Chapter 23
Let’s be strange, let’s go mad
A little more wild-eyed and a little less planned
Scare our friends, talk to ourselves
We gotta do something or we’ll wind up like everybody else.
“Strange”
By late October, cooler winds had blown in, or at least cool by Florida standards, and the sun was setting earlier. But neither the chill nor the dark diminished our sense of outdoor fun. We may have had less light for late-afternoon bass fishing, but longer nights enabled us to launch our secret expeditions to Catfish Pond, Hidden Pond, and the all-night convenience store long before midnight. In some respects, that made the days, at least when measured by adventure, last much longer.
Fall is a mystical time of year. You have the proverbial frost on the pumpkin and the fallen leaves infused with blood colors, more beautiful than when they were in their chloroform glory days. The relief from summertime temperatures alone gave us a sense of renewed life among the dead leaves. Autumn begs one to stay active and soak up the last of the remaining year. In the South, fall offers the perfect temperature, halfway between melting your face off and freezing your butt off. The woods, the grassy fields, and even the water call out for one last exploitation before winter changes the balance of it all.
Even now, without neighborhood friends nearby, when the leaves change color I feel a chilled tractor beam shooting out from the woods and off the river, pulling me out of my studio and into those outside spaces. The smell of an open campfire, of wet, half-mulched leaves, and of a dewy sundown are like a wilderness pheromone. They still make me crave the thrill of some wild adventure.
Two of our favorite pastimes on Starmount were running around at night and, of course, eating candy. So it’s no surprise that, as far as favorite holidays go, Halloween gave Christmas a real run for its money. All Hallows’ Eve was, to a ten-year-old, the perfect blend of make-believe and reality, a combination we highly valued. The possibility that our costumes and games might nod toward some mysterious truth, be it monsters, aliens, or paranormal happenings, was more real on that one night than on any other night of the year. And that’s saying something, because, for us, fantasy was pretty real all year long.
Dracula and any form of the Devil were the most popular costumes in 1977. Both seemed to fit the Sons of Starmount, even beyond that one night. Jim and I both dressed up as Dracula that year.
My get-up was a thrown-together homage to vampirism, the basic building blocks of which were blue jeans, worn out at the knees (like every pair I owned); a black cape; a sharp-looking white dress shirt (hardly ever worn); and a short, fat, weird red tie. To finish off my ghoulish, if not manly, chest, I wore a funky wooden red, green, and pink hippie cross. Not only was this cross a bizarre cultural mix of a stoic religious icon and seventies permissiveness, but I somewhat remember Dracula having a serious aversion to seeing a cross, much less wearing one. No matter; it looked cool, and looking cool allowed for taking some license when it came to vampire fashion.
The last part of my costume focused on transforming a freckle-faced redhead into Bela Lugosi. My skin tone already leaned toward the undead, but mom whitewashed my face with some concoction of makeup to embellish my already Scottish, anti-tan features. She applied red lipstick so that it caked under my eyes, dripped from my mouth like blood, and formed several severe-looking varicose veins across my cheeks. Pomade made greasing my hair into a Fonzie-style pompadour a snap. The key was to lean the hair more toward 1850 than 1950 though, which my mother accomplished by combing a sharp widow’s peak into my forehead. It was perfect; so perfect in fact, that it would have made the vampire Barnabas Collins from the TV show Dark Shadows, with his sawblade-like comb-over, green with envy.
The crowning accessory was the obligatory pair of plastic fangs. We bought the teeth a few days ahead of time, so of course I walked around wearing them 24-7, making an evil hissing sound. That sound was partially an effort to get into character and partially due to the fact that the awkward fangs made my mouth fill up with spit. On Halloween night, I tried to suck that spit back into my mouth so I wouldn’t drip saliva down my face, washing away my fake varicose veins.
The others wore costumes that ranged from the barely-any-different-than-normal to levels of scary detail that transformed them into something more than young boys, at least for one night. Eye patches, random black Sharpie slashes, pencil-thin mustaches, fathers’ bandannas, mothers’ headscarves, dining-room napkins and tablecloths, and all manner of cardboard weaponry came together to create the creatures of the night. We were vampires, pirates, superheroes, soldiers, and, quite possibly, one giant Granny Smith apple.
We never set out to trick or treat before the sun went down. In the late seventies, it was still safe to let your kids loose on the streets at night, or at least so our parents thought. Nowadays, the trick or treating exercise occurs, unceremoniously, in either daylight hours, or with a parade of parents carrying so many cellphone flashlights that it might as well be high noon. If you’re a particularly unlucky candy grabber, the ghoulish events occur within the antiseptic corridors of the local mall or middle-school hallway. That would have been an unheard-of level of oppressive supervision back in 1977.
Once the harvest moon had completely replaced the pumpkin-colored sun, we readied our costumes and began to gather where we always did before important outings: under my carport. By that point in our young lives, we had become hip to the efficacy of using a pillowcase to collect candy. It could hold large quantities of sugary loot without breaking, even when used as a weapon to fight off your friends’ attempts to abscond with your favorite brands. Armed with goodies from my parents’ personal Halloween stash to prime the pump of our candy bags, we headed out to trample the front porches of Starmount in one great haunted herd.
As far as candy caches were concerned, there were big differences between the various houses. We instinctively knew which ones would be windfalls and which would be stingy strikeouts. There was a clear connection between the personality of the homeowners and their willingness to provide candy to ghoulish little boys. We already knew each specific homeowner’s level of enthusiasm for the holiday based on their reactions to our trespassing, noisy play, and general disregard for subtlety during the previous summer months.
The houses we visited first—and, by the way, the word “visited” is a euphemism for a Sooner-like land-rush—left huge bowls of candy on the front porch. Those were the people who didn’t care for Halloween, but were guilt-ridden enough about the prospect of letting us down that they just dumped copious amounts of high-quality candy in large empty punch bowls. We generally had a one-for-all-and-all-for-one approach to friendship, but when it came to houses with these unguarded treasure troves of sweets, it was every man for himself. If you were not the fastest or the strongest, your only hope was that you had developed a taste for the lesser-appreciated candies, otherwise known as raisins.
After hitting all the free-for-all houses, it was time to tangle with the homeowners who took Halloween to the same extremes we did. These overzealous neighbors spent half the year planning the most innovative schemes with which to scare the crap out of kids. We approached the first such dramatic house about midway up the street, toward Meridian Road. Our bags, already full from the big caches of unguarded candy, ballooned out at the bottom and draped heavily over our shoulders, like an odd Santa Claus-meets-Count Dracula prop.
“Hey, look up there, in the tree,” I said, pointing to the big spiderweb hanging in the tree in front of the first scary house.
As we got closer, we started to see the owner’s horror film-inspired décor taking shape and began posing timely questions.
“Is that a coffin?”
“Do you think there’s an actual dead guy in there?”
Jim announced what we all were thinking: “Guys, they’re gonna try to scare us, maybe even worse. We gotta be on guard.”
If the scene wasn’t scary enough, our walking commentary had certainly whipped us all into a fright. We were excited and scared, but tried to hide it, just like when we had dared each other to twist and turn upside down on the Bullet ride at the fair a few weeks before.
Joey was the first to slowly step up onto the broken concrete walk in from of the house. I was a foot behind him, followed by Jim and the rest of the ghouls. Scary sounds came from the bushes. We could tell a speaker was hidden behind them, but the adrenaline rush we were experiencing made the moment less about what it was and more about what it could be.
Big round candy buckets masquerading as witches’ cauldrons sat unattended on the front porch. They looked both dangerous and tempting, bathed in the glow of orange and black lights. Those buckets were close enough to hit with a rock, but may as well have been a mile away; they lay at the end of a deadly gauntlet of coffins, giant spiders, stuffed heads, and angry jack-o’-lanterns.
Joey glanced away from those candy bins and was the first to see it. He forcefully shot his hand out behind him, stopping us all on a dime. We froze, staring in horror at the dead body sprawled out in the middle of the front yard. Seconds ticked by and then Jim again said what we were all thinking: “That guy looks real.”
“Yeah, real dead!” Joey added.
We stood motionless. The dead body belonged to a haggard, older-looking guy. The speakers blared hellish laughs as the shadows in the yard seemed to surround us. We looked at the dead guy, looked at the candy bucket on the porch, and then looked at each other.
“Grahhrrrr!” came a growl from the side yard, as some dude jumped out from behind the big magnolia tree that was draped in spiderwebs. He wore a freakish black cape that enveloped his whole body and bizarre face paint that made him look almost as dead as the man on the ground. “I gotcha! Hell yeah, I gotcha,” the suburbanite dramatist growled in a drunken slur. It seems he had been sitting on a cooler behind the tree for the last couple of hours guzzling cans of Pabst Red, White & Blue beer, known by the teenagers in the neighborhood as Red, White & Barf beer.
We didn’t run away, partially because we had jumped straight up instead of straight out, but mainly because we still had our sights set on the large candy bowls beckoning from the porch. That’s when we noticed the beer bottles littering the ground around the guy we thought was dead. Reality and courage began to flow back into our bodies and our minds.
“So, is that guy dead or drunk?” I asked the scary dude, pointing at the man lying prone on the ground. The irony of asking a drunk to weigh in on another person’s level of sobriety escaped me at that moment.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you go over there and find out?” the scary dude replied.
By then, we were close enough to tell that the guy on the ground was indeed more drunk than dead. He was moaning and slurring a spit-filled missive about our not getting any candy. The scent of beer wafted off his body as his pores oozed alcohol like a redneck diffuser.
We no longer cared if he were drunk or dead. They had officially scared the crap out of us, and we wanted their stash of candy in return. We rushed towards the candy caldrons on the porch, took what we were after, and just as quickly, ran away with our pillowcases even more stuffed. For all their efforts at setting up for Halloween and scaring us, the two drunks just watched as we took off with their stash. Once we were several houses away from that freaky house with the two Beer Brothers, we commented on what a great job they did with the holiday. Their place turned out to be just our kind of fun.
Aside from the overly dramatic houses, there were also those curiously dark houses utterly devoid of any Halloween spirit at all. Some of the owners were so unmoved by the tradition that they had heartlessly gone out to eat or to the movies without any regard for the needs of the neighborhood kids. We also knew some of them were home and were just too weird to participate or even acknowledge our needs. Bolstered by our fake plastic fangs, cardboard swords, and monstrous face paint, we advanced on those dark, abandoned porches. We wanted these homeowners to know what we knew—that they were indeed home, hiding from us, and ignoring their debt to society. We took turns rushing onto those forgotten porches and ringing the doorbell incessantly until a light came on inside the house or, better yet, footsteps made their way to the door. Then we’d run. In true ten-year-old style, the speed of our advance looked like slow motion compared to that of our retreat.
Ding Dong Ditch was not a game we played very often. Looking back now, our behavior strikes me as delinquently irritating. But at the time, it seemed a justified response to those neighbors’ stunning lack of enthusiasm for our hallowed holiday.
Once we had exploited every house on Starmount for candy or other derivative forms of Halloween fun, we headed back to home base, my carport, to begin the grand and complicated assessment of our overstuffed and supremely valuable pillowcases. The scene of us all carving out sugary real estate on that protected concrete was, at first glance, one of youthful fun and fancy. But to the keenly trained eye, it was a highly sophisticated open market. There were prices to establish, deals to strike, and candied dreams to win and lose.
The quantity of candy had an inherent value, but the quality of the stash ultimately ruled the index. There were tiers—high, medium, and low—that marked the candy’s value. Boxes of peanut M&M’s, Snickers bars, Butterfinger bars, Mounds bars, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups reigned supreme. There were also the only slightly less beloved, but far less common Marathon bars, Charleston Chews, Zero bars, and the innocent kind of Mary Janes.
As we wheeled and dealed, traded and bartered, peanut butter, chocolate, molasses, nougat, marshmallow, caramel, and many forms of dyes and additives began flowing through our veins in a sugar rush that would rival any teenage high or adult stupor.
Our parents tried to extol the virtues of the healthier snacks we had quarantined far away from the objects of our desire. Straight-faced (from years of poker playing, no doubt), our parents riffed about “the good stuff.” They talked about raisins, apples, walnuts, and the occasional ridiculous carrot as if these items were hidden gems with mystical powers that only good boys and girls knew about.
To say that we weren’t buying what they were selling is a massive understatement. We knew it was all a big ruse on their part to make off with the best of our candy. And they knew exactly how it would end: we would end up paying them off with prime pieces of candy, and, in exchange, they would back off their lectures about overindulgence and cease their embarrassing diatribes on the merits of fruits and vegetables on the night of Halloween. It was an expensive deal, but, in the end, a mutually satisfying arrangement for all parties.
Despite Thanksgiving and Christmas both hosting vast smorgasbords of sugar, Halloween night was the one sanctioned moment of complete and uninterrupted gluttony all year long. There may have been a degree of reverse psychology underlying our parents’ strategy: perhaps they thought that if they enabled one night of nausea-inducing piggishness, it would somehow dull our taste for candy and reduce our total annual sugar intake. I don’t think that plan worked too well though, because this Dracula had his fair share of fangy cavities that year and in many of the years that followed.