Note: I know this is well overdue, but I’ve been ruminating about this article and the writer’s plight for some time since reading it. Basically, here’s why it’s okay for writers (and other artists) to think the world owes them a living when we provide services. Expecting otherwise is downright un-American.
When you’re younger and say you want to be a writer, people look at you as if you’ve decided to breed flying velvet unicorns for a living. Parents, teachers, and minimum wage employers are the most common criers of boo. The nastier ones tell you to forget about it because you’ll die poor, hungry, and alone. The limply supportive ones beg you to find a “career” and do a little writing on the side—you know, to be safe. Just remember: it’s not a real job. More on that later.
But you keep it up, and eventually someone might decide your words are worth paying for. Not a lot. Nothing close to compensating you for your time, research, expenses, etc. The most I ever got was about $1,200 for an feature article. Awesome, right? I must be wearing mink underwear under an ermine jumpsuit, right? Well, after calculating the aforementioned, time, research, expenses, etc., and including the endless rewrites insisted upon by the editor (who, according to his suggestions, appeared to be reading a different article) I should have cleared way more (and let’s not get into taxes, healthcare, social security, etc.—you have to mail the government their chunk on your own). But you make sacrifices, because thank goodness you’re being published, and you understand the publishing industry is always in a rough way. You take what you can get.
And then you grow older. You acquire a spouse, perhaps, a home, children, and so forth. You take on writing jobs you’d rather not do or get a day job you don’t hate (if you’re lucky), to keep food on the table. Society continues to be no help at all. Even as it consumes writing in the form of books, newspapers, the Internet, films, TV shows, and so on, it still views you as an aberration. On the face of it, you produce nothing of value. You can’t eat an essay; you can’t build condos on a novel. And after all, writing isn’t WORK! Writing is “fun.” Bricklaying, plumbing, accounting, selling, marketing, lawyering, and so on—by gum, those are REAL jobs that deserve to be given a living wage, because they
contribute. And they’re boring—unless you’re lucky enough to have a penchant for cement, figures, and torts.
The arts and artists, on the other hand, deserve to suffer, because what do the arts ever PRODUCE that can be bought and sold?
You know, besides books, newspapers, the Internet, films, TV shows, video games, advertising, and so on.
Anyway, it’s good to suffer for your art! Oddly, society feels it’s not good to suffer for your selling, marketing, or number-crunching. Let me repeat a phrase I coined in a moment of inspiration: Have you ever heard of a “starving young accountant?”
Consider this (and I’m not picking on any particular professions; merely pointing out the facts): even a mediocre to middling lawyer, accountant, or salesperson can earn a living wage. I’m not saying it’s easy or that they work any less hard than a writer, but the system is geared to compensate them for showing up, mucking in, and not messing up—as it should.
Conversely, writing success is rarely equitable to just compensation, according to hours worked and income generated. In the aforementioned fields of publishing, TV, and film, success is parsed out to a lucky, talented, formulaic, shrewd, and/or whorish few. You’ll notice a recurrence of certain names in your favorite media and fan sites. No matter how enjoyable or abysmal their output. They are the few who presumably worked hard, got a break, found an angle, established themselves as dream- and taste-makers, and got paid well for it besides.
Most writers… Well, that never happens for us.
As a full-time writer, you end up in one of four situations: (1) ruling your own personal Stephen Kingdom and making money hand over multiple fists (extremely rare) or making enough doing what you love to afford a comfy home, regular meals, and two dentist visits a year (just plain rare); (2) working a day job (more common); (3) having an EXTREMELY understanding spouse who carries the burden of bringing in a regular paycheck (infrequent but not unheard of); or (4) taking every job that slips over the transom while living on microwaved burritos (too often).
I’m not singing the socialist blues here. It’s a fact of life that we live in a capitalist society, and in a capitalist society you work if you want to survive, because hard work is compensated. At least, that’s the way it used to be, more or less.
The business of business is business, not to mention screwing every person, place, and thing on the planet out of one more nickel. Human beings have long been both ladders and obstacles (with their selfish needs for food, water, shelter, and love) to profit. Thus far American labor laws remain powerful enough to ensure (legal) workers aren’t buggered TOO much, and by and large, cheating people and working them to death are still somewhat frowned on. I’m not talking about undocumented workers, obviously, and minimum wage is purely a joke, but my point is that the general rule is that you MUST compensate people somehow for their time and effort, otherwise, they’ll walk away. How then to ensure you squeeze every last drop of sweat from their bodies and minds while you have them under your thumb? If you’re not paying people enough, your first resort is fear. Work, or I’ll fire you. Work, or I’ll dock your pay. Work, or your kids don’t eat. Work, or I’ll make you even MORE miserable. Work! Regardless, the bosses eventually reach a point where they can’t scream and starve efficiency out of their workers. So, what’s next?
Why you make them “partners,” of course. Not business partners with stock options and whatnot, naturally, but, you know, chums!
Enter the implementation of happy-face corporate programs, disingenuous penny-pinching, and the return of the nonsensical notion that one’s work life is equitable to one’s home life. Your time, skills and knowledge aren’t being rented, pal. Your paycheck is secondary to participating in a splendiferous never-ending picnic of joyous labor. Grab a potato sack, champ, and start racing! Uh, but before you do that, can you stay late to prep that PowerPoint for the CEO’s presentation tomorrow? Golly, why do you look so annoyed? Pulling together is what families DO, right? What? You haven’t seen your real family in weeks? I don’t follow you.
This appears to be what’s happening with our beleaguered writer. Publishing is hurting, pal, and the “family” needs you, because we’re all in this together. The offer of “exposure” in lieu of grocery money is just their little way of stepping up and saying thanks.
Editors who pull this crap know better, since they too are doubtless being reamed by requests from on-high to be more “proactive” (e.g., letting support staff go and assuming more duties for less dough). I suppose “exposure” is an attempt to give something back. Personally, I find it less insulting than the several times an editor tried to schmooze work out of me, because hey, bro, your stuff is very… very… “hip,” amiright? Then again, given a choice between being schmoozed and being offered nonmagical beans for my work, I’d choose… neither. Because it’s a scam either way.
People who aren’t writers may not understand why an experienced scribe wouldn’t leap at the chance for “exposure” in a major magazine. Let me put it this way. Ask any CEO you know if he or she would accept a million pin-back buttons bearing their face instead of cash or stock options. Jeepers, ask anybody on any company’s staff anywhere if they would accept a full-page ad plastered with their face in the major metropolitan newspaper of their choice, in lieu of a month’s pay.
Ah. That daylong flush of excitement doesn’t seem so enticing now, does it?
Exposure is a term of relative value. I’d say that if you’re in your early 20s and starting out in the writing racket, and an editor from a top-tier mag offers you a chance to have your work appear on their blog for naught but “exposure”—you ride that pony until it drops dead, chum. Silver platters show up infrequently—so do it and add an impressive tear sheet to your young, emaciated portfolio (just make sure you retain the rights; there’s no shame in requesting a one-time reprint contract). But here’s a sour truth, kid. Unless you set the editors and their readers afire, that’s likely it for you for a very long time. You might end up in some mid-market mags, newspapers, and sites, and you’ll probably poke along if you keep working your ass off, but you’re not displacing anyone at Harper’s or the New Yorker on the basis of one blog post. Still, well done. I wish you every happiness.
Now, let’s imagine you’ve been writing for 20-plus years. Maybe you haven’t cracked the high-profile markets, but you’ve done okay with local papers, a few web sites, and the like. Maybe you’ve got a small-press book or two under your belt. You’re not a hobbyist or an American primitive discovered typing in a bayou shack. You’ve paid your dues. You’ve flown the flying velvet unicorn past your parents’ front window to their delight. You’re a G-D writer for a living.
And then some editor from a magazine—one from whom you might have collected a stack of rejection letters—comes along and asks you to rewrite a piece of yours for them, for free. No, not for free—for “exposure.”
We’re not talking about a charity or nonprofit you’d contribute to out of the goodness of your heart. No, this is a mag claiming to present ads “from energy companies to luxury products to top tech brands.” (And Scientology too, apparently, cough.) As they love to trumpet, they have A-listers writing for them. They seem to be doing okay. Toughing it out maybe, trying to please the owners, but they’re staying put. According to the articles I’ve been scanning, they’re doing fantastic with their digital presence. Digital… Hey, that’s like blogs and stuff, right?
But they just can’t shake loose with a quarter a word for an article. That’s about $300 for a 1200 word piece; I think I averaged about $250 for an article of that size when I wrote for the Chicago Journal. Not much, but something. I didn’t expect the very local newspapers I write for to pay me my weight in gold. But, man, that Atlantic “exposure.” What a plump, juicy plum, right?
Except it’s not an appearance in the actual magazine, it’s a blog post. Unless your piece memes harder than Grumpycat, your “exposure” will involve a few friends sharing your Facebook link to the site. You are literally working for nothing—no money, no promise of further publication, not even placement on the home page. You’d have equally good results posting it to your own blog. They’ll clear X number of bucks through click-throughs, no doubt, but at least your mom, dad, and significant other will be impressed.
Still, I get it. It sounds cool. I’d probably do it myself because I’m one of those writers with a day job, and I consider writing a vocation, not a career (though I wouldn’t say no to a book contract). But I have no illusions. I’ve had similar “breaks” and near-breaks that came to nothing. Let me give you a grandfatherly piece of writing advice, young scribes—do not wait for the single event that will launch you into the big time. Just work hard, enjoy yourself, and promote your work (no one else will). If fame and fortune come, they come. If not, at least you’re doing what you love. That’s only slightly more rewarding than “exposure,” but it’s something.
Still.
This “exposure” thing is noisome. Claims that exposure is a worthy substitute for pay are irrational to the point of insult. Firstly, and as the Wonkette article points out, this amply demonstrates the beleaguered state of modern journalism, and the workload imposed on editors due to cutbacks. The bean-counters determine that if more work were done by fewer people, there is greater potential for profit. That one human is now doing the work of three—often to deleterious effect for all parties; quality DOES slip, you know—however, escapes them. Best to prod that person to challenge themselves and “innovate” and “impact” ways to improve work processes. If they can’t, well, they’re just being difficult. Fire ’em. Better yet, suggest that you’ll fire them. That’ll pour nitro in their gas tank, and you’ll get three to five months of extra work hours out of them. Hey, editor! BOO! Get your writers to work for exposure peanuts.
We can’t feel too bad for the editor mentioned in the piece either, despite Wonkette’s suggestion. She knows damn well prison life is slightly better for trustees. She’s achieved a comfy position and decided to remain in place by exploiting (or attempting to exploit) others. That’s unfair (both to her and the writers she’s soliciting), not to mention lousy business. This attitude has become endemic in the working world. While companies are pulling in profits, they’re still telling the proles, “Golly, we wish we could throw you a bone, but, you know, we’ve got bills to pay. Heck, we’re barely hanging on here. So why not muck in, champ? Spend a little of your own dough? We’re all in this together!” Where it becomes egregious is when the organization plays the austerity card for years.
Note the mushy statements like “unfortunately…can’t pay you for it” and “I understand if that’s not a workable arrangement for you, I just wanted to see if you were interested.” She’s trying to soften the impact of asking him to suffer a little bit so she, and her magazine, can fill a column and sell ad space. Do you know what that’s called? Manipulation. It’s running a long con, involving many marks in this case, I’m guessing. How many other authors were approached this way? How many sighed, added another notch to their belts, and said, “Oh… okay… I guess so…”? The writer’s work, as well as his or status, is likewise denigrated and devalued further. And the attitude spreads: “Why should I pay you when I can get a hundred writers like you for free?”
This perception is becoming prevalent. Publications are no longer viewed as conveyances of information; they’re ad sheets tacked together by articles and photos. Without advertising, say the moneymen, you wouldn’t HAVE your little Mickey Mouse weekly readers! Yet, they forget that without articles, no one would see their damn ads. The fact that video and audio have supplanted print is entirely different discussion, but let me stress this: people read books, newspapers, and magazines not for the ads, but for the articles. The ads are targeted at these people because of the editorial content they peruse and enjoy. But this perception is being slowly obliterated because it allows for greater profit. “Writing and photography is valueless, so let’s cut the budgets and staff to the bone. But…pursue free content by convincing the creators of their “worthlessness.” Nyah-ha-ha.”
Fellow writers, remember: IF THEY ASK YOU FOR CONTENT, THAT MEANS THEY REQUIRE/DESIRE IT. It HAS value.
There’s another level to the above, not discussed in the piece; though this is only my supposition. Requests like these always carry an implied threat, whether intended or not. “If you work for free this time, I’ll remember you fondly. If you don’t, well, I’ll remember you were ‘difficult.’ No other promises though if you say yes. In fact I’ll probably ask you to work pro bono again.”
When you’re trying to make it in any business—especially one as insular as publishing—you don’t want a “difficult” reputation—particularly when you aren’t difficult. That goes for both sides of the equation. Writers will write for you and write well if they are suitably compensated to the point of being able to buy groceries. So, what gives with the shakedown? What stomach-dissolving need are you fulfilling by shaking down a writer? Wait, I have it. Greed.
Let me quote Heath Ledger’s Joker: “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” Internships are an exception, I suppose. I recall a local journalist making the case for young reporters coming into local and regional papers to do scut work for nothing but experience. The supposition, however, is that because you are young you probably know jack about the business when you’re starting. The danger rests in attempts to let the average age for interns creep into the late 20s. I imagine we’ll have thirtysomething interns before long, paid with a robe, a daily handful of rice, and a begging bowl. Personally, I believe unpaid full-time intern/apprenticeships only work for Victorian cobblers and blacksmiths, and that they’re just another scam to preserve profit. However, if you’re in school and Mom and Dad are providing a roof and filling the fridge, take advantage of working for nothing for a while to build that portfolio and resume.
But if you’re writer already in the business—and an old hand at that—don’t go for “exposure” unless you can afford it. In fact, don’t bite; because you’re setting a precedent for the next thousand or so writers, and perpetuating the contradictory bugaboo we writers have had to fight all our lives: it’s okay to screw writers, because they produce nothing of value.
Strangely, the media continue to display an insatiable appetite for flying velvet unicorn meat.
I always wonder what the thought process is behind this. Machismo/male privilege? A lack of basic urban etiquette? An inflated sense of one’s size (the dude is big, but, at most, he “needs” two side-by-side seats)? Cultural differences (e.g., “Bah! Women are second-class humans!” or “In Gmöszk, where I am coming from, life is hard and one must prevent the wimmens, cripples, childrens, and non-Gmöszkeans from sitting down, else they grow uppitys!”)?
Personally, I ascribe it to mental deficiency. Not full-blown cognitive impairment. Just a general, dim-witted lack of perception of others, selfishness, a misplaced sense of persecution, and an allergy to acting decently because it would be “inconvenient.”
An example. I once stood up on an asses-to-elbows crowded train to give an elderly lady my seat, and a guy, about as big as this fellow and listening to his tiny electronic music box, grabbed the seat as she started to sit down. I looked at him, gobsmacked, then said: 

”Hey, buddy. I was giving the seat to this lady.”
He looked at me blankly, nodded sharply, causing his jowls to jiggle, and then said, “Oh, okay.” Nothing behind his eyes. Just marshmallow fluff.
Then he remained seated while the woman, the surrounding people, and I all stared at him. He wasn’t threatening, so I said, “Uh, hey, guy. Why not give her the seat?”
He then cleverly outwitted me by keeping his head down and ignoring us. Another gentleman two seats behind me got up and let the lady sit. I kept staring at the idiot the whole way home. He never looked up. I figured it was a combination of low intelligence, bad parenting, and, mostly, embarrassment, which always, ALWAYS fades when you continue to act like an ass. Yeah.
Mostly, these people (men) probably do it because they think most folks wouldn’t bother to confront them (not out of fear, just from a sense that it’s not worth it to mix it up with them; and then there’s the asinine/horrifying attitude that infects our country: “What if he/she has a GUN?”).
But then again… why do they do it? How does it benefit them? If you ride, say, the Blue line, from end to end, you’ll be on the train no more than 30 to 40 minutes. Unless you’re toting heavy objects, and/or you’re physically impaired, you don’t suffer much more than a minor foot cramp by scrunching into a seat.
My friend Kathy once suggested it was because they suffered from severe enlargement of the testicles. Poor souls. Let’s take up a collection.
Later Note: After reading more of the site, I’d like to add that it is hilarious to hear the “But men need to spread their legs because their junk is in the way!” Ladies, in case you were wondering, that’s a load of bollocks (chuckle, snicker). We’re not toting steel rods and bowling balls down there. They’re semi-squishable—at least enough to sit down with our knees together.
Horror fiction is the only genre I follow with any consistency. I’ve had brief flirtations and extended courtships with genres like fantasy (I favored sword and sorcery during high school, but happily never after), mysteries (mostly the old pulp/hard-boiled stuff, though I’ve followed a few modern series), and sci-fi (briefly raiding my dad’s 40s to 70s sci-fi library—truthfully, it’s the only genre I find a bit silly). Horror, however, is my fictional wife, or at least my mistress.
I’ve been reading horror novels, short stories, and comics and watching horror films and TV shows since grade school. Arguably even before that through myths, ghost stories, and fairy tales. I followed a familiar path, starting with Poe, Bierce, Stevenson, Wells, and the other classics; reading through Stephen King’s output; discovering Lovecraft and Rod Serling’s circles; indiscriminately gobbling up every vault, haunt, and crypt of terror-fear-horror EC, DC, Marvel, Gold Key, and Charlton comics offered; falling in love with my literary queen, Shirley Jackson during college; and working through everyone from Ray Bradbury to Richard Matheson to Clive Barker to Mark Danielewski, and plenty of other hacks and auteurs in-between.
Between all that I watched my share of B-movies, monster flicks, cult classics, gore fests, and arthouse horror, and delved deeply into real life nightmares like serial killers and ickier/stickier subjects, and supposedly real life nightmares in the urban legend/campfire story vein. If it was disturbing, made my flesh creep, and had me hiding under the covers, I was interested—especially so. Why? Who knows? A slow imbibition of poison, perhaps, can do a body good. What does not kill me makes me stronger as I shudder.
The gist of this entry is that I’ve seen and read a lot of scary stuff. Most of it is forgotten, some remains, but a few bits and pieces have lurked for far longer, like dark flickering shadows in the corners of my eyes. Two in particular though, not only stuck around, for years I couldn’t be sure if I’d actually seen them, or if my mind made them all up. I’d like to share them, and if I’m worth a damn as a writer, I might even help you understand why they remained with me.*
*****
As indicated, my brain’s mouth has gobbled great greasy piles of fictional horror-steak, the quality of the meat running the gamut from terrible (as in awful) tales of terror that couldn’t scare a three-year-old, to pungent, succulent, juice-dripping stories that made my sense of reality slip a bit.
Just a little bit.
But just enough.
The latter are rare, their power depending on their originality, the writer’s skill, and my age while reading them. What scared me at age 10 wouldn’t make me arch an eyebrow at age 45, but like a chicken pox scar, some sensations remain scratched into my memory’s flesh. Hm, maybe not a chicken pox scar. More like a self-administered tattoo.
The fictional fears that stay with me are diffuse: Lovecraft’s description of Akeley’s cylinder recordings of the Mi-Go’s buzzing voices—use of recording technology as a false document to cause the heebie-jeebies decades before The Blair Witch Project, incidentally. The night burial of Church the cat in King’s Pet Sematary. The cool, low-toned fear of House of Leaves, when the protagonist stops and listens to the constant grinding and shifting of the walls, floors, and ceilings as the house remodels itself. Clive Barker’s “Dread,” which ends ludicrously, but has an exquisitely horrific extended photographic sequence featuring a vegetarian, a steak, and a locked room. No easy trick for a writer when they can’t show you the photographs.
Those are memorable bits, surely, but there are two that lingered, sticking to my brain like a black tumors, and metastasized over the years, become more terrible than I knew they could have been (this entry deserves turgid, overwrought metaphors, leave me alone!). Why did these moments become so exponentially freaky and terrifying? Mostly because I encountered them once, and then never saw or heard about them again. Even worse, no one I spoke to about them knew what I was talking about. A horror trope in and of itself!
I’ll wager most of the younger folks out there have no concept of the pre-Internet age, when pop knowledge wasn’t easily acquired. Surely, you could go to the library and get your fill of info on Benedict Arnold, Art Deco, wainscoting, or other “normal” topics, but try to locate an iota of info about an obscure TV show, film, writer, or book… good luck with that pal. In my youth, while looking for works by, say, Kerouac and Lovecraft, the four or five local libraries I had access to were only able to scrounge up Tristessa and The Dunwich Horror. As for other books by those writers, or just more information about the writers themselves, the librarians did their best, finding and photocopying a scattering of articles through reciprocity agreements with other libraries. Ultimately, they were found wanting. Think of that drought of facts, and compare it with today, when punching a few words into Google turns up rafts of websites about Jack and Howard that all but tell you what they had for breakfast on any given day of their life.
One more point, a seemingly strange point: while the info they turned up was sparse, they proved that Kerouac and Lovecraft existed.
Now, imagine trying to describe something you experienced briefly as a child, without benefit of verification through images, sound, or text. Just you, babbling: “There was this cartoon I watched every day as a kid, where this alien boy came to earth, and he had a medallion that gave him superpowers. And his worst enemy was a guy who threw a buzzsaw watch.” For years I described the show to kids in my own neighborhood, trying to find someone else who had watched it on UHF channel 44. “Uncomprehending” is too light a word for their expressions. It wasn’t until I took German in high school and met a girl named Ramona who’d also seen Prince Planet that I realized I hadn’t made it all up. That sense of doubt is weird enough for an innocuous (if hyperviolent) cartoon like Prince Planet, but it becomes cancerous with a thing that scared the hell out of you. I’m sure there’s a psychological term for it. Maybe the Germans call it by some multi-syllablic name.
But I lived until the 1990s, and I light a candle and say a prayer for Mother Internet for letting me know I wasn’t going mad when I rediscovered the following spookshows.
*****
As a kid, how old do you have to be before radio shows seem stupid and boring? I should experiment with my four-year-old son, and play The Shadow, The Whistler, Weird Circle, and other old-time radio shows for him before he becomes jaded. I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll sure as shit not play Arch Oboler’s 1962 Drop Dead! album—featuring reenactments of his 30s and 40s radio show Lights Out—within listening distance of the lad until he’s at least 10. Maybe 30.
I still remember how queasy I felt after hearing the LP at a friend’s house one long-ago Halloween. If you’ve heard of Oboler’s show, you probably remember one story in particular: “Chicken Heart.” Everyone remembers “Chicken Heart.” With that title how in God’s name could you not? Orson Welles may have convinced the rubes that the Martians had landed, but Oboler left a bloody wet thumbprint of terror on the brains of multitudinous youths, including Stephen King and Bill Cosby, who did a routine on the show. I won’t summarize “Chicken Heart”; it’s best experienced through the first link. Certainly, it’s ridiculous—absurd even—but there’s something there, something grotesque and wrong. Thump-thump… thump-thump… thump-thump…
For me, Oboler’s scariest, freakiest skit was “The Dark.” “The Dark” barely has a plot. Scary stuff just…happens. From memory…Sam the cop and a psychiatrist are called to an old abandoned house (is there any other kind in these stories?) because the neighbors, presumably, heard screaming and shenanigans taking place. The cop and the doc walk in and discover a madwoman, given to bursts of cackling, shrieking laughter that will drill through your head. Something stirs in a nearby room, and when the doctor, to the cop’s chagrin, opens the door they discover… a man… TURNED INSIDE-OUT! A monster shows up, as monsters do, in the shape of a shadowy mass that acts more like a pitch-black amoeba. Listen to the link before proceeding further. I’ll wait.
*****
“The Dark” is scary. “The Dark” is also, under scrutiny, stupid. Unlike many fictional monsters, our shadow beastie makes no damn sense whatsoever. Let’s pretend a person could survive the initial, incomprehensibly painful shock of the act, not to mention that a person could be “transposed” (they can’t, sorry), and ask, what is the creature’s motivation? Whether sentient or non-sentient, why does it do what it does? According to the presented evidence, it doesn’t perform full-body prolapses to eat, defend itself, or even to meet some magical/ritualistic purpose. Notably, it does not properly kill its prey, making it unlike any known or even possible creature. Barring any yammering about alien morality, we must assume that it is sentient and yanks human beings from stern to stem simply to be shitty. That’s horrifying, especially to a young boy seeking sense and hoping for kindness in the world.**
The sound effects are the second level of “The Dark’s” horror. The good doctor’s yucky description of our reversible human being is terrible enough—we’re left to imagine a pitiable anthropoid mass of veiny, sticky, red flesh, dangling organs like a grisly purse rack. Doc’s description is merely gross, but Oboler revealed his creepy genius for radio through the sudden stomach-lurching sound effect of our poor floppy guts-man trying to stand up, pitiably mewling and wetly slapping about the floor like a landed trout. Good gravy, no wonder the cop passed out.
Arch Oboler
Purportedly (though perhaps apocryphally), Oboler achieved the inside-out sound effect by filling a rubber glove with cooked macaroni and slowly reversing it Mercifully, he avoids the likelier sounds of such extreme body modification involving the bones, or the effects of reversal of the lungs and larynx. Perhaps in the words of the several dozen insensitive bastards I’ve met in my life, I’m “too sensitive,” but “The Dark” put the fix on my head for two reasons: it didn’t just make me imagine my own insides slithering out, it offered the scenario of discovering someone so reversed, and the feelings of frustrated compassion and helplessness it would entail. Gut blowout isn’t something you can kiss and slap a Band-Aid on—the first sensible reaction available to a lad of eight or nine years.
*****
Then there was that one story…
I’ll bet you have one too. A tale you read by daylight, which laid in wait in the back of your head until bedtime, emerging from the closet to say, “Hey, kid! I’m gonna keep you awake for the rest of your life. That cool?”
I read mine in seventh grade. At the time (I think I was 10) it scared the bejeezus out of me, and for years, even after maturity sapped it of fear-power, it returned in some form or other on nights that seemed excessively lonely and dark.
A great deal of its strength rested in its formatting. Someone in my class, I don’t remember who, passed along a manuscript. That’s how I remember it: a typewritten stack of eight or so pages, not a photocopy (fairly uncommon in the classroom in the late 70s), though it might have been a mimeograph; I have a memory of the ink being purple, but I can’t verify that. If it had been passed along to me as part of an anthology or a torn-out magazine page, I would have been fine. What it resembled was a sworn statement, some sort of confession, or an MS found in a bottle. I took my turn with it that night and brought it back the next day. For a long time after sleep wouldn’t come.
In summary, a young boy named Tommy is frightened of his basement, and has been so from a very young age. The door stands in the kitchen, the single room in the house where Tommy doesn’t act like a perfectly happy little fellow. When open, he screams bloody murder until mom or pop closes and locks it, taking the extra measure of stuffing the cracks in the doorframe with rags and the like, worshipping the lock with kisses and caresses. Childhood binding magic.
His parents, total yokels, are put out, and employ old-time parenting techniques like “thrashing” him and sending him to bed without his supper for this single bit of insolence. Tommy grows up, and at five years of age, in preparation for school, they take him to see the family doctor. Naturally, he is perfect health, but his basement fear is brought up. In private, Tommy tells the doctor there’s something down there, something bad, but when pressed to describe it, he reveals that he doesn’t know what it is… he just knows that IT is down there. The doc advises Tommy’s parents to nail the door open and leave Tommy in the kitchen for an hour so he’ll see his fears are groundless. Since this isn’t inspirational glurge from Reader’s Digest, you can guess where this is going.
And here was my other bout with self-doubt and potential false memory. I knew the story existed, but other than a vaguely remembered title (“The Thing in the Basement” sounded right, but seemed too vague). I couldn’t find it at the library, and I wondered whether it was the work of a classmate’s older sister or brother (hence the typewritten manuscript). The story, as I recalled it, was a perfect frame on which to hang a horror story. The tropes are all there: helpless, frightened victim whom nobody believes; a subterranean place that radiates evil; clueless authority figures—it seems like it could only exist in the abstract, as every horror story.
But time heals all wounds and, with luck, makes one smarter. I didn’t know Shinola about good writin’ back then. I concentrated on plot, and the plot for “The Thing in the Cellar” is scary as hell because it’s fill-in-the-blank. When you’re a child, you spend most of your time filling in blanks, often with erroneous info. See, I knew what Tommy was afraid of, I knew it because I had my own basement monsters. Somewhere I encountered a picture of a Metaluna mutant, and for a month I thought one was huddled behind the couch in my dad’s basement den. I can still it in my mind’s eye, shambling up the steps, ready to rip off my head with its claws. Now I’d probably just side-kick it back down the stairs and run like hell.
The fear got worse. I read about the “true” story of a girl who suffered periodic attacks by an invisible assailant. My unimpeachable source, by the by, was a Ripley’s Believe It… or Not! comic book, in a story titled “The Thing with Claws” (I sense a trend). My Metalunan metamorphosed into a see-through clawed assassin—the unknown became the invisible and vicious, compounded by an unseen and horrific result, namely, Tommy’s death in the story.
Ah, as for that. These two sentences stick with me to this day.
Trembling, he examined all that was left of little Tommy.
and
The mother threw herself on the floor and picked up the torn, mutilated thing that had been, only a little while ago, her little Tommy.
They sting worse now that I have kids.
We know the result of the cellar thing’s attack on Tommy—presumably a moment of joyous triumph for the creature, since it had the only being aware of its existence in its power—but we don’t know its extent. “Torn.” “Mutilated.” “All that was left.” Perhaps you’re picturing a few well-placed, deep scratches—something whipped up by the Buffy the Vampire Slayer make-up/special effects department. Not me. Not with my stupid, scared child brain. I conflated the integrity of Tommy’s corpse with a story I overheard my father telling; the one about the family who adopted a poodle as a companion to their Doberman. The next day they returned home to discover cottony viscera all across their living room rug. My child’s mind made it worse, picturing Tommy left in stringy tatters and a single red chunk of gristle staining the kitchen tiles. Tommy? Did I say Tommy?
Sorry, I meant me.
That was me.
I was there. Dead. Shredded. Violated. By the Thing in the Basement.
Rereading the story, there’s another segment that may have gotten to me. The oafish Mr. Tucker takes out his toolbox and pounds nails while explaining to his clearly terrified son in English spoken not by people who real are:
And I am going to nail the door open, Tommy, so you can not close it, as that was what the doctor said. Tommy, and you are to be a man and stay here in the kitchen alone for an hour, and we will leave the lamp a-burning, and then when you find there is naught to be afraid of, you will be well and a real man and not something for a man to be ashamed of being the father of.
Well.
I should make the point that my parents loved me and were plenty sympathetic whenever I was afraid. Mom was nurturing and reassuring; Dad rationally explained away fear—I tend to do both with my son whenever he’s afraid.*** But no kid, no adult, ever gets rid of the fear that the only thing worse than Mom and Dad not being there is Mom and Dad not giving a shit or acting, by intent or omission, as agents for one’s invisible claw monster destruction.
*****
Closing thoughts? None, really (though if anyone wants to pay me to expand on this essay, I’m all ears). When people ask me why I write—which happens ALL the damned time—I explain that I write about two subjects: what I love and what I fear. I write about what I love because I want other people to enjoy and preserve those things. I write about what I fear because, for as long as can remember, I’ve been a fearful fellow. And I don’t like it. As my former dentist told me, “Fear is the mind killer.” By reading and writing about what I fear I become not only stronger but smarter; and as I become smarter I become a better person. As personal meanings of life go, that’s not a bad policy.
As an addendum, and FYI. I’ve never mentioned the above to anyone for as long as I can remember. I figured it was time to exorcise those particular demons.
Boo!
*Also, I’m reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, and I’ve been itching to throw in my two, no, let’s make it nine cents on the subject.
** Side Note: I imagine Oboler had Doc specify his mouth as the final piece covered by shadows in order to avoid suggesting he was turned inside-out starting at the rectal end. Which, from an engineering perspective, makes slightly more sense.
*** My favorite technique for when Nate is afraid of something—say the giant frog-shaped shoe and sock basket on his closet door—is to punch it out and encourage him to take a few swipes himself. Mom and Dad did a good job, but I wish they’d encouraged me to go a few rounds with my monsters. In hindsight, they were all wusses.
Let’s imagine that through some set of circumstances, you end up attending a soda pop bottle collectors’ convention. Perhaps, like me, you collect soda pop bottles, and turning up at such a convention wouldn’t be a surprise to you (I haven’t attended any myself), but in this instance let’s assume you don’t give a damn about soda pop bottles. You don’t hate them, but they fail to set you afire, let’s say.
At first, as you walk around, you might be mildly impressed by the beauty of the bottles on display: some possess eye-catching art, others have pleasing shapes. Perhaps some of the collectors are perfectly lovely people, plainly excited about their hobby and willing to share the joy of soda-pop bottle collecting with you. Some are more exuberant and/or socially awkward than others, but mostly they seem to be a pleasant, harmless lot. You may not be able to follow their conversations about grading or ACLs, but it’s clear they’re enjoying themselves, and no one is buttonholing you to joyfully scream about the 1952 seven ounce Grapette bottle they discovered in a Muskegon landfill.
Still, after a time, you tire of hearing about bottles. That’s understandable. The convention center exits are clearly marked, and you’re not chained to a column, so there’s nothing keeping you there.
Yet, you remain, and you continue to walk about. But now the tone and endless onslaught of soda-pop bottle trivia and trading is growing grating. I must stress, you could leave, but instead you visit each table, hoping someone will start talking about flyfishing, SOPA, Artemisia Gentileschi, or Indian food. You bring up these subjects, and you generate a mild conversation or two about them, but soon you’re back to bottles, bottles, bottles. You exhale a sigh of disgust and walk off to another part of the center.
Eventually, you find a group of your friends—all of whom, for the purposes of analogy, are exchanging empty bottles that once contained Heep Good orange pop, Top Hat seltzer water, Kayo chocolate soda, O•So•Grape elixir, and others. They’re having a grand old time, and when they see you they wave you over.
“Aren’t you guys SICK of talking about bottles?” you ask.
Startled, they look to one another, and your best friend says, “Uh, no. It’s fun! what’s your favorite soda pop bottle?”
“But it’s NOT fun,” you gripe. “It’s just so overdone. I’m sick of hearing about it.”
They look at you sympathetically—these are your friends, after all—but ask, “Well… You do realize you’re at the annual soda pop bottle convention, right? And Bob and Jane over here, well, they’ve just gotten into it.”
“Yeah! It’s superduper fun!” says Bob, happily. You shoot him a withering glare.
“But you’ve been talking about it for days now. Isn’t it time to discuss something else?” you say.
One of your friends shrugs and says, “I… guess… but we’re really enjoying ourselves.”
“But I’m not!” you say. “I want to talk about something else! Like jai alai or French cinema or Anjelica Houston.”
“Hey, you’re in luck!” another friend says, cheerfully. She points to a staircase across the center. “Upstairs they’re holding the convention for aficionados of French movies starring Anjelica Houston as a jai alai player! And it’s free! Actually, I was thinking of going up there after this, so we could…”
You begin to stomp your feet and shake your little fists in the air.
“BUT I WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT DOWN HERE WITH YOU GUYS! RIGHT NOW! AND I WANT EVERYONE ELSE TO PACK UP AND GO HOME! AND I DON’T WANT ANYONE TO TALK ABOUT BOTTLES EVER, BECAUSE BOTTLES ARE STUPID! OH, I LIKED THEM AT FIRST, BUT NOW I’M TIRED OF THEM, SO THEY NEED TO GO AWAY! AND ANYONE WHO LIKES BOTTLES IS AN IDIOT! YOU HEAR ME!?! AN IDIOT!”
Your friends look at you askance.
“Maybe you could go home for a little while and then come back later? You know, take a break. We’ll be done soon.” says your best friend.
“Yeah, let’s go to the bar next door and have a drink. And we’ll talk about whatever you like!” says your cousin. “Before we go though, check out this hilarious soda pop bottle I found! It has a kitty-cat on it!”
“NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!!” You scream. You start overturning tables and breaking bottles like Christ cleansing the Temple.
“Everyone must talk about things according to my schedule! Everyone must cease enjoying a hobby when I declare it! Anyone who hasn’t laughed at a joke by a certain time and date MUST BE FORBIDDEN TO LAUGH AT IT EVER AGAIN!” you bellow. “Arrrgggh! This is why America is in danger! This is why people are stupid! Once things were good, but now they are bad! Argggh! Evil has a face, and it is soda pop bottle collectiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!”
When you finish, you find yourself panting, sweaty, and standing on a mountain of glass, the collectors dazed and breathless and more than a few—your friends included—glaring and wondering why you’re so damned worked up.
Then you look across the center and see someone eating a ham sandwich. Except the ham isn’t stuck between two pieces of bread… IT’S STUCK BETWEEN TWO LARGE SQUARES OF GRAPE JELL-O!
“Ha ha ha! Hey, look guys!” you say, stumbling with bloodied feet across the field of glass. “A Jell-O sandwich! Ha ha! Well, if that isn’t the ever-living, ever-loving end!” You take a picture of it, intending to share it with everyone you meet on the way home. “Say, guys…” you ponder, turning back to your friends, “What other things could you make with Jell-O!?! Ha ha! Bacon Jell-O! Badger Jell-O! Zombie Jell-O! Lutefisk Jell-O! HA HA HA HA! Man, this is KOOKY!”
At once, everyone in the convention center forgives you, and you all begin amassing and sharing thousands upon thousands of Jell-O recipes and photographs.
Something you know you’ll never ever get tired of doing.
I just read an article about a new study that discovered that I should start prefacing my opinions with either “According to this article I read…” or “I just read about a study that states…” because most people will believe ANY sentence that starts that way. I also read about a study in the same article that proved plantains can increase your lifespan and get your kids into good schools, but only if you shove them in your ears. It’s true! It was in, uh, Salon, or Granta maybe… possibly Field and Stream. I forget.
