When I was nine years old, I refused to go down into the basement in our home. Why? Because Ho Chi Minh lived down there, of course. Anyone with half a brain should have known that. Unfortunately, in spite of my best efforts, my mother was not convinced of the terror that lived in the basement.
Of course, at nine I knew little about Ho Chi Minh, other than he was a evil, malevolent, wild-eyed VietCong leader. I’d never even really heard of him until he died, when I saw a report on the evening news about his passing. All I remember of the story was the picture of Ho Chi Minh on the screen. It was enough to scare the hell out of this nine-year with an imagination set to warp nine.
I don’t remember how it come about that I was convinced that the late Ho Chi Minh was inhabiting a basement in a working-class neighborhood in the iron ore mining town of Hibbing, MN. All I knew was that HE WAS DOWN THERE SOMEWHERE, and I sure as Hell didn’t want to find out where.
The basement was a dark, dank place, with several poorly lit and partially constructed rooms below ground level. The light switch…well, the “light” was actually only one bare 60-watt bulb, was halfway down the staircase. Whenever ever my mother would ask me to get something stored in the basement, it involved an act of monumental courage. I certainly couldn’t tell Mom why I slinked down into the basement, but she had to have wondered why I came sprinting back up the stairs. I don’t know that I would have been able to articulate the total, abject terror I felt each time I descended into the realm of Ho Chi Minh. For all I knew, HE was down there, just waiting on me…and I wasn’t about to give him the opportunity.
At some point, it dawned on me that Ho Chi Minh had better things to do in his afterlife than lurk in a basement in northern Minnesota terrorizing an impressionable nine-year-old boy with a hyperactive imagination. I always did hate that damn basement, though….
