My old roommate Ben was (and still is) very allergic to bees. This was very disconcerting to me as his roommate, since every time went he carried an EpiPen which he could stick himself with should he ever get stung. I’m not exactly sure if getting stung by a bee would actually kill him – I think he explained this to me once, but I wasn’t really paying attention – but the fact that he carried this dang thing everywhere was enough to lead me to believe that getting stung by a bee would not be a very good thing for ol’ Ben; it’s kinda strange to live and drink with a buddy who at any time may be murdered by a common insect.

For most of my childhood, I was terrified of all bugs, mostly because they’re gross and icky and I had an absentee dad who never taught me that “They’re just bugs, pussy. Man, I can’t believe you’re pretty much already a gay.” However it was another male figure in my life, my Uncle Joey, who helped me overcome my fear of bugs one day in my early teens when I was walking around barefoot by the pool down the shore. He looked at my toenails and exclaimed, “Damn – you could kill a cockroach in a corner with those mothers!” I had never quite thought of it this way; my own lack of hygiene in the form of vampire-like toenails could easily dispatch that thing which I so feared. Therefore, there was no need to be afraid. I was cured.

(Note: Those are not my actual toenails.)

(And sorry about that picture, but it was just too good not to link to. Yowza.)

However in my 20’s, because of my experience with Ben, watching his extreme (and justifiable) fear of bees, well, I sort of became afraid of bees. I mean, if they could kill Ben, why couldn’t they kill me? Would it be that one day I’m just sitting there in Central Park, rubbing myself under a blanket with a pair of yellow cotton panties I found on the southeast corner of the Sheep Meadow, right by the 65^th Street Transverse, when suddenly a bee stings me, then I have a seizure, then I die, right there, half-erect, clutching those little yellow cotton panties, dead, with the panties, the little yellow cotton panties, in my hand? I mean, this could happen, right? It’s not impossible. So even though Ben moved to Seattle a few years ago, and I’ve since moved to LA (away from Central Park and the Sheep Meadow and that glorious discovery on that glorious day), I’ve still harbored a fear of bees.

Fast forward to this morning. I was driving to work in the Town Car, listening to either Adam Carolla or NPR (I’m very versatile), with the sun roof open, enjoying the glorious Southern California morning sun. I was on that long stretch of boulevard known as La Cienega, about 50 minutes into my commute (so still at least 25 minutes away from work), when I felt something hit me on the top of the head. I assumed it was a leaf that had fallen from a tree and through the sunroof, and so I mindlessly brushed it out of my hair. Then I thought, “It felt a little harder than a leaf.” Then I thought, “Wait a minute – there are no trees on this stretch of La Cienega.”

I looked down at my feet and there, on its side but trying to regain its footing, was a bee. And not just a cute little bumblebee, but a giant, man-eating bee, roughly the length of my thumb, as thick as the head of a well-endowed man’s penis. I let out an audible yelp and immediately started using my left foot to crush this Monster Bee into my floormat. For several seconds, I blindly stomped, trying to focus on the traffic and the driving, but more importantly, desperately trying to kill this bee before it killed me.

As the car was moving along in bumper to bumper traffic, I could only look down for so long to see if I had succeeded. I shortly came to stop, as a light turned red a few cars ahead of me, and I finally looked down to assess the situation. I hoped to see the bee crushed into the mat, but instead couldn’t see anything – no dead bee, no live bee. I assumed that in the struggle I had moved the floormat and covered the bee and believed I’d find its crushed body under the mat when I got out of the car. Just as I was about to breathe a sigh of relief, I saw it: the bee was alive, very much alive, crawling along my right pant leg, heading down toward the hem on the bottom of my pants, prepared to go under and in my pants and directly up my leg.

At this point, panic set in. If I had yelped before, I screamed now, and, still stopped at the red light, threw the car in park, flung my door open, and threw the lower half of my body outside the door. Continuing to scream and yelp and maybe now starting to cry a little bit, I desperately swatted at my pant leg, trying to get the bee off my leg before it went up my pants and stung and/or ate a large chunk of one of my testicles. The whole process took maybe six seconds, but in the middle of the screaming/yelping/crying/swatting, the traffic light turned green and cars behind me started beeping at the chubby kid with the beard half-hanging out of his Hearse in the middle of one of the busiest thoroughfares in Los Angeles, shrieking and swatting at his leg.

Then I felt it: my hand hit something and when I took a quarter-second to look, I saw that the bee was finally off my pants. Quicker than almost anything I’ve ever done, I pulled my legs back into the car, put it in drive, and continued on my way to work, sunroof closed. Crisis averted.

The lesson? Close the sunroof whilst driving or face death by bug. Los Angeles is a dangerous, dangerous city.