Amongst the Widows – Part 1 – The Widow Whisperer

When I was a kid, every house I lived in was infested with black widow spiders. My family must have smelt of flies or crickets or some shit, because those wacky arachnids just couldn’t get enough of us! If youv’e never had the pleasure of meeting one of these charming little fellows, allow me to introduce you to a couple now:

Um, yeah, they’re some of the foulest, creepiest creatures that walk the earth. Fouler even than K-Fed or a post 2000 Tara Reid (but not fouler than the skinny Olsen twin). And the best part: their venom is potent enough to kill a baby! Yay!! I was so emotionally scarred by these spiders as a child that as I sit here writing this, my arms and legs are tingling, and I can assure you that it has nothing to do with the two tabs of acid I dropped earlier this evening.

Please understand that there is no way for me to exaggerate how many black widows were living around our 900 square foot house rent-free. It had to be hundreds. It was so bad that rarely, rarely did I play outside in the yard after dark. A friend of mine once laughed at my hesitance to go out there at night and, determined to prove me wrong, went out there by himself. A couple days later I found his skeletal remains in some widow-dung.

We were hostages in our own home. Well, most of us were…but not my dad. He took a sick glee in our widow infestation, was in fact a sort of Widow Whisperer. Im not shitting you, he had a real way with these little nightmares. His favorite thing to do was to go around the perimeter of our house at night armed with a flashlight and his trusty “Widow Whapper,” (yes, that’s actually what he called it) a yard stick sawed in half. Finding the widows dozing in their silky webs, their abdomens as large as a pomegranate, he would first slowly approach, lulling them into a stupor with his magical ways. Then: WHAP! Their milky innards would be a stain on the concrete.

The Widow Whisperer once showed me a neat trick by lighting a black widow egg-sack on fire with a match. It burnt up quickly with dozens of little pops, like a sparkler on the 4^th of July. It was a cool trick indeed, but I stopped after the time I tried it and to my extreme horror dozens of tiny widows burst forth from the flaming sack and scurried away in different directions like Napalmed Vietcong villagers.

The Widow Whisperer also enjoyed keeping black widows as pets. Yep, you read that right; he would keep them in glass jars out in his work area, spending hours fascinated by their eating and mating habits. Perhaps gaining this important knowledge helped him better exploit their strengths and weaknesses while out on whapping missions. We’ll never know.

My favorite all-time Widow Whisperer story though happened in the middle of a warm spring day. I was inside on the couch, reading Tolstoy’s masterwork War and Peace (OK fine, watching GI Joe, same thing) when I heard my dad calling me from the backyard. He was out there in a covered storage area cleaning some stuff out. I trudged out to my doom, sure that I was being called on to help. When I got out there, I found my dad standing there, looking very serious.”Son,” he said, looking me in the eye. “You know how I’ve always told you that if you remain very calm around black widows then they’ll leave you alone?”Uh oh, he’d finally lost his mind. “Yeah, sure dad, of course.”

“Well, I just wanted to prove it to you.” With this he raised his right arm to reveal a plump, marble-sized widow crawling lazily up the side of his forearm. It paused for a moment and waved one spindly leg at me, its eyes gleaming cheerily.”See, they won’t hurt you!”

I nodded and mumbled something incoherent. As my dad and his new buddy returned to work, I stumbled back inside the house in a daze, the true power of the Widow Whisperer washing over me like baptismal waters.