July 1988, Detroit, Michigan

By Heather Dilly

Rosie grabbed my hand with a force beyond her 13 years. She had had enough– enough of me and my fear getting in the way of her good time.

“What is wrong with you? Just come on!”

I smiled and pretended that my insides weren’t churning and eating themselves. I fussed with my scrunchy with my one free hand and shrugged like I didn’t have a care in the world. Rosie pulled me toward the fairgrounds, and I had to throw up in my mouth a little with every step I took. She had shamed me just enough to swallow my own vomit.

I wasn’t scared of rides. I wasn’t scared of cotton candy. I was scared of crowds. I was scared of people. I was scared of being scared and having nowhere to run.

I couldn’t have known that accepting Rosie’s invite to the fair that night would propose a problem. I hadn’t realized that fairs were scary. The few I had attended in my meager past seemed all right enough to me. Mom, Dad … Ferris wheels? But tonight was different.

Rosie’s big sister was the driver, the chaperone. To be kind I will call her big-boned. To be very kind I will call her responsible. To be a liar I will say that she didn’t hate the both of us and our bright eyes and tiny bodies. The second that car was in park, she was gone with only a snotty word over her bulbous shoulder.

“Be back at 10. I am not waiting for you shits.”

And I wish I could have felt liberated. I wish I could have felt free. I had no chaperone. I had no one watching me. I needn’t mind my Ps and Qs. It was a freedom that was shiny new to me. I was 13, at the fair, with my cool friend and freedom was looming and covered in cotton candy, Ferris wheels, and the materhorn.

Maybe it was too much too soon, but I just felt scared.

Rosie and I were speechless at first. We watched the formidable shadow of her older sister dissolve into the spectrum of bright colors and sounds. We scuffed the dirt underneath our feet, and neither one of us knew what to do next. Neither one of us had banked on absolute freedom. Absolutely.

But while I covered my Converse in dirt, Rosie found her resolve. She realized that she had been given that rare teenage opportunity. She was chaperoned, or so her parents thought. She was where she said she was going to be. She had a pass. She could do as she pleased.

I wish that I felt like my friend did that day. But I just wanted to go home. I felt butterflies and twitches and a cold sweat. My hands were shaking, and my mind racing, and I needed to run somewhere and hide. What a lovely introduction to panic. Panic that would plague me right to the end of … well, I am not done yet, but I imagine it will be around until I am done.

I wanted to stare into the lights of the explosive panorama of the Michigan State Fair. But my knees were knocking together, and the sound of bone on bone matched the thundering in my chest.

Rosie didn’t notice. While my knees were knocking, hers took to walking. She was hypnotized by the sounds and lights and materhorns.

“What is wrong with you? Just come on!”

Vomit and all, I followed.

I was scared. I didn’t know why.

In spite of my seemingly unwarranted fear, we did manage to ride a few rides that night. We stopped and purchased snow cones. I did sweat through my “RELAX” Frankie goes to Hollywood T-shirt, an easy thing to write off because of the suffocating humid summer air. No one would have guessed that the sweat that covered me from head to clammy toe was cold and more a result of the hurricane of fear welling up inside of me with every clown we passed, every bite of cotton candy.

I was able to hide my ever mounting panic just enough to appear normal to my cool friend. My insides were shaking but my outsides seemed calm, if sweaty. Every time there was a loud noise, I checked all of my surroundings as subtly as I could without giving myself away. That means every time someone fooled the guesser, or hit the hammer so hard that the disc rammed the top of the tower, or someone’s blood curdling scream wafted through the summer stick from some death defying ride or another, every muscle in my body tensed. And I carefully scanned every angle of the panorama looking for who was there to kill me.

Rosie didn’t notice anything strange about me, much to my great relief, and at 9:30, just before our 10:00 “don’t be a shit” meeting time with our robust “chaperone”, she decided that we simply had to go into the haunted house.

One might assume that a girl with knocking knees would do anything to avoid “THE HOUSE OF 1,000 HORRORS!!!!” But I was wonderfully relieved by such an option. It was the one spot in the whole damn fairground where I wouldn’t have to hide my internal horror.

Everyone would act like I felt, and after holding it in for the last few hours I was looking forward to the freedom of expressing my terror. They would scream when we walked past a man in a ghostly mask jumping out, and I would just breathe deeply and enjoy that they were all acting like I was feeling. I would breathe in and feel normal, if only for two minutes, in a haunted house. It was a perfect place for a panicked pre-teen to hide.

I never did get that luxury. I never did breathe deeply in a house of 1,000 horrors. As we waited in line a scuffle broke out. Well, it was a scuffle at first and then a full blown fist fight between two intoxicated boys who, of course, had other intoxicated boys with them who decided to get in on the melee.

And there I was, in the middle of the tiny riot. There I was not only witness to the danger of crowds but a victim of them as well. Those dumb boys tore my “RELAX” T-shirt. Well, OK, I ran like hell at the first whiff of hostility and caught it on a fence. But it was ruined and it was the crowd’s fault. I lost Rosie in the mob and ran like hell toward the junky black Escort that I prayed would have just enough life in it to transport me away from certain dismemberment.

The parking lot was an immense maze and only added to my fear. If I couldn’t find the junker, how could I ever be beamed away? When I finally found it, “RELAX” was holding on by a thread, and I couldn’t breathe. Rosie and her hulk of a sister were nowhere to be found, and I had to fight the urge to crawl under the useless metal, dig a hole, and cover myself with dirt to disappear. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.

It was 9:45, 15 minutes before the shits were to be shuffled home. I had no idea where my friend was, and I was sure that the hulk would milk every second of fearless fun that she could. So I sat in the dirt, tried to blend into the shadows that the junker provided, and waited. I waited for the longest 15 minutes in the history of waiting.

When they finally showed up, Rosie precisely on time and the hulk a few excruciating minutes later, I was filthy and torn, and they looked like they had just had the time of their lives.

Some of the drive home was filled with the hulk regaling us with stories of all the boys she had met, all the while blowing her second-hand smoke up my nose, with windows up and the air conditioner on. Some of the drive home was filled with Rosie torturing me with stories of the fantastic house of horrors that I had missed. But most of the ride home they made fun of me. In the age old pull of fight or flight I had opted for flight … an option that sadly did not go unnoticed or un-ridiculed.

“I turned around and she was just running!” Rosie laughed and then added, “Heather sometimes you are soooooo weird!”

This made the hulk guffaw and add, “God Heather, grow up. So some guys got into a fight. Don’t be a shit about it! I mean, no boy is ever gonna like you if you keep acting so weird. Trust me!”

My panic was the highlight of their night, the funniest thing that happened all evening. I just sat in the back and laughed on the inside, choking on second-hand smoke. I had been mired in earth that night, sitting on the dirt parking lot for 15 minutes where I had discovered a fantastic power - a power that I had all my own. I wasn’t weird. I wasn’t a worry wart. I was able to sense danger. So laugh all you want, girls, but don’t come crying to me when that Mac truck hits you when you should have turned left instead of right.

I have always been protective of my panic. I have always believed that it kept me alive in a world of 1,000 horrors, largely due in part to the events of that particular night in the middle of a Midwestern heat wave and haunted houses. It’s hard to purposely cut off your terror radar, even if it has a high instance of incorrect readings. Sometimes it works. Well, most of the time you just get freaked out for no reason. BUT, sometimes, maybe one time, you correctly sense the horror in the air. It’s enough to keep a girl out of therapy. It’s enough to keep a girl away from anti-anxiety meds, for most of a girl’s life I suppose.

However, I eventually took the plunge into a radar-less world with a not so delicate pushing from my spouse. Poor guy had put up with five years of my ever panicked ways, and I must say he is a patient man. It has been a relatively successful ride, the whole therapy and drug thing. But as happy as I am not to cold sweat through my shirts these days, I can’t help but long for my radar when I would have sensed to turn left instead of right.

Heather Dilly is a writer/actress currrently residing in New York City, where she lives with her beautiful husband and their three cats. She hails from the middle of the middle of the middle of the Midwest desert of Detroit, Michigan.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, March 16th, 2007 | Email This Post

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