Arachnophobia

This morning, I was getting dressed. I had not yet put my contact lenses in and had taken my glasses off to pull my shirt on, so my vision was not exactly 20/20. That's why I leaned in to see what the little yellow blob floating in front of my face was.

You know winter is almost over when the spiders start coming out.

So,I think it's time to haul out the Florida spider story. Two summers ago, three of my friends and I rented a car and spent almost a month driving down the East Coast from New York State to Orlando, Florida (chosen semi-randomly as the final stop because of a good, cheap flight back to Buffalo).

We spent three days or so in St. Augustine, Florida. We arrived at the hotel at maybe 10 o'clock or so after a full day of driving and two of the girls wandered off to "get ice" (read: "find cute guys") and the other girl and I collapsed on the floral bedspreads to soak in the AC. We were chatting away about something or other and I glanced over at her in the middle of a sentence, the way you do when you're having a lazy, slumber-party kind of conversation. That's when I saw it: the Biggest Spider Ever.

Now, I know, Australia gets lots of nasty horrible spiders that kill you in nasty ways. But I'm telling you, this was the star of a Mystery Science Theater episode where the featured film was titled "The Monster Spider That Ate Manhattan" or something. It was black and very hairy and larger than my hand.
Both friend and I are MAJOR arachniphobes. I jumped up, and quietly told her to "Get up and come over to this side of the room RIGHT NOW". Seeing the object of my terror once she arrived on my side of the room reduced her to frightened tears.
Now, we are both college educated women who at that point in time each lived alone in an apartment in the center of a larger city (I was in the process of moving to Buffalo when the trip started). We've killed roaches, dealt with would-be muggers, etc, as any woman living alone would. But there was no way either of us was about to do anything about THIS.

After a few minutes of "I'll give you $100.00 to kill it" "No, you kill it" "You know, if you kill it, you will be able to face anything that comes your way for the rest of your life-- think of it as a learning experience ", we decided to call the front desk.

The girl at the front desk almost peed her pants laughing at us, but offered to bring us a can of bug spray. Bug spray?? Is she kidding? This thing would survive a nuclear holocaust! Raid is soooo not going to cut it. Nonetheless, we accepted the offer, because frankly, we didn't have any better ideas. It took both of us at least 15 minutes of courage-gathering and pep-talking before one of us (and I honestly can't remember who) finally depressed the button, emitting a timid little psssssst of poison in the general direction of the spider.

This, of course, sent the spider into an eight-legged panic. It started running toward the opposite wall (incidentally, the wall with the door in it), we started squealing and trying to will our bodies to pass through the wall into the adjoining, presumably-spider-free hotel room. The freakish thing ran over the door and disappeared behind the sagging wallpaper border at the top of the wall. Behind it, I tell you!

We were standing there, unsure what to do, clutching the Raid like a horror movie heroine clutches the kitchen knife that she thinks is going to save her from the lunatic killer when the other girls walked through the door, unsuccessful in their quest to "get ice". At the sight of us in the corner, they froze in the doorway and we started screaming "No, don't stand there! Get over here! Get over here!" Did I mention that these two girls were German? They had NO CLUE what we were yelling about, as by this point, we were hardly making sense to ourselves, but they ran over to us. So now there were four twenty-somethings huddled together in the corner of a Days Inn, armed with a little red can of Raid, two of whom were crying hysterically.

We eventually got the point across to the other girls about what was happening, but none of us was brave enough to go and peek under the border to see where the spider had gone. We assumed there was a hole hidden under the paper and we convinced ourselves that that hole was not like a little cave where the Monster Spider That Ate Manhattan was lurking, waiting for us to walk out the door for a day at the beach only to jump out, falling upon us with terrible poisonous fangs, but rather that the little hole lead outside and that he'd gone outside where the people don't have cans of Raid to annoy him (because, really, we all know that Raid wasn't any real threat to the MSTAM, just a minor annoyance, like a truck belching diesel fumes in front of you on the highway).

When we returned the can of Raid to the front desk, the clerk grinned and said "Welcome to Florida!".