The Fear

One of my greatest fears in life is a painful death. It's not something I necessarily think about very often, maybe only one or two times per day. As a child, I feared being kidnapped, tortured, and mutilated. My parents taught me to lock the doors so that bad guys wouldn't come and get me. It's definitely a lesson that I learned well.

I always had an overactive imagination (probably a side effect of being an only child) so I never had trouble imagining all of the horrible outcomes of being a victim. As a child, I feared monsters under my bed, the dark, creatures of myth, vampires, werewolves, zombies, deranged animals, kidnappers, and nuclear holocaust. As a teen, I feared getting physically injured, gang-bangers, drowning, being burned by intense fire, destructive earthquakes that would either swallow me into the planet itself or bury me under tons of rubble, plummeting off a skyscraper to my doom, and talking to girls.

As a man, I find that most of the fears from my youth are buried deep within in me still. But I gained a new fear that still has the power to grip me with relentless might: serial killers.

Around late high school/early college, I started getting more interested in crime. (Crime stories are still one of my favorite genres of fiction.) But the reality of crime paralyzed me with fear. True crime is something that I am endlessly fascinated with despite the fact that reading (or watching) stories about true crime would increase my heart rate and make me sweat in trepidation. I am repulsed by violent death but also intrigued with it.

I think it was the first time I read Watchmen when I was in high school. Watchmen is a comic that had a profound effect on my life. Realistically speaking, it's probably the second most significant book in my life after the Bible. There are myriad ways Watchmen impacted my life but one was simply the origin story of Rorschach's mask. Alan Moore made it tie in to the story of Kitty Genovese, a woman who was brutally murdered at her apartment complex. There's a couple of panels that I pored over, that I reread over and over. Here's Rorschach's narration as he speaks to his prison psychologist:

"Kitty Genovese. I'm sure that was the woman's name. Raped. Tortured. Killed. Here. In New York. Outside her own apartment building. Almost forty neighbors heard screams. Nobody did anything. Nobody called cops. Some of them even watched. Do you understand? Some of them even watched."

The first time I read this, I thought it was just a fascinating story. I read the words over and over. "Some of them even watched. Do you understand? Some of them even watched." That part has always stayed with me.

Maybe a couple months after reading Watchmen, I was in my A.P. Psychology class and we were talking about diffusion of responsibility. The teacher mentioned (or maybe it was in the textbook, or both) the story of Kitty Genovese. I never forgot that name. But I learned, in that class, that she was a real person and what happened to her was real. That kind of blew me away.

That led me on a search to learn more about her. I found some websites that detailed her story, and then that led to me reading up on other true crime stories. I started reading a lot about serial killers and unsolved murders.

I remember having a lot of trouble sleeping after reading stuff like that.

When I was in college, I read another Alan Moore comic, From Hell, which was about Jack the Ripper. Eddie Campbell's scratchy art really triggered my imagination, really brought me into that era of Victorian England. I have a really powerful memory of coming home from class one afternoon, and relaxing in my room as I finished reading this very long comic. Just reading about this creep chilled me. Anyway, I finished reading the book and I was trying to digest what I could, when a loud chime surprised the crap out of me. Apparently, I had left my computer's audio speakers on full volume and someone sent me an instant message. That really shocked me and it was the one time in my life when I fell off my chair.

Then there was the time my buddy Kenton and I watched the movie Zodiac at my house. For some reason, we decided to watch it in the dark. Poor decision. That movie scared me more than any horror movie I've ever watched. There was a part when the protagonist was being stalked and toyed with by the Zodiac killer, and it was intense enough that I swore out loud at one point, purely out of irrational fear.

Even just thinking about the Zodiac killer right now makes me look around the room and make sure that there's no one near me. I hate serial killers. Why is it that I'm just inflicted by primal fear whenever I think about them?!

I am not afraid of death. It's the pain that scares me. I do not want to be murdered in a ritualistic manner by a psychopathic, ax-wielding serial killer. That's not how I wanna go. It sounds ridiculous, but I think that really is my greatest fear.

[My ideal death, if I can't die peacefully in my sleep, is to die surrounded by the corpses of my greatest enemies.]