What Scares Me
You know what’s really scary? No, it’s not that I’ll be shot just for being within a block of where a crack deal went bad. It ain’t that some guy in a funny hat will hijack my next flight and fly it into the LeVeque Tower. I ain’t scared no anthrax, no chemical bomb, no bird flu. Even before times got modern, I laughed at nuclear holocaust and the Cold War. We had Asian flu back then, then swine flu where Gerald Ford got a shot and got sick. That was funny. We rode in cars, crusin' for burgers, without seatbelts and, before MADD; everybody was half-drunk and driving on undivided roads. Acceptable risk.
We didn’t have no juvenile delinquents, but there were those shady-looking kids is high school with duck’s ass Brylcreem hair. They didn’t wear leather jackets, nobody could afford them, but they wanted one. They didn’t have switchblades, nobody knew where to get them, or wear tire chains on their belt loops – because their parents needed them in the trunk in case it snowed. But they had the inclination, you could look at them and tell, to become vicious reptilian killers just like the big city kids we saw in High School Confidential and, living in a world where imagination was our 24-hour News Channel, by God, that was good enough.
You never knew when they might turn, as if bitten by a werewolf, and become the nightmare we all feared back then.
That was scary.
While we awaited Doomsday, we listened to music on the AM radio, the universal iPod of the 50s. There would be Dinah Washington, Percy Faith, a few Day-Os from Tarriers or, maybe, late at night, from Harry Belafonte, though Johnny Mathis was always there, the Platters too, but every once in a while something would jump from the speakers that made us want to dance but we couldn’t because our parents would hear it, get disgusted, and switch it off. That music was being made by very the people who looked like what we feared most, but we still liked it. These were the Siren songs of the juvenile delinquents that never quite made it to our town.
Now Rhino Records has compiled all these songs into a 4-CD box set. I am listening to it right now and Googling leather jackets, tire chains, and switchblade knives.
5:53:14 PM 
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