Eight Arms to Creep You Out

I welcome you all to the first formal telling of what I'm calling "The Spider Story".

Years ago, I embarked on a personal quest not to kill spiders just for the infraction of being spiders in my personal space. Spider catch flying bugs, which are more annoying to me than spiders, so it made less and less sense to kill the things which would help thin out the insect menace. This quest has become easier and easier over the years and I've found myself pausing more to observe the spider in passing rather than pausing to remind myself of my pledge. Although I have admittedly and understandably found myself violating this pledge from time to time, I mostly stick to it.

One day back in Minneapolis – before my circus days – I found myself mired in a situation that thrust my face into the mud pie of the limits of my self control. One night I entered the bathroom/kitchen area of our apartment (as they were rooms next to each other) and I was slapped in the face with a sight I had never seen before: hundreds of baby spiders. Somewhere in the crawlspaces between floors of the old house had been a number of egg sacs and they all hatched at the same time; and hundreds of baby spiders found their ways to our ceiling in the bathroom and kitchen; and they were crawling all over the ceiling and lowering themselves on their amazingly thin, yet horror-inducing silk lines. I had never been witness to such a sight before and I silently freaked, realizing that I was outnumbered and could not stem the flood of tiny spiders.

I shut myself in my room, scanning the ceiling every few minutes until I went to sleep. Every twitch of a hair could possibly have been a spider touching down on my skin, maybe to crawl its way into the dark, damp recesses of my skull. When I awoke the next morning, there was no sign of the arachnid apocalypse.

Last Sunday, history repeated itself on a small scale.

I had entered clown alley, our dressing room. I tied up my hair, put in my contacts, and began putting on my greasepaint. I brushed at a small tickle at the top of my forehead, thinking it was a loose, single hair. I looked at my finger and saw a tiny spider carcass. I apologized – probably to the dead spider – and continued. While applying the flesh tone a few moments later (Mehron light egyptian, for the record) I noticed the sight of another baby spider lowering itself from one of my dreads. I dispatched that one as well as its companion that was on the other side of my head doing the same thing.

It was at this point that I started to think it wasn't just one spider that I picked up from walking under the trees from the house to the alley and that something might be amiss. A few moments later, I spotted two more lowering from the ceiling. I started to come apart – I could feel it. Somewhere in the wagon was an egg sac and it was probably in the ceiling space. This could have been the end or just the beginning. As any proper story would have it: it was the beginning.

All colors of makeup applied, I made my move to the outside to powder. On my way out the door I noticed it: the front of the wagon was ground zero. Dozens and dozens of baby spiders were crawling around on the left curtain and the rope that was holding up the curtains. The right curtain was untouched, but bearing to the right as I exited and to the left as I entered was no solution: they were covering the left (south) curtain and the rope that stretched between the curtain halves.

All bets were off: my pledge was null and void. I remembered that my partner Neal had a can of Yard Guard somewhere in the alley. I found it, shook it up, and not caring one bit about the fumes I was going to subject myself and the dressing room to, I stood back and I let loose with a few well-aimed puffs and sweeps.

After propping open the door for ventilation and letting my breath out, I finished powdering and re-entered to check my work. They were dead very quickly. I grabbed the vacuum to clean up the exoskeletal carnage and found the hatched egg sac on the outside face of the curtain. The devils had been there God knows how long! It didn't matter anymore. I had freed myself and the alley from the spidery menace, but I would pay a price for my vigor until after the first two shows.

I had slightly fogged myself and for a brief while I could taste the faint taste of the chemical death I dealt in my mouth if I breathed too deeply through nose or mouth. I was sure I'd recover. I had made certain that the pursuit of comedy would not be hamstrung by tiny arachnids that day.