When I was somewhere around two or three years old, I was minding my own business, probably playing with my Mr. Potato Head in peace, when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came on the television. This was 1993, it had been a full decade since “Thriller” was first released, but they only showed three things on TV in the nineties—The Oprah Winfrey Show, TV shows about black teenagers going to live with their aunties and uncles in Bel Air, and thirteen-minute-long music videos—and “Thriller” fell into at least two of those categories. For whatever reason, my mother thought it would be a good idea for me, her three-year-old infant baby child, to see this video with my own two innocent baby eyes. She beckoned me over from Mr. Potato Head and innocently said, “Look, Matthew. Watch the man turn into a big doggie.” She figured, I guess, that I was three, and my interests included dogs, bright jackets, and effeminate men, so maybe I’d enjoy watching Michael Jackson turn into what she affectionately believed to be a large, kind puppy.

Of course, if you’ve seen Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” you know that this is a wild mischaracterization of what happens in the video. Dogs are friendly and they are nice and they lick your face. Michael Jackson does not turn into a dog. Michael Jackson turns into a jagged-fanged, yellow-eyed, contorted-faced werewolf who literally rips a girl to shreds. And my mother made me watch that shit. The second his eyes turned into angry yellow slits, I screamed like he had personally burst through our front door, and I leapt headfirst into my mother’s uterus (or what was left of it), refusing to reemerge for nearly three days. Some nights, I close my eyes, and I still see his face.

And perhaps I would’ve forgotten this event, had it not been for my brother, who purchased a rubber werewolf mask days later, just to chase me around the house while I screamed for mercy.

To make matters even worse, not long after this, my older cousin Nick tried to scare me into obedience with a story about a clown named Pennywise who stole insubordinate children in their sleep and forced them to work in underground labor camps. It didn’t matter that this was merely a bastardized version of a Stephen King novel. I believed it outright, and spent four straight nights without sleep, shaking uncontrollably, fearful that closing my eyes guaranteed my immediate kidnapping.

This is all to say that I entered adolescence scarred not just by my mother, but also by my brother, my cousin, Pennywise the child-stealing clown, and Michael Jackson himself. It should be no surprise that I’m fucked up. I spent most of early childhood fully expecting every person I met to transform into a wild-eyed beast who would kill me in my sleep, if they could get to me before the clown forced me into hard labor.