Joe Keesey had a well-documented fear of snakes. One day we found a dead snake in the woods and put it into a new shoebox recently relieved of its cargo of pristine Reebok pumps. Joe Keesey came over and we ran out to him with the shoe box yelling “Joey, come check out my new pumps!” When he was close enough we opened the lid and threw the snake on him. At the exact instant the snake became visible to him, his face shot through with fear. It took him no time at all to recognize the snake and react to it with pure primal terror.
Had that happened to me, it would have taken at least a half second to recognize that I wasn’t looking at Reeboks, another half or quarter second to wonder what happened to the Reeboks, another quarter to register the joke at my expense, and then maybe a full second to glean that the thing now resting on my shoulder was a snake. Maybe, at that point, the thought would have occurred to me that the snake might be alive, and I may have felt fear.
But Joe, the instant a sliver of light poked in through the opening between the box and the lid, he went bat shit. Before the dead snake left the box, he had turned to run from it, and was already screaming and trying to pull it off him by the time it landed on his shoulder. He must have lived his life on constant alert for snakes, always expecting, in every situation, that snakes lay in wait for him behind every closed door and in every box of Reeboks. He was terrified, but not surprised. I imagine he’d have been no more surprised, and no less terrified, had he opened the box of Reeboks in the security of the Foot Locker in Exton Mall and found the snake.
Joe then had a brief, hysterical panic attack and cried for ten minutes straight before shouting “fuck you, I hate you guys!” and going home. Yeah, not our finest.