Behind the Couch: My Secret Horror Baptism

a memoir

At age eight, my greatest ambition was to be invisible. Not in the magical, superhero kind of way, but in the very real, very sad kind of way that involved crouching behind our black leather couch that smelled like farts, praying my older brother Ryan wouldn’t detect the human-shaped lump crouched behind him in the dark.

It was a Friday night and Ryan had rented “Pet Sematary” from Video Horizons, the mom-and-pop VHS shop downtown Astoria that somehow always smelled like a mix of Twizzlers, popcorn and mildew. He and his friends with names like Brandon, Dustin, and some kid with braces they called “Nugget” for reasons I never understood, had sprawled out in our basement family room (which was actually a bar stocked with every kind of liquor), which in the early 1990s meant a room with 70s wood paneling, a fireplace, a five stool counter, and an exercise bike that everyone used as a coat rack when my mom wasn’t jamming out on it to C&C Music Factory.

I wasn't allowed to watch gory horror movies, yet. In my family, you had to reach the age of ten first. But I was obsessed. Every trip to Video Horizons ended with me staring longingly at the horror shelf, while my mom rented something “safe” for me like “Adventures in Babysitting” or “Pink Flamingos”.

That night, while Ryan and his crew were upstairs microwaving Totino’s Party Pizzas and arguing about who got the bean bag chair, I snuck into the bar. I wedged myself behind the couch, curled into a terrified armadillo shape, and held my breath.

From my vantage point, I could see the glow of the TV wash over their mullet silhouettes. The movie began. A pet cemetery made by kids, a creepy old neighbor with an accent that smelled like cigarettes, and dead things that didn’t stay dead. I was hooked, horrified and thrilled!

The problem with hiding behind a couch during a horror movie is that you can't leave. If they found me, they’d either kill me on the spot or, worse, tell my mom (even though she probably wouldn’t have cared because I was almost ten). So I stayed. For the full 103 minutes.

I watched a toddler get fuckin-owned by a semi, a cat come back wrong, and a mom get buried by her zombie baby. And yet somehow, the scariest part was when Nugget kept reaching his hand down behind the couch to scratch his ass and nearly touched me. Every time he did it, I had to scoot an inch to the left like a cockroach avoiding light. By the end of the film, I had stealthily maneuvered five feet across the basement.

When the credits rolled and the lights came on, I had a choice: emerge from behind the couch like some kind of sewer troll or wait it out. I chose the latter. Ryan and his friends thundered upstairs, laughing and burping and arguing over who would marry Christina Applegate. I waited five more minutes, then sprinted down the hall to my room and cried into my Garbage Pail Kids pillow case from a mix of fear, exhaustion, and adrenaline.

I didn’t sleep that night. Every shadow was a dead cat. Every creak was Zelda, the twisted sister, coming down the hallway for me. But I also felt something new, a spark. A thrilling awareness that something deep inside me, some twisted, spooky part had been awakened. I was alive.

From that night on, I was hooked. Freddy, Jason, Chucky, Candyman, Leprechaun, even the Ghoulies (those weird trolls that live in toilets). I loved them all. Horror became my secret language, my badge of bravery, the weird little corner of the world where I felt alive and powerful.

Looking back now, crouched behind that leather couch at age nine, trying not to piss myself while watching a scalpel-wielding zombie toddler slice Fred Gwynne’s Achilles tendon, I wasn’t scared. I was baptized.