- April 23, 2024
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The King Kong of spiders took up residence in my garage. The place wasn’t much, but it was his and he called it home, right there in the corner near the door.
They were cozy quarters, that’s for sure, with a nice amount of shade and a ball of dirt near the molding which I was sure he used as a beanbag chair or hammock in his spare time.
And make no mistake about it: Spider Kong enjoyed his leisure time. But in all other ways, this bad boy meant business. At least four feet tall and two feet wide, he had about 68,000 eyes and fur as thick as a lion’s mane. I don’t want to exaggerate, of course, but this spider laughed in the face of other, punkier beasts, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and boat-eating giant squid.
This abomination didn’t crawl as much as it strutted, rocking sunglasses and an opened collared shirt, half unbuttoned. It was a living exaggeration, a miracle of modern biology, a mistake of evolution.
When I first noticed him, shade-bathing on his dirt-hammock, I was cheerfully whistling, carrying a load of laundry out to the washer. And I swear he winked at me.
That’s when I lost my cool.
I threw down my laundry and stopped in my tracks. But then I got a handle on myself.
You’re a self-respecting, self-reliant man, I thought. You drive a 1999 Civic with 175,000 miles. Spiders are afraid of you, not the other way around! Yeah, you’re so mean, you make medicine sick.
Realizing that I was correct on all counts, I calmed down and attempted to tap into my years and years of Boy Scout training to decide what to do next.
Then I remembered I never took Boy Scouts or had any training.
And that’s when I really lost it.
I grabbed for the closest blunt object, a cooler, and like any rational adult, proceeded to smash it onto the concrete and scream, “I hate you! How dare you!? Not in my house!!” until I tired out, leaning on the cooler and panting.
Spider Kong was dead. A sad, shriveled goner. He’d been assassinated, and I was the 1920s’ biplanes that shot him off the Empire State Building to watch him crumple onto my garage floor — and all because we simply didn’t understand each other.
Had I learned nothing from the movies? I wondered. And I almost felt ashamed. All things considered, Spider Kong wasn’t so bad. Really, he was even kind of amazing, a sort of natural wonder, a real rarity. And I murdered him. Well, obliterated — maybe that’s a better word.
What a senseless waste.
I lifted the cooler to say a prayer or two when the unthinkable happened. (If you’re squeamish, now would be the time to turn back to Page 4 for more happy pictures of Rocky the Golden Retriever. Save yourself.)
In a flash, it seemed the floor grew dark with movement. And the colored mass was growing, outward from the bottom of the cooler.
It was a sea of tiny, baby Spider Kongs, running for their lives in waves. Turns out I’d actually dethroned a Queen, and she was pregnant.
And it’s like they say: Hell hath no fury like a spider scorned.
Springing into action with what can only be described as a girlish yelp, I began tap-dancing on the spiders. All I could imagine was 500 grown-up, disgusting, good-for-nothing Spider Kongs infesting my garage, waiting for the perfect moment to carry out a planned invasion of inside and tie me to the ground like “Gullver’s Travels.”
So I did what I had to do, killed every last one in order to ensure the future safety of my sanctuary.
Then I turned and walked away from the mess of baby carcasses the same way action heroes nonchalantly stride away from explosions.
Like the devolution of any great antihero — Michael Corelone, Walter White — I was officially now a cold, hard, heartless killer. And I like to think a single tear fell from my eye as I was pacing — my own sweet and silent redemption.
And that’s when I decided I was moving somewhere spiderless to live out the rest of my days in peace. Somewhere north. Way north. Like Alaska.
Remember me.
BY MIKE CAVALIERE | ASSOCIATE EDITOR
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