Life As A Coward

Life as a Coward


I used to be so afraid of the basement that it would get me into trouble. My mom once sent me down to the kitchen pantry to get a can of dog food. I went down the stairs and into the abyss.

We had a stack of shelves in our basement where we stored can goods in case there was a nuclear holocaust and 40,000 people needed food for a couple of years. Well, the selection made it impossible to find anything.

I stood there searching frantically for ‘dog food’ and could only spot a can that had a picture of a cow on the label. The label said, “Pet”. “Pet? A dog is a pet!” Whatever was lurking at the back of our basement was about 2 seconds from killing me so I grabbed the “Pet” can and ran back up the stairs.
I am 100% positive that a 6 year old in a scary basement could outrun a Kenyan.

The “Pet” can was evaporated milk. I didn’t consider that, after a nuclear holocaust we were also going to need evaporated milk.

Once safe in the kitchen, I handed the can to my mother. She told me, “That’s not dog food” and sent me back down to my death. I was afraid of my mother as well, so I couldn’t tell her, “Mom, it knows I’m coming back now. I’m not going to get the head start I had the first time.” I did the only thing a boy fearing for his life could do. I played stupid.

ME-”Mom, it’s not down there.”

MOM-“What are you talking about? I bought 20 cans of dog food last week. Just look again.”

ME- (pathetically) “But I did look and I can’t find it!”

MOM- (not sure what to believe) “If I walk down there and find it, you’re going to be in trouble.”

ME- “At least I’ll still be alive.” (I didn’t really say that.)

If you think I’m pathetic then you’ve never seen my basement. A lot of my friends had nice ‘finished’ basements with lights and couches. Some had TV’s down there with Atari’s attached.

Our basement was detached from an insane asylum and grafted onto our house. The stairs were just slats, so there was no backing. And there was a big empty space underneath those stairs. So, any number of beings you saw on television the day before could easily reach through the back of the stairs and pull you into a black hole of nothing.

And the stairs were just the entry point. Our furnace is the first known existence of A.I. That furnace knew the exact moment a 6 year old boy had convinced himself that the basement wasn’t going to kill him and then it would shoot flames and make a noise like a dragon belching.

The section of the basement that stole a couple of years from my life was the back. It was just a big black hole that led to an empty space, which I would later learn represented the area underneath our front porch. I was positive that every toy I had ever lost growing up was sitting in that hole being used as bait.


On a brave summer day, with daylight flooding through a 12’ by 12’ window, my friend, David and I put on my brothers’ football helmets and grabbed hammers and marched into our worst fear. The ground from the basement stairs to the back of the basement measured about 3 miles.

There was not much light back there because we were about 3 feet short of pulling on a white string. The furnace did its part in scaring the ever-loving shit out of us. We made it about 3 feet when Dave saw a pair of glowing eyes in the hole. We broke the world record for the sprint from my basement to Dave’s front porch.

Dave did see a pair of eyes. It was a pedal reflector from a bike that my dad had yet to fix. When I was 13, I went back there with a flashlight and found, about, 7 bikes and zero flesh eating demons. It was a right of passage for me. And, yes, I almost ran away that time too. It helped that I was tall enough to flood the basement with enough light for the Buffalo Bills to hold practice down there.

I spent a portion of every day of my childhood being afraid. I never hated myself for being afraid. I hated that which I didn’t understand. I was like a 6-year-old bigot.



Fear had a helper monkey. His name was “Donny”. Donny was one of my older brothers. He was like a combination of every bad guy in every movie ever made. Donny was the only kid on our block who wore a monocle.

Donny used to draw energy from my screams. It’s like I screamed sunlight. So, I guess it was my fault.

Donny read “The Amityville Horror to my cousin Jimmy and me when we were too young to hear what happens in “The Amityville Horror”. He then spent the night telling us he saw pigs in the window. As soon as Jimmy and I calmed down a little bit we noticed that the front hallway door was shaking. We were scared, but we weren’t stupid. We knew it was Donny on the other side of the doors.

Jimmy got up the nerve to leave the couch and open them, expecting Donny there with a huge shit-eating grin on his face. The doors opened to nothing. Jimmy slammed the door shut and ran back to the safety of the couch. I ran to the kitchen to tell my mom the most important thing that has ever happened in the history of the house, “The front door is shaking by itself.” My mom, my hero, never looking up from some paperwork, said, “There’s just a draft.”

The door continued to shake for 10 minutes or so. We spent that time curled up against the wall close to the kitchen. We would learn the next day that Donny was on top of the staircase opening and closing that door repeatedly. The wind causes the door below to shake. If only this genius could have been used for good.


When I was two years old I was afraid of getting into trouble. I’m told that I used to take off my diaper and shit on the floor and then hide behind my Dad’s bar. My mom would find the pile I left and then hit the dog with a newspaper.

Years later, my mom gave my brother Mike and I Sesame Street themed winter jackets. Mike got ‘Cookie Monster’. I got ‘Big Bird’. I was hopping the fence to go to my friend’s house behind ours and accidentally shit my pants half over the climb. So I sat there crying, perched on the fence, with a ‘Big Bird’ Eyes on top of my hood and shit in my pants, for a half hour before my mom came to rescue me. I was too old to be shitting my pants and I knew I was going to get in trouble but I couldn’t make it to my Dad’s bar.

TBC