There is a hallway closet in my house. The doorknob sticks. While it’s never previously been much of a problem, It made me just about soil myself in surprise and alarm the other day after I returned home from work.

I arrived home in the afternoon to find that the back door had been left unlatched, likely because the boys are wont to traipse in and out of the backyard every chance they get. Despite the fact that I live in a tranquil neighborhood, my paranoia was aroused. No sooner had I opened the door to allow the breeze to air out the kitchen than I heard a thud and crash coming from one of the bathrooms.

The aforementioned paranoia quickly decided 2 (an unlocked door) + x (the noise) equalled 4, so I warily crept down the hall to investigate the matter. I poked my head into kids’ bathroom to find, to my great relief, one of our cats had knocked over a basket of tub toys, and was staring back at me with the "what are you looking at?" sort of expression that cats manage to convey so very well. Feeling much less paranoid and slightly foolish, I walked back down the hallway towards the kitchen.

Just as I reached the hallway closet, the doorknob, which had likely been stuck in the open position since the kids had left for school in the morning, decided it could resist its spring no longer, and snapped back into the closed position. Since the bolt had never fully engaged, the door hadn’t been completely closed, and was barely ajar. Just open enough, in fact, so that the curved face of the bolt hit the curved lip of the strike plate, glancing off of it, and opening the door a couple of inches further.

This dispassionate description of mechanical events does little to convey the thrill of sudden terror that flooded my brain and body as the closet door, which a cursory glance showed to be closed, sprang open as the knob turned with lightning speed. Just as I walked right in front of it. "Oh shit!" doesn’t even begin to describe the reaction to the farrago of adrenaline, fear, confusion, rage, and various potential tactics that simultaneously jammed themselves into my neocortex. I was sure as hell ready to do something as soon as the door either opened all the way or I saw someone or something coming out of it. Whether that something would have ended up being a desperate fistfight, uncontrollable defecation, or running the hell away, I have no idea. I suppose it depended on what came out of the closet.

Needless to say, nothing came out of the closet. The cat wandered down the hall, nonchalantly sniffed the jamb, and rubbed its face against the door as is the habit of cats, casually tossing me another "what the hell is your problem?" look. After a quick inspection of every other room and closet in the house, I ended up having to take a walk around the block to spin down; that adrenaline packs quite a wallop, and I needed more than a few gulps of fresh air to help swallow my heart back down into its proper place in my ribcage.

When I returned, I made sure that door was as unstuck as humanly possible — I got a screwdriver and a wire brush, then proceeded to disassemble and clean the thing, then applied amounts of lubricant to it not usually encountered outside the Castro district. WD-40, gun oil, Astroglide, you name it, I sprayed, drizzled, and dabbed it on the worky bits of the doorknob. As rousing as a squirt of adrenaline is, I really have no wish to recreate the experience anytime soon. That goddamned doorknob is now is as unstuck as doorknobs can possibly be. One nice bonus is that all my sweaters and jackets now sport the refreshing scent of aliphatic petroleum distillates.

I’m also finding coathangers strangely erotic now, but can’t imagine why.