The Duffer

by Ian Robinson

Duffer…getting the willies

  THERE’S a lot of things that give me the willies. 

            The willies are that are creepy, crawly sensation you get when you are scared or disgusted, raises the hair up on the back of your neck and, if you’re around my age, the hair that’s starting to grow inside your ears and nose.  And the sensation of unaccustomed hair raising up in your nostrils and tickling the insides of your ears?  Why, that’s enough to give you the willies, too.  Hell, just having hair on the inside of your ears.  That’s pretty creepy in and of itself.

               Unlike most people who get the willies, I actually know where the term comes from.  The sensation gets it name from a guy I grew up with.  Willie L.

              There’s one in every neighbourhood, a bed wetting/fire setting/loonie, a guy so nuts you might even try to rat him out to your parents, a crime at the top of the list of the schoolyard Criminal code.  I approached the subject obliquely, because parents don’t take their kids all that seriously anyway.

                “Um, mom?  Willie’s a bit weird, don’t you think?  He likes to cut up frogs and shove them down the back of my shirt.  He wipes his boogers on the girls and he always said that he though Charles Manson was his favourite celebrity.  When you ask him what he wants to do when he grows up, he says ‘Do evil.’  So what do you think, mom? Huh? Huh?”  My mom said she was sure Willie was just going through a phase.

                And I thought:  A phase?  When I decided not to eat anything but peanut butter and onion sandwiches last summer, that, dear lady, was a phase.  This is…this is something else. 

                 But I didn’t say that because when you’re about nine, talking to grown-ups is about as productive as lecturing a brick on its social responsibilities.

                 Anyway, one day, we’re all down at the Palace Theatre watching a horror movie – the one where the spring-driven spikes come out of the binoculars when the girl raises them to hr eyes – and when that happens, a buddy of mine says:  “Whoa. That gives me…the willies.”

                And a new word entered the language.  Down in the front now, Willie was lying on his back on the floor, picking gum off the bottoms of the seats and eating it and scaring the little kids.

                 I’m getting the willies a lot these days.  Just got used to the whole gays are people, too, thing, excised those nasty words about them from my vocabulary and NOW there’s support groups for guys who want to have their bits cut off and otherwise modified so they can become women.  Ugly women, if the ones I see on TV are any indication.  Plug ugly women.  Transsexuals, I’m supposed to call them.  Those fellows give me the willies.  And the people who get mad at me because transsexuals give me the willies, they give me the willies, too.

               The Canadian Alliance Party gives me the willies because it’s so sure it knows what’s right and the front-runner for its leadership is a former evangelist who tries to appeal to people like the rest of us by admitting he used to be a dope smoker.  Frankly, I’d admire him more if he admitted he was still blowing big spiffs.  Anybody can flirt with marijuana as a youngster; it takes real commitment to keep it up through to your 40’s.

                Serial killers, pro-gun nuts, anti-gun nuts, vegetarians, vegans and radical lesbian terrorists.  Women who breastfeed their children until they go to junior high school.  All of them give me the willies.

                Want to know what gave me the willies today?  I just found out Oprah Winfrey now has her own magazine.  Its called – go figure – Oprah.  Bad enough, the women had millions of other women watching her on TV, learning to think the way she thinks, feel the way she feels, demanding that men start feeling stuff, too, and, worse yet, express our feelings to the Oprah watching women in our lives.  Which automatically turns us all into liars.

                “How do you feel, honey?’

                Blind panic, right?  Followed by the truth:  I’m not hungry.  I’m warm.  I’m not sexually excited with no immediate prospect for relief.  I don’t have to go to the bathroom.  “Um…sweetheart…I’m fine.”

                Before Oprah, that answer would have been enough.  Not anymore.  No.  She’s had that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus guy on her show too often.  He’s the guy who looks like he was chosen last for every pickup sandlot game of his childhood.  He’s got the voice of a female late-night FM disc jockey:  sultry, soft, and not really like a guy at all.  He looks like he’d have trouble bench pressing a freaking can of soup.  And now, thanks to Oprah, you’re supposed to sound like him and act like him and tell your women how you really feel, when what you really want to do is strip him and Oprah naked and hunt them through the forest with Dobermans and a sharp stick because before Oprah you didn’t have to listen to this crap.  Back in the old days, when our fathers were young, a woman said, “How are you honey?”  and our father would say, “I’d like a beer,” AND THE WOMEN WOULD ACTUALLY GET IT FOR HIM!

             “Um…sweetheart…”

             “How do you feel about me?”  She says.

             “Well…”

             “I’ll go first. When I think of being enclosed in the warm circle of your masculine arms I feel safe and loved.  When you smile at me, I feel adored.  When you ask me my opinion, I feel valued.  You are the sun and the moon and the stars and when we’re apart, the sun seems to trifle less bright, the darkness a little darker, food taste less savory.  You are my heart and my soul.  Your turn!”

            “Um,” you say, doing the very best you can do, reaching down into the depths of your poetic heart:  “You got nice ass for a woman whose had three kids.”

             And thanks to Oprah and the Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus guy, you’re sleeping on the coach listening to the hair inside your ears grow longer and wondering what went wrong with your life.  Oprah, that’s what.  Oprah Magazine means something bad for us all.  Before, you could get a woman away from Oprah.

             Take her on a canoe trip.  Throw her and the kids in the car, drive to Yellowstone Park.  Get some peace.  No more.  Now she can take Oprah with her.  In the car.  Anyways.  No matter what, a woman can have Oprah in her purse.

             Opened up my wife’s copy of the premiere issue of Oprah.  There’s a picture of the staff in there celebrating the launch of the magazine.  And in the background, off to the left, there’s this guy.  About my age.  I’m pretty sure it’s him.  Oh, he’s changed his name and all, and I think he may have hair growing out his ears that didn’t

 used to be there.  But it’s him all right. 

             And I remember saying.  “What you want to do when you f\grow up, Willie?”  And the answer:  Do evil.

             I’ve got the willies so bad; I’m shaking, I’m sorry, people.  If I’d truly known what he was capable of, I’d have done something about him when he was a kid.