girls to bed, and presumably that would be in the dark. I wished for -- more than anything except perhaps those girls -- freedom from that panic.

As it happened, quite apart from my fear of darkness, I was having an uncomfortable childhood. My father had died when I was nine, and my mother, a kindly but not very sensible woman, had remarried to a drunken oaf. He was a pestering, bullying sort of man whose favorite subject of derision was my fondness for books. But when I did try my hand at sports and fishing and so forth, he teased me for my ineptitude. He described me as a "hothouse flower" when I stayed inside, and claimed I was running wild like a juvenile delinquent when I went outdoors. I was accused of spinelessness when I did not respond to his goading and of impertinence when I did, told I was dumb when I was quiet, and to shut up when I spoke. My mother tried to intercede, but this only made things worse and made me feel like a coward and a mama's boy besides. As for the remainder of my family, I had only a pair of nattering younger sisters, and I did not like them any better than I liked the rest of the household. Weeknights at home were the most difficult. Our house was cheap and small, and it was impossible to get away from the others. My bedroom was above the living room, where they all sat and watched television from sundown until bedtime. I could hear every word they spoke, many of these words being about me and what a problem I had become. Then my mother would come upstairs every half hour or so to ask, "What are you doing?" And if I tried to go down to the basement -- which, as I mentioned, I didn't like -- my stepfather would yell, every time a commercial came on, for me to leave his tools alone. This was very painful. Not many of the tools were really his. Most of them had been my father's. And if I tried to sit in the kitchen, which at least kept them from talking about me in the next room, then I would be criticized for moping. Therefore, most evenings, wet or dry, cold or warm, I would sneak out of the house and walk around. The single explosion of abuse that I'd receive when I returned was preferable to the constant multiple irritations I received if I stayed. And though I was scared of the darkness outside, I was not as scared of the darkness as I was exhausted with my family. Most of the time I was not even really that scared. We lived in a city neighborhood. It had lawns and trees and so on, but there were busy streets nearby and I would meander along the well-lit storefronts, avoiding alleys, parks, and other dark places, supporting my timidity fairly well, and hoping and mooning and worrying the way adolescents do. I tried to calculate my return with precision, so that I would be late enough for the stepfather to have drunk himself to sleep but not late enough for my mother to have called all the neighbors, or worse.

There was one night, however, when I would not have gone out if things hadn't been much worse than usual at home. My sisters became engaged in some prolonged and stupid screaming match with each other and I had slapped the louder one to shut her up. This set off a general row in the house so that by the time I bolted for the door my sisters were shrieking like banshees and my mother was crying aloud and my stepfather was bellowing threats and the dog was barking and the television was blaring in the background of it all -- a scene I still envision whenever I hear the phrase "hell on earth." It was moonless and very windy and there was an overcast that blotted out the stars but was too high to reflect the city lights. It was early spring, I think, and still cold, and the wavy forms of the naked tree branches were especially macabre. I stuck close to the store windows and huddled in well-lighted doorways several times for warmth. I was doing just that when a police car stopped. What was I doing prowling around in the middle of the night? said the officer. I wasn't prowling, I said, I was just walking home and got cold and stopped for a second in the doorway to get out of the wind. He pointed out that it was not my doorway to stop in and that, anyway, stopping in doorways was suspicious activity at that time of night. He asked me where I lived and I told him, since I could not think of a lie. He said I'd be *plenty* warm, he thought, at least on one part of my body, if I were to arrive there in a police car instead of immediately under my own power. So I strode off in the direction of my house, attempting to look purposeful, and turned into a darkened playground where I was out of sight and a police car couldn't follow me. There were no lights at all on the playground, and besides the spectral things I always felt around me in the gloom, I was worried there might be quite corporeal bums or drunks or, worse, older teenage boys there too. I was frightened but I was stuck. I couldn't go back to the main streets or else the police, I was sure, would get me. And I couldn't go home. I couldn't bear to do that. So I stayed where I was, trembling and miserable, and after a while I began to think. I did not really believe that there were monsters in the shadows, and I didn't see any drunks or teenagers, but this did nothing to allay my terror. I must have read somewhere that it was useless to rail against panic, that the source and causes of fear should be examined and meditated on, to see if the fear will respond to reason. And I was not completely ignorant of primitive psychological theory. I asked myself why I was afraid of the dark. Nothing very bad had ever happened to me in a dark place, that I could remember. No, the worst things in my life had transpired in broad daylight or well-lit rooms. It, the darkness, must "symbolize" something to me, I thought. I had only recently heard about symbolism and I thought it was a swell concept. Perhaps, I thought, darkness symbolized the death of my father. But I could remember being afraid of the dark before he'd died. And, in truth, I had not been that close to the man. It was his absence in the present, not his loss in the past, that was sorely felt. I didn't think his death was it. I decided darkness must symbolize something more general for me. Evil, I decided. That's why I imagined monsters in the dark. Monsters are evil because they do evil things, which is what makes them monstrous. But I recognized that as circular reasoning. No, I had to consider what evil really was. Evil was harm and destruction. Murdering people, that was evil, or burning their houses down. These were the sorts of things evil forces might do, the kind of forces that darkness symbolized for me. Such forces might rage into a home like my own and murder one of my sisters or both of my sisters or even my mother and tear the house to pieces, breaking it into little bits and then blowing the ruins to smithereens with nitroglycerin and setting fire to what was left, and then take my stepfather and break both his arms and slice off his feet and poke his eyes out with red-hot staves, disembowel him, skin him alive. And then they'd attack the rest of the neighborhood and the police force and the school and burn and bomb and steal and break everything in that part of Ohio, from the filthy oil refineries on the east side of town all the way to the moldy, boring cottage we rented every summer at the lake. And who knew what such evil forces might do after that? I didn't. But I sat on the swing set considering suggestions for a very long time. And I have never been afraid of the dark since.