Spider House
by Crockett Doob
I woke up looking at a spider on my ceiling. My first thought was denial: This spider will stay on my ceiling forever. It is content up there. The idea of the spider descending into my bed while I was sleeping was… Like what if I rolled over and the spider bit me? Or what if it decided to lay eggs in my orifices? Impossible. That would never happen. The ceiling was a great place for a spider. Hell, I’d spend time up there if I could. Then I could have a couch. So with that, I got out of bed and made coffee.
I was in a difficult life moment, you could say. Or no, the opposite. Things were going well and I wasn’t used to that; happiness–or rather, contentment; better word–was difficult. My goal today was to do nothing before work and relax. Learn to be. Which meant, for one thing, I needed to stop writing. I was squeezing the writing too hard lately, taking all the fun out of it. Because my dreams were coming true. After so many years of trying and failing, strangers on the internet were saying yes to me (occasionally, but still) and publishing my stuff! And I could see already that these hard-won victories would be my ruin. I was getting obsessed with more more more approval! More strangers saying something other than no. And I knew that wasn’t good. Not for me, not for the writing. So yeah, full stop. Take a break. Be alive. Do nothing. Nothing was important. I knew this. So you can probably guess where this is leading: I was about to meditate.
The thing is I’d been meditating for years now; I was just bad at it. I’d read plenty of books. I’d tried to organize my thoughts into little mental folders, which felt exhausting, even with coffee. I’d tried staring at a rock for twenty minutes a day, which was fine, I guess, for a while, until I found out at a for-free TM™ seminar led by a very spider-like salesman with gangly arms and big, smiling eyes, that the staring-at-a-rock method was the worst. He was like, obviously, they’re all inferior to TM™ but when he listed other kinds of meditations, he showed us that staring at a rock or a candle–staring–was the only kind of meditation that didn’t help, it hurt. Well, that pissed me off. I left in a huff and returned to Mother Teresa.
Now, the Mother Teresa method, if you don’t know, is where you empty out your mind and let God in, to heal you or whatever. But my girlfriend at the time told me Mother Teresa was a bit of a grifter. “She’s not as charitable as people think.” So whenever I had my eyes closed and mind open, I would be defending Mother Teresa’s honor against my girlfriend. This was a strange love triangle. I finally chose my girlfriend over Mother Teresa but by the spring of 2017, I was so suicidally depressed that my girlfriend dumped me because I wasn’t “fun anymore,” and in fairness to her, I wasn’t. Anyway, I returned to Mother Teresa and for years, the meditation worked well enough until it devolved. By 2024, I was sitting and pretending to meditate while really, I was just thinking a whole lot and sneaking peeks at the timer, as if someone was standing over me–Mother Teresa maybe–and yelling, ‘You think I can’t see you! Stop cheating!’
Okay. So I had to stop writing but I couldn’t even meditate anymore. I knew my brain was about to go into self-destruct mode if I didn’t do something.
And then, just when you think you’re fucked, someone told me, “Try YouTube. Great resource.” Ah ha! YouTube! That sounded so reasonable! Why not YouTube? Well, because of the A.I. stuff, because it’s owned by Google. But I’m not going to pretend I understand A.I. And either way, I had to do something different. This guy told me these meditations were guided. Which sounded relaxing–in theory.
So that morning, once my coffee was made, and I checked that my spider friend was still on the ceiling, I went on YouTube and picked the first “meditation for beginners” video that came up: a thumbnail of a woman sitting in the lotus position–which I was not about to do. No, I’d sit in my beach chair. See, my apartment is so narrow that everything must fold. My desk folds. My table folds. And the beach chair, obviously, folds, too–and I placed it right next to my bed. I sat down and pushed play.
The woman in the video told me to close my eyes; I complied. She told me to relax my body and all that shit and I knew I was getting angry, especially when she started in about how I was part of the universe, that I was “here.” How could she know that? What if I left the room? Although technically then she’d be telling an empty room that it was “here” and part of the universe, which was true. Fine. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was part of the universe. Maybe I was “here.” So I was trying to settle into this when, for some reason–who knows why; maybe it was God, or the spirit of the universe, or some muscle memory of my Mother Teresa days and checking the timer–but I opened my eyes and there was the spider. Caught in the act! The spider was right at eye level, close enough to kiss. And we were so close and the visual was so stark that I was suddenly brought back to the day of the spider massacre in the spring of 2012, when I killed thousands and thousands of spiders.
How long does bad luck last?
So travel with me, if you will, to Louisiana in the fall of 2011, thirteen years prior, when I got a job at a car dealership as a porter.
This was in New Orleans East, an area ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and not brought back at all. Except there was this car dealership.
I was on a very bad streak that summer of getting fired (thrice!) and my brain was really good at doing the self-destruct thing at the time, trying to kill me. So, of course, I applied to this car dealership job thinking I’d be alone every day. I’d heard about “dealer trades,” which was described to me as driving brand new cars across state lines and back, every day. I thought, oh perfect. I’ll talk to no one and have no relationships. Had the job been that, I would’ve died, or at least lost my mind. Because whenever I did do dealer trades–say, driving to Mobile, AL and back–spending that many hours in my own company, I’d start screaming and get back to the dealership so rattled that I was very grateful I didn’t get the job I wanted.
It turned out the porter job was very social and I loved it! I loved my co-workers, particularly Haywood, who worked in the back with me, washing cars–which was mostly what we did. But that’s not all. Oh no. I’ll get to that. The dealership was Black-owned, and mostly Black-run. And I was this white kid from New York. I’d come from video editing jobs where you’re in a dark room and you talk to no one all day (and night) staring at a screen where, usually, people are talking to each other. At the dealership, I said hello to like twenty-five people in the first five minutes when I came in every morning. I loved hearing from Haywood about drama between salesmen. I loved visiting the phone sales matriarch whom we were all in love with. Including me. Including Haywood. And I loved Haywood! And he loved me! “Tom, Tom,” Haywood would tell me, “you’re a brother from another mother.” He also would say, “Tom, it doesn’t pay to be Black.” And, “We’re making the small bucks.”
The lot felt like being on the moon. It’s so flat in Louisiana, and the dealership was on a service road next to an interstate, cars zipping by at 70 mph, providing endless perspective; the horizon was speckled with palm trees and everywhere I went, I was tits-deep in cars. And who knew spiders loved to live in engines? Not me. But early on at the job, we learned about a customer of ours who had been driving his newly-purchased car home when all of a sudden, spiders started pouring out of the vents. (Can you imagine?) He brought the car back and Haywood and I were instructed by our supervisors to drop everything and take care of this man’s car. This traumatized car owner glowered at us, not saying a word, just chainsmoking as Haywood and I sprayed the engine with acid, pressure-washed it, and rewashed the whole car.
One day, the VP called me in. “Icicle!” (He called me “Icicle” because of how cold I looked on the lot while he sat in the heated showroom mocking me with the finance guys.) “Icicle! People are complaining about all the spiders on our windows.” He meant the tops of the showroom windows, massive floor-to-ceiling things, wrapping around two sides of the building. I highly doubted people were complaining about spiders. But now that I studied them closely, I could see how the windows did look a bit neglected.
But I didn’t want to kill all those spiders! I tried to get Haywood to do it.
“I’m afraid of heights,” he said.
“So am I!” But I already knew I was going to be the one to do this. And so, in the spring of 2012, I spent an afternoon killing spiders. Like a village of spiders. Or an entire city.
I’d climb up a giant orange ladder–no one below to spot me; Haywood was busy–and spray the spiders’ nests with acid and then climb down and get the pressure-washer (giant water gun for adults) and blast the remains away, then climb down again, inch the ladder over and do it all again. My uniform became drenched and I was soaked by the end of it. I remember, I went into the showroom, dripping wet and tried to get the VP to feel bad for me, or to share the blame–something–but just like when I informed him that there was a maybe-rabid raccoon roaming around the lot in the middle of the day, he barely acknowledged me.
Haywood didn’t want to acknowledge me either. “Don’t get that shit on the cars.” He meant the eggs.
Then it started, the bad luck. Haywood and I started bickering, like an old married couple. But it wasn’t cute. He was fond of telling me what I should’ve done differently whenever I fucked something up, and I was fond of telling him, “Then buy me a fucking time machine!”
I wasn’t eating right. My routine was a Snickers bar for breakfast along with two energy drinks, the cheap ones, called Rip-Its; for lunch, a brick of ramen (uncooked, no powder) and another Rip-It. Haywood would sometimes push his leftover fast food on me, saying, “Tom, you got to take care of yourself,” but that only slowed me down. For months, I spent my lunch break writing. I’d drive to an abandoned mall parking lot and sit in my backseat and smoke cigarettes and blast out as much as I could in that glorious, mandatory lunch hour and come back to Haywood and report how many words that day, and he was nice enough to pretend to care. But all of that was over. Right around the time of those spiders, I finished the book and it was way, way too long and I didn’t know what to do next. So I became idle on my lunch breaks, which is never good.
One day, Haywood and I were supposed to set up twenty or so cars for a photo shoot. The way the photographer had us do it was to leave the cars running, all in a row. Climate change-o-rama, yes, but all that carbon monoxide also made me think about how I tried to kill myself. It was in the same car I’d been writing in, which I’d named the Suicide Mobile. My joke was the Suicide Mobile was dying; it couldn’t hack it in the Louisiana heat, all the while surrounded by hundreds of working cars. I was stealing a jump box from work just to get the Suicide Mobile started in the mornings. It was having alternator problems, or was it battery problems? That was the dilemma. I was frequenting the many Auto Zones around town, and the alternator and/or the battery problem persisted. And whenever I’d report another failed trip to Auto Zone, Haywood was quick to tell me what I “should’ve done,” which was driving me crazy. Or I was driving me crazy. I really was.
My girlfriend at the time–she preceded the one who didn’t trust Mother Teresa–we were fighting terribly and one night, she invited me to a party uptown with all of our friends and I didn’t want to go but I’d already said I would, but I had to go to Auto Zone first. Whichever one it was that night, the alternator or the battery–let’s say the battery–after it was replaced, as soon as I pulled out of the parking lot, the light turned back on. I called my girlfriend to tell her I wouldn’t make it to the party. I remember making a U-turn–I was going to go home for the night–and that was when my brain did this thing where Haywood shouted: ‘You should’ve…!’ probably something about the alternator. And boy did that get me. I mean I smashed down on my steering wheel so hard, I broke it. When I lifted my fist, the horn kept blowing. My reality was suddenly New Orleans on a Friday night with a horn that wouldn’t turn off. I pulled over, cut the engine, didn’t stop. I turned the car on again–miraculously, the engine started!–but the horn didn’t stop. I didn’t know what to do. A long time ago, I worked on a movie in New Orleans where we filmed at a lake. I thought I’d go there. I couldn’t remember how far it was, but I was only at the first traffic light, all the people in cars–the pedestrians, too–looking at me like, what the fuck? I was screaming by then, the bad kind of screaming, while tearing at my steering wheel, as if I could rip out its wires and pull its heart out and smash it and smash it until it finally died.
I quit the job in July. Haywood was pissed and kept calling to tell me keys were missing and they were going to fine me. They didn’t. I went back to video editing, which I already knew I hated, and ended up making less money than at the dealership. That girlfriend I didn’t get along with cheated on me, so we moved in together. The relationship died slowly, then quickly; it was a messy breakup, her screaming, pushing me, telling me I was devoid of feeling. She was probably right.
That book I wrote on my lunch break, I trashed it. I wrote another one and trashed that one, too.
When I returned to New York, my only plan for money was to return to video editing. I worked for a woman who screamed and growled at me–she bit me once, though that was when she was in a good mood–and look, I was no angel either. I was either manic or suicidally depressed. I had roommates who sold drugs, who rubbed their feces on the bathroom walls in alcoholic blackouts, who’d pass out while cooking and fill the apartment with smoke.
I worked in advertising, my asshole clenched for hours, fearing the wrath of my bosses and their sinister clients, editing pharma ads, ads about ads, corporate industrials that no one would ever see or care about.
And it was around then that I had an idea for another book. It would be about this ‘venue’ (loose term) I’d played at in 2006 with a band I quit. The venue would also be the title of the book: SPIDER HOUSE. It would be a rock ‘n roll thriller where a band plays this basement show and they get so wasted and (in real life, the guys who lived there convinced me I’d given them all blowjobs because I got so drunk so fast; and so of course that would happen in the book, too) and it would be an amalgamation of my drug dealer roommate (who also had snakes, so there’d be snakes) and my boss who bit me would film the shows and a guy we’d met on tour who constantly apologized, which got to be very creepy after a while, he’d be the villain, and I added that the apologizer’s dad would be this guy I knew who was a shrink whose job was to do psychological evaluations of cops who fired their guns in the line of duty, but this shrink guy exploited his position and bought an enormous amount of guns and ammo at a discount rate because he pretended to be a cop and he got caught and was tied up in court and having a midlife crisis in the meantime, fucking someone too young and driving a motorcycle, the usual. All of it together seemed good enough to put in a book. Which I was excited to write. I was determined not to fail again. I must have said something about it at work because I remember my boss saying, “Why are you writing a novel?” in this dismissive tone. “Why don’t you write a screenplay?” And without hesitation, even though I hated screenplays and didn’t want to work in movies (though I was working in advertisting), I rewrote SPIDER HOUSE as a screenplay. My girlfriend, the one who thought Mother Teresa was a fraud, asked me, “Why are you writing a screenplay?” Same dismissive tone as my boss. So I stopped and went back to SPIDER HOUSE, the book. I added that, instead of lots of regular spiders in the basement, there was also one big spider, like the size of a dog and it would be a sort of horror/sci-fi novel now. Failed again. Or I gave up. Went back to the script. I decided I’d try Spider House as a TV script, even though I hated TV and associated it with depression, but so what? I’d write it as a TV show. And I tried and tried and then I’d give up and go to the movies and not pay attention to the movie and just sit in the theater, thinking of how I’d pitch my TV show to my bosses (in this shared conference room which overlooked the Hudson River and got really nice sunsets) and how excited they’d be to make a cool, fun TV show instead of these crappy commercials and I’d be their savior but I’d be modest when they couldn’t stop complimenting me, when all I was doing was eating popcorn, alone in a movie theater in the middle of the day. I scrapped the script. I decided I was a novelist again except this time I’d do something different; I’d outline. My bedroom walls became awash with index cards, the entire story up there (without an ending, of course). I’d done it this time. It would be so easy! All I had to do was write it, connect the dots. But when I tried, it was like I’d taken all the fun out of it. I’d turned writing a drug-fueled, gun-filled, rock ‘n roll, dog-sized-spider book into a chore. And it was extra frustrating this time because it was all there on my wall! As I said, my girlfriend dumped me–not for the index cards, but for being too depressed.
And it was around then, just about, yes, seven years after the spider massacre, when my luck started to change.
I finished a novel, a new one, no outline–well, after I wrote it, I outlined–and sent it out to agents.
After a year selling life insurance–definitely part of the bad luck–I was fired and got a job working with kids and I was just… good at it. And I loved going to work every day.
That same summer, a friend recommended I buy a Nutribullet® and so I started putting fruits and vegetables into my body!
I even dated someone and we didn’t argue the whole time; it didn’t last, but still!
And now, at the age of forty-one, I finally live alone. No roommates!
So it’s safe to say the bad luck passed.
Except let’s look at Haywood. After the dealership, Haywood got a better job but soon had to go on disability because of a strange infection on the top of his foot that looks like a wet, pink sponge–which has never gone away. His wife got breast cancer, didn’t deal with it, started cheating on him before she died, leaving him with a 7 year old daughter. Haywood’s father, furious that Haywood didn’t give him the life insurance money, got dementia then died of cancer. Haywood’s own health deteriorated so much that he couldn’t stand up; he went to the hospital for two months, became buried in bills, and he’s in wheelchair. No 7 years of bad luck for him. My bad luck is nothing in comparison to Haywood being Black in this country. So maybe this has nothing to do with spiders and why even pretend that there’s good luck and bad luck and that the “universe” is trustworthy enough to open your mind to it?
Still though, I wasn’t going to kill this spider. And I wasn’t going to let it into my bed either.
I ran over to the kitchen side of my apartment and grabbed an empty coffee cup and ran back to the spider. I raised the mug like I was making a toast and once the spider was inside the mug, I put my hand over the top, hoping–no, trusting–the spider wouldn’t bite.
Crockett Doob‘s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Cleaver Magazine, The Good Life Review, and HOOT. He lives in Rockaway Beach, NY, and does not surf.