The Death Stare

Unlike the Death Star, which was blown to smithereens and no longer exists, the Death Stare is still a very real and very sinister influence in the universe. I mean a child’s universe.

My mother had the Death Stare, in spades, and she was never afraid to use it. For those of you fortunate enough never to have experienced the Death Stare as a child, let me give a brief explanation:  Imagine a laser beam of such malign intensity that it could not only slice your head open but extract all your secrets and memories of naughty deeds and make you confess them unconditionally, blubbering all the while like an infant. That is the power of the Death Stare. Only certain females, usually mothers and sometimes young women, have this capability. Men never have it. If they did, civilization as we know it would be destroyed. Only the female of the species has enough intelligence and willpower to wield it righteously.

As a ten year old boy I used to hang around Harry’s Grocery, on the corner of Como Avenue and 19th Avenue Southeast in Minneapolis. Harry was a kindly, bald headed old coot, always wrapped in a full length green apron. He sold the usual staples like milk, bread, and eggs, plus a large selection of candy and household odds and ends like Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing and Brillo Pads. On Halloween he handed out Sputniks, a blue marble of bubble gum, to every kid who came in. He was a good egg. But as a ten year old kid I had jettisoned all my former Sunday School scruples, considering myself above the law. So one day, when Harry’s back was turned, I secreted a box of bird seed under my jacket and sauntered out of his store feeling like Raffles the Gentleman Thief after a big heist. I had absolutely no use for the bird seed, since we didn’t have a parakeet or canary -- it was more the principle of the thing; wanting to prove that I could move among the swirling masses of humanity invisible and undetected, filching whatever I pleased whenever I wanted.

But the minute I got home and took off my jacket the bird seed fell on the floor and my mother turned on the Death Stare without saying word one. I immediately fell to my knees and confessed all in a flood of tears. When I had finished she silently pulled me to my feet and we both trooped back to Harry’s, where I offered up the bird seed along with a lachrymose apology for my crime wave. Mom bought me a Fudgsicle and we went home, my head still reverberating from my encounter with the fury of her Death Stare.

Several of my daughters have developed the Death Stare, as I have witnessed them unleashing it on their own children and on obnoxious males who unwisely assumed they could chat them up when they were single. At a Welcome Home picnic when my daughter Virginia was mustered out of the Air Force, a young gallant, who lived in his mother’s basement and had a case of late blooming acne, began forcing his unwanted attentions on her. She politely rebuffed him several times, but then when he managed to sit next to her at the picnic table while the barbequed ribs were being dished up, she got him in her sights and let him have it. At first he seemed unaffected, but slowly the overpowering influence of the Death Stare penetrated his chunky skull, until he sort of flowed off the bench like melting ice cream, and slunk back to his Atari pursuits in his mother’s basement. Virginia was still a novice in handling her Death Stare, so before she could turn it off she left a long pyrographic line of smouldering wood on the picnic table top.

The only group known to be immune to the baleful power of the Death Stare are teenage boys -- and only of their own mother’s Death Stare. If a girl they happen to know gives it to them, they disappear in an instantaneous mist of vapor. When my daughter Madelaine’s boy turned 14 he began raiding the fridge in the middle of the night, denuding it of all leftovers and draining milk jugs dry before you could say “Bob’s your uncle.” Despite repeated dire threats from Madelaine, the boy kept ravishing the fridge at night until she decided to stay up and catch him in the act while delivering a particularly savage Death Stare. I was staying the night at their house, on the couch next to the kitchen, and witnessed the entire episode.

Right on cue the boy came into the darkened kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and began to gorge like a famished honey badger. Madelaine flipped on the lights, then uttered a triumphant “Ah-hah!” And turned on the Death Stare. It had no effect on the boy, as he finished off several chicken wings and a slice of sweet potato pie. Seeing that her Death Stare was impotent in the face of such willful appetite, Madelaine decided that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. She got out the Cool Whip and had a piece of the sweet potato pie herself, along with some leftover spare ribs. I got in on the act with a bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy, hastily nuked in the microwave. Gave me a terrific case of heartburn so I didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night. Uff dah!