Poke Me In The Eye

What is the most scared you have ever been? That is the question this week.

Moe’s Answer

I had two possible answers for this question. Both with a very different type of fear. I was going to choose my experience with Hurricane Charley. My father lives on the west coast of Florida in a town called Matlacha which was supposed to get creamed by the hurricane so we decided to evacuate north and we headed up to Arcadia. Arcadia ended up being one of the worst hit towns. I watched as the hotel we were staying in got torn apart. My brother, his wife and their 16 month old baby went to a shelter when the evacuation order came in for Arcadia and my father, his wife and myself decided to stay at the hotel. The roof of the shelter ended up collapsing during the hurricane. If I had gone to the shelter with my brother and his family I have a feeling it would have been my answer. But seeing how I didn’t, getting arrested and thrown in jail in Tijuana is my answer.

Here is the story.

It happened with in the first 3 weeks of college. I went to SDSU so I was only about 20 minutes away from Mexico where the drinking age is 18. Now, when I got to school the people who ran the dorms had a little meeting and warned us about Tijuanna and told horror stories about people getting stuck in the jails down there for stupid stuff.

On the fateful night of the arrest before we had even left the dorms I had already had 7-8 shots of tequilla. When we got down to TJ the place we went to was giving out free shots of tequila when you ordered a beer. A few of the people that I was with didn’t want their shots so I did theirs as well. Anyway, we drank the night away and as you can probably guess got really hammered.

On the way back home we had to cross the bridge, if you have ever been to TJ you probably know what bridge I am talking about. Myself and two of the guys I was with decided that we really needed to go to the bathroom. So we went off the bridge. As we were standing there peeing all of a sudden a spotlight from down below started shining on us. We looked down and it was from a cop car so we all started running. We made it off the bridge and after about a block we figured we were safe. We were wrong. Before we knew it three cops were handcuffing us and putting us in the back of a car. I remember asking what I was getting arrested for, the cops reply “for making pee pee of bridge”. Unfortunately none of us had any money to bribe the cops otherwise we probably could have avoided being thrown in jail.

It is amazing how fast being arrested will sober you up.

So the three of us are in the back of the cop car and the cops are driving like maniacs, they have their lights on and everything. They first take us to some sort of staging area. I went first, gave them my ID and the cops spoke some spanish to each other and I really had no idea what was going on. After they were done checking me in the cops brought me back out to the car and handcuffed me to the car and went back inside leaving me there all by myself. So there I am, 18 years old, haven’t even been in college for a month yet and I am sitting handcuffed in the back of cop car in Tijuana. The cops had not put the cuffs on very tight and I could actually slip my hand out of the cuffs. For a couple seconds I consider running, but I had no idea where I was and I figured even if I did make it my friends would be worse off so I stayed put (very glad I didn’t try running, that would have been extremely dumb). So eventually my two friends are brought back out to the car and they haul us off to the actual jail.

Luckily they put the three of us in the same cell. We were also put in with two other college kids. One of the other guys was passed out the whole time we were there, the other guy was cool enough. The cops let us sit there for a several hours before they let us make any phone calls. During that time we got flashed by a couple of hookers that worked at the jail.

Anyway, we finally got to make our phone calls at around four in the morning. Now we had gone down with a quite a few people from the dorms, but seeing how we hadn’t been down in school very long we didn’t know anyones phone number. About the only numbers we had were our own so we each called our roommates, none of whom came to TJ with us that night. I tried calling my roommate first, no answer. One of my friends tried calling his, no answer. The last guy tried calling his friend, no answer. So the cops put us back in our cell.

About an hour later the cops let us try again. First call, no answer. Second call, no answer. Third call, finally someone picks up. The roommate grudgingly agrees to come down and pick us up, but he says he has no money. So this guy drives down to the jail. Gets one of our ATM cards, drives back across the border and gets the money to bail us out ($30 each if I remember correctly) and then drives back to bail us out. In some weird stroke of luck, the guy who came down to bail us out was from TJ and actually knew one of the guys working at the jail, so once he showed up things went pretty smoothly.

Well that is my story, I only went to TJ twice after that, both of those times were for concerts.

Crawford’s Answer

When this question was posed to me my first thought was “whoa, clever…this ought to be good.” But the more time I spent thinking about it the deeper I realized two truths.

I haven’t been truly scared…in the classical sense. The time I can remember being the most scared is extremely personal.

Being scared…being truly and deeply terrified, to me, means awareness that something catastrophic will be happening (or could happen) at any moment. It could mean that I will die, it could mean that I’ll lose my home or my family or whatever. It means that something real is going to go wrong. Not something really bad, but real bad. There is a distinct difference between the two.

Personally I’m not one of a risk taker. I don’t bungee jump off very tall things for the sheer thrill. I don’t juggle live hand grenades. I don’t drive into downtown Oakland in the middle of the night and try to hug strangers. Sure I’ve been in, as well as have put myself into dangerous situations (either through conscious action or foolhardy alcohol influenced decisions). So the opportunity for my life to end, be horribly changed, or whatever…in a way that would truly scare me…just hasn’t happened.

But there is no question that I’ve been scared. And here lies the problem. This turns the answer to this question into an extremely personal one. I can’t think of an instance where I was real scared. I can only think of instances where I was really scared. And those times were in my mind.

So when was I the most scared I have ever been? It all started out many years ago when I was still living in Tucson Arizona. I came home from work and my roommate was studying. I was pretty stoned at the time and he asked me to leave him alone for a bit so he could concentrate. I obliged and went to my room. I lit some strong incense, and since it was in the middle of summer, I kept the windows closed so the air conditioning would keep working.

And that’s when I got my first headache.

It was so painful it surprised me. Hell, it scared me. But I was young, on drugs, and living a pretty crappy life at the time and blew it off. Sure it was extreme pain but in my early 20’s drug user brain I figured God was punishing me…some sort of quasi-philosophical explanation.

And life continued.

Years later…the headache returned. They returned several times in fact. These days I know exactly what I suffer from. They are called Cluster Headaches and roughly 50-100 people out of 100,000 experience them to various degrees. They predominantly affect men (about a 6:1 ratio of men vs. women) and I could spend quite a lot of time talking about them.

But the essence is…they hurt. I struggle with a description of the pain I endure. I know that no words I could possibly put down could remotely compare to level of pain that comes with these…these things. I almost laugh when I try to explain them to people as I know they couldn’t possibly know what it’s like. I’ve read medical journals on the subject and some doctors have described them as the “most severe pain syndromes suffered by human beings”. That come pretty close I’d say.

When the cycle starts it fills me with a sense of dread. I know they aren’t going to kill me…that I’m not really going to die. All I know is that soon I am going to be in real pain. And there is the story of my greatest fear.

I couldn’t tell you what year this was…what month…what day of the week…it doesn’t matter. It was night and I was living in an apartment in Walnut Creek. And this series of Cluster’s was the worst I have ever experienced. It wasn’t just the pain….it was the fact that the pain was sudden, it was bright, it was unexpected, it wasn’t going away.

The most scared I have ever been was lying in my bed in the middle of the night. I had barely managed two hours of sleep. The headache was over. But I was awake and crying. I could feel the tears running down my face as I lay in the dark. I knew…I knew that another headache would come. I didn’t know when. I didn’t know why. I just could feel it back there…waiting…quietly. It would come back and that delicious rush of ecstasy that I felt when the prior one subsided would soon be replaced with agony beyond description. I was beyond scared.

These days I know more about them. I have good medication. I have a fantastic doctor. Even better than all that is that it’s been over 2 years since I’ve had my last series of Cluster’s.

But they’ll come again someday. And that fear will never go away.

For more information on Cluster Headaches check out this very informative Wikipedia post http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_headache or visit an excellent support page with tons of information http://www.clusterheadaches.com/