Re: Uncle Herb: The Sum of All Fears

If I ever had to describe Uncle Herb to anyone, I would describe him as stomach-twisting terror, covered in pure darkness, made into the shape of a man. Never before has anyone injected so much unimaginable fear into the heart of a child.

What made him the most horrifying is his otherworldly silence, and his ability to suddenly materialize at the corner of your peripheral vision. We would be playing on the swingset, or trying to wrestling in the back yard, and suddenly the birds would stop chirping, the wind would go still (and somehow there would suddenly be no cars on the road below).

We knew what this sickening stillness was.

We would turn our heads, and there he would be, standing at the corner of the house, shoulders slack and head dangling. No words can describe the icy terror that would pulverize our tiny minds at times like these.

Though I don't remember having seen him walk or move, he would suddenly be standing mere feet from us, and would mumble something in a voice that sounded 1/3 human, 1/3 rottweiler and 1/3 the smoke from the fires of hell.

Usually his questions at this point would concern whether or not our Dad was around. At the time, we thought this was because if Hal wasn't around, he would eat us. In retrospect, I realize that this is because he was utterly terrified of his siblings, for no particular reason.

Did we mention that he had a dog? He had a little wiener dog named "Missy" who was the most hateful creature ever to walk the earth. With its tiny brain warped by being locked, 90% of the time in Herb's room, being subject to condensed, unventilated cigarette smoke and a steady stream of Nick At Nite, the dog went crazy.

Apparently though, Missy's company wasn't enough. She lacked certain things Herb needed in a companion. Things such as a car, a child, alcoholism or food stamps. So, as I grew older, I remember sporadically seeing a different "girlfriend" every few months or so which, upon our arrival at my grandma's house, would be standing silently with Herb by her Toyota Tercel, with a baby on her hip that looked like neither or them. They would stare at us silently as we walked by and it always made me feel like I'd just seen a ghost. A really pathetic ghost.

Ben hit the nail on the head. Never has there been a more bone-chilling, hateful caricature of Boo Radley ever realized in the real world. Except Herb never saved our lives from a murderous white supremacist. Instead, he just hotboxed his bedroom with cigarette smoke and watched syndicated reruns with his evil Dachshund. And he was content to go down in the annals of history just like that.