One night my two self-appointed insurgent brothers rigged up the vacuum cleaner hose through the bed springs before I came to bed (if you’re too young to know what bed springs were ask someone older). After I got uncomfortably settled in my inside-closest-to-the-door-position, this growling noise began to be emitted from under the bed just below my head. Against all hope, I wished I was imagining it. I wasn’t. This was something new and more ominous than all the others. Perhaps the Tingler and Middle Man had merged or morphed into something much worse. It made noise. It was real. I wasn’t imagining it. I could HEAR it for real! And, my wonderful brothers slept through it! I thought anyway. My older brother had the other end of the hose coming out on the other side of the bed next to his face under the pillow and he’d intermittently clamp it over his mouth to make these wonderful noises.

I wasn’t in the middle so I reasoned that the Middle Man couldn’t be the growl emitter. I surmised the Tingler made no noise. There must be an Inside Man that had shown up or a new creature that had evolved. Well anyway, I was terrified (as is the object of terrorism). I lay there in utter fear hoping I’d just imagined it. Oh no, I hadn’t. This continued for some time and only because I was too scared to utter a sound let alone to be able to yell at my mom. And, just as I started to yell, a hand was clamped over my mouth. You can only imagine how clean and pleasant that was. I’m probably still infected. I know I’m still warped. It took some fast explaining and lots of verbal threats to keep me from telling. I of course knew shunning would occur for an appropriate period of time after each “tattling offense” I committed against these Taliban fighters. Any torture in addition to the shunning would then be directly proportional to the seriousness of any much-deserved punishment they might receive.

Light was a key defense for me though. If I could just get to the light switch when the Tingler or Middle Man or Growler was attacking in the darkness, they’d disappear. More than once I had my brother’s dirty hand clamped over my mouth while I was trying to scream at my mom. And as I noted previously, having your teenage brother’s hand over your mouth and nose is a real fright within itself (Maybe that was indeed the Tingler! I have never thought of that.). But, we did have alligators that lived under our bed too and we had to jump when we got out of bed to keep them from getting our feet. So, it was tricky trying to yell at my mom while jumping a safe distance from the bed from a supine (I like the word so look it up) position and hitting the light switch on the first grab (hoping there wasn’t Middle Man’s hand or a Tingler on the switch in the dark). And, you wonder where I learned to multi-task!

Well one night the Al Qaeda duo used light against me though. These two hooligans actually went to bed early. I knew something was wrong and hoped they were both dying (well, not really, but at least be incapacitated for an extended period), but I stayed up just to be safe from them. At least, they’d be asleep when I went to bed. So after some time, everybody was going to bed and I had to go into our room in the dark to get in bed. I, of course, was scared and was trying to figure out how to get into bed in the dark without stepping on the Tingler, without running into the Middle Man, without being growled at, and without getting my feet bitten by the alligators. A young man with a lot on his mind I was! Well, suddenly the light spontaneously CAME ON! And, my brothers lay there asleep. Yeah right. And nobody was standing in the bedroom door either. So I stood there in this frightened stupor for a moment, frozen in time. I looked at the switch. Nothing. I looked at the floor and it was free of all the feared ones. Eh oh.

I don’t know how long I stood there before I started to turn out the light, get in bed, and stay awake all night terrified, but it was a minute or so. When my brothers realized I was getting ready to yell at my mom, they started laughing gleefully at the incredulity at the light coming on by itself. Well what had happened was that these two budding Hell’s Angels had rigged up a string through the heads of some tacks lined up along the walls and across the ceiling to the other side next to my older brother. When I came in they could just yank the string and the light would come on. A simple enough gimmick. I believe this was a precursor to the more sophisticated versions of roadside bombs with similar ignition apparatuses. They didn’t shout, “Long live Allah” or any other supposedly redeeming testimonies, I don’t recall, but they were really proud of themselves. Oddly, they still are!