What Terrors Made Me a Horror Writer? #1: The Earwig Story

Back when I worked in the "real world" and had a lot more contact with different types of people and I'd often get asked why I write horror.  Whenever I explained my reasons they'd always leave dubious.  Clearly, I was lying to cover up some nightmare trauma.  So, today, I'll come clean.  It's true.  I've been afflicted by several horrors that would have broken the mind of most!  Of course, who's to say that my mind is actually unbroken?  I do, after all, write the darkest of fictions.

There was no simple single event that traumatized me.  There were several and today I'll share one of the worst with you; The Earwig Story.

As many of you know I spent a chunk of my youth in Guadalajara, Mexico.  My step-dad worked for Motorola and we spent nearly three years there.  Guadalajara is fairly different from the average impression of Mexico.  It's in the mountains and is very rocky, hilly, and green most of the year.  I don't know how it is now, but at the time there was pretty small middle class.  Medium sized houses were rare.  Also, any house of significance had walls.  The house next door to ours took up half a block, had a nine foot wall, and broken glass shards cemented to the top of it.  They had three dobermans that patrolled the grounds and when you walked past they'd reach their heads out of the only spot with bars and try and bite you.  Our house, the nearest equivalent to a standard suburban home in the US, had five bedrooms, maid's quarters, a party/guest building out back, fireplace, library, indoor garden area, and marble floors.  I came to this from living in a two bedroom apartment in Elk Grove.  It was massive.  We went from sharing one bathroom to having seven.  Seven.  My bedroom had its own bathroom and shower at the end of a large walk in closet.  The walk in closet was half the size of the room I'd previously shared with my sister.

Buildings in Mexico are generally box-like and this place was no exception.  The front yard had a series of walls with built in planters and iron fencing.  All of the windows and doorways facing the street had bars on them.  I once got into a fight with my sister and said I was going to run away.  While I was packing gear she left to tell my mom and locked me in the house, trapped by all the bars.  After several attempts to fabricate a rope from tied blankets and climb down from the roof, I surrendered to my captivity (oh how different my life would have been...).  The back yard was eight feet of wall with six feet of chain link after that, and three rows of barbed wire on top.  If it all sounds oppressive keep in mind that it's covered in beautiful flowing bougainvillea flowers and all sorts of other plants.  It was very pretty.

My favorite part of the house was up on the roof.  There was an iron spiral staircase that wound up to the top floor where the maids quarters were (we didn't have a maid and my parents didn't let me live up there).  It was like a little third floor with the bedroom, bathroom, and washer and dryer.  It had a door to the roof and an area for hanging clothes.  There was a ladder that reached up to the roof of the maids quarters and on top of that was a big water tank.  Drinking water had to come out of a purifier.  All the other house water was stored in the tank.  I used to like to sit out on top of the tank, not quite four stories up, and look out.

Thankfully, my mother was a let-children-run-free sort as long as my chores were done.  As such, I got to do a lot of roaming around the mountain forests.  People would let cows and horses roam loose and I spent a fair amount of time tormenting the former and riding bareback on the latter (not from lack of trying to ride a cow, stupid cows).  My friends would pick teams and we would see who could count more; lizards or chipmunks.  You had to keep an eye out for snakes and dog packs.  It was a fantastic place to be eleven years old. 

The biggest difference was the bugs.

I'll never forget opening a kitchen drawer the first day we were in the new house.  Dozens of roaches poured out, all over the counter, even onto my hand.  Some Mexican lady was there, a realtor perhaps, and she just shrugged.  "Even el Presidente has cucarachas in his palace." she said.  "Fumigator is coming."  Thankfully, the fumigator did come and solved most of the problem.  But it didn't solve them all.  Giant wasps, wandering roaches, the occasional scorpion, and various spiders.  It's a lot more than your standard mid-Western honeybee.

We had these enormous geraniums in the planters outside of the house, over three feet high, and one of my chores was so pull dead leaves from them.  They were full of spiderwebs.  I remember pulling one and finding a black widow on the backside of a leaf and freaking out.  My mom, salt of the earth that she is, told me I wasn't getting out of my chores that easy.  "Hit 'em with a stick and stomp 'em."  Every moment of that chore was like the tree-stump scene in Flash Gordon, but I did it.  I also sent many spiders to the great gossamer beyond.

I'd gotten used to the bugs.  Some still freaked me out, but I was dealing with them.  Until the earwigs. 

As I mentioned, I had my own shower.  It was all marble with a sliding door, no tub.  I was eleven.  A pretty awkward body age for anybody.  I stripped, headed for the shower, and got in.  At that age I enjoyed turning the water on myself, not turning it on and stepping in.  I liked the rush and shock of it.  Not anymore.  I turned on the water and... nothing.  A dribble.  It was like someone had twisted the faceplate and shut it down.  So I reached up and twisted it to get the water going.  The faceplate came off in my hand.

The mass of earwigs, that had evidently filled the shower-head, shot out and hit me directly in the chest.  The faucet continued to pour a sloppy stream of both living/dead earwigs and waterlogged insect guts onto me.  I am not ashamed to say I screamed.  A lot.  Reflexively jumping back out of the water didn't turn out to be a good idea.  The lump of bugs that had struck my very heart was mostly sliding down my chest.  The majority of it was parts of bugs, legs, abdomens, antenna.  But lots of them were still alive and crawling up my neck and shoulders.  The bug 'slurry' was splashing all over my feet and legs.  They were crawling all over the floor of the shower. I started wiping myself off with my hands, doing that freakout dance, trying not to slip.  Now, you have to keep in mind, it's a big house, nobody heard me.  There would be no rescue.  Secondly, these aren't normal earwigs.  Each of them is well over an inch long.  They're jet black and yellow.  They have wings.  I only know this because I was covered in their bloated little corpses and had their wings sticking to me.

It only took a few seconds for the 'bug blockage' to subside.  Clear water came out of the tap, but lacking the head, it was like a lazy hose.  I stood under it, guiding the water as best I could, sluicing the juice and live bugs off of me.  I turned the heat up and scalded myself, and them.  They curled up in the heat, gyrating.  I stomped and kicked them down the drain.  Eventually, after hunting them all down and soaping myself multiple times, I got out.

It seems earwigs enjoy congregating in dark, cool places.  Like the water tank on the roof.  There's a reason it wasn't water for drinking. 

To this day I do not particularly enjoy a delicate touch on my chest.  I have been brushed there by a wet, squirming, insectoid god and I don't think I'll ever forget its caress'.

Oh, incidentally, the picture is exactly what they looked like.  Happy showering!