The Boogie Man

Many of us can recall a time as children when we were gripped by unexplainable fears. Those fears controlled many aspects of our young lives. One such fear was our belief in the ‘Boogie Man.’ While we never actually saw the Boogie Man, we instinctively knew that he lurked in the dark recesses of our room and meant to do us harm. His evil presence was palpably felt and had a profound effect upon our mood, and our behavior.

Sometimes when my brothers and I were especially rowdy—presumably in a vain attempt to frighten us into submission—our parents warned us that the Boogie Man was coming to take us away. Only our good behavior, our compliance to our parent’s wishes, could keep him at bay.

Then when we became older we feared the encroachment of all sorts of evil people who would do us harm.  We began to identify them one by one.  There was the milkman who came in and put fresh milk in our refrigerator.  He was dark skinned and usually unshaven he had coal black hair and I thought that sometime he might unleash his evil doings on us children, so I longed for someone who would keep me and my family safe. There was Hobo Joe who came around once in a while and asked mom for a sandwich.  My Mom I’m sure was scared of him, because she fixed him his sandwich and forced him to go eat it somewhere where we wouldn’t see him.  There was that house on the hill they called Rosefield where the nuns held their secret rituals and dressed all in black.  We knew they were in league with the boogie man because they would chant and pray counting their black beads in front of a cross with a half naked man hanging on it. One day Billy Bob, who has just moved with his parents from Alabama, snuck out at night and with some gasoline set the cross afire.  He had seen it done in Alabama and was sure that that would frighten the boogie man enough that he would stay away.   There were them evil Russians who were going to drop Nuclear Weapons on our heads and so our teachers taught us to duck under our desks and cover our heads with our arms, if we didn’t want to get incinerated.  I asked my teacher what good it did to duck and cover if the bomb was going to incinerate us anyway.  The teacher got mad and told me to not question just obey the rules, so I learned to duck and cover, but I always feared I would be burned alive in a crouching position.   Then there was that black man who wasn’t an African American but a fireman on the Pennsylvania Railroad.  He was blacker than any of my friends they called “Negroes”.  One day when he got off the train, when his shift was done, he took a shovel with him and chased us kids out of the yard cussing at us in some language we were sure was the language of the boogie man.  There was that strange church in an old store downtown where Africans would sing and dance and say "Amen" all the time.  They were a frightening lot, because we thought they were doing some strange dance to bring the boogie man out of the closet, where we were sure he lived during the day.

Then, when we became adults, we feared even more evil people. Then there was my boss, who constantly yelled at us and demanded that we work harder, because after all he was paying us and paying us for every minute we were on the job.  He cussed and swore like a trooper.  Speaking of a trooper, there was that evil looking guy who forced us off the highway that one day for driving 57mph in a 55mph zone and discovered that our license  (tags) were due on July 31 and it now was August 1.  Boy did he give me a talking-to.  He shouted at me and demanded that I learn the traffic laws and obey them to the letter and if I didn’t stop complaining, he would run me in. I longed for a knight in shining armor to rescue me from the injustice of it all.  There was that big boozer of a fella who robbed the liquor store next to where I worked and shot the owner.  He was frightening because he was always drunk and yelled at us anytime we would pass by the alley where he slept at night.  There was that preacher man from Alabama who had a dream and kept marching with his people around the country causing riots in places like Watts and Detroit.  There were those crazed and disloyal cowards of college students who kept burning their draft cards and made the Governors of 3 states send in the National Guard to drive them off the University campuses, and to shoot some of them in Ohio to put a stop to it.

Fear not the Boogie man my friends, he is only a phantom of our imagination put there by others to control us and make us be obedient to them.