Spider Bite Story

Sonicrusk posted about spiders a little while back, and it reminded me of a story. One that brings out the true coward inside all of us…well, inside of me anyway.

Jimithy Johnson, welder by trade, can’t call him a friend of mine without cringing, not because of his body odor or attitude towards life, but this affliction he suffered a few years back. We were working security for Jordan Marsh (department store chain), our shifts overlaped by 6 hours every day from noon to 6PM, with one of us closing up the store at 8PM every night.

I’d gone out drinking with him and his buddies one time, but it wasn’t my bag. Too much of something and not enough of something else, like all things in life I suppose, and perhaps it had something to do with sports or humanity, the crowd he ran with tended to view the combustion engine as something 500 times more exciting than anything Tom Brady was doing at the time, and so the talk generally centered around such-n-such a part ordered from somewhere to go onto such-n-such, to which the group would split down the middle most times, one half calling whoever shared their story an idiot or a genius depending on what they had done to their car or was going to do to it at some point.

Important part of the story being that, on the night in question I was too drunk on tequilla and superiority to notice anything like a spider. Though that’s where Jimithy insists he got bit – I suspect that he was building up the courage to file a lawsuit or something – typically, he’ll talk a lot of shit about something like this and never follow up. Important thing to remember at this part though is he was BITTEN. In the FACE.

Swelling up to the size of a golfball some time afterwards, I was the one who had to have a heart-to-heart (supervisor was a woman and afraid to be alone with him) about how he should really go see a doctor about the bump on his upper cheek. “Talbots (our nickname for the bosslady) put you up to this, huh? How ’bout getting that bitch to kick down some medical insurance. ”

I told him it was beside the point, that the wound on his face was starting to be talked about all over the mall, that little children were reported to have serious bed-wetting nightmares about it all over town, with even some reputable plastic surgeons refusing to step foot into the mall until he gets that thing checked out.

He never does, not for any militant or political reason (even though that’s how he played it to everyone who’d listen), but really it’s a part needed to make his car drive faster using nitrous oxide he was saving up for, couldn’t be accomodated…this swollen, disgusting lump on his face would have to get in line.

Then it started pulsating one day. Jimithy had gone on a spin an hour earlier and was still high from what he smoked on the way to Dunkin Doughnuts, so as I started commenting from a distance, he thought I was just fucking with him. Who knows, maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me, but I wasn’t going to touch the thing to find out. All I know is, I had the camera room while he went to get an ice cream downstairs. Next thing I know, people are going nuts on camera 4, parents swooping in for their kids, running away, and there’s my partner, hunched over the ice cream counter with little black things coming out of his face, crawling all over the counter, into the ice cream vats, down into his shirt, onto the hair and down the shirt of the poor girl who was serving him…

Took off my nametag and droped it on the floor, Beck streaming into my ears a minute later.  That’s right, I quit on the spot…the old fashioned way, NO CALL NO SHOW…haven’t seen or heard of Jimithy in years.