I had to go the store last week for cat foot and cat litter and detoured through the Halloween section on the way to the register. I ended up buying a $35 bag of assorted candies, 330 pieces, supposedly, in case we’re home on Halloween.
Who am I kidding? We’re always home on Halloween.
I had this vague idea I’d head out to Hollywood for 3 days, solo, go see Kaz and Linda, watch the Halloween parade. Kaz and I went many years ago and it was fantastic. Then I bought a new mattress and blew that idea all to hell. Unless we figure out some way to be out of the house that day I’ll be doing what I did in 2024 and every year prior since moving here in 2007: handing out hundreds of pieces of candy over four or five hours to kids who definitely do not live in our neighborhood.
Last year I started at 4 pm, when the first little kids showed up with their parents. As it got darker the kids got older, with the sullen teenagers showing up by 7 pm. I packed it in around 8:30, 9:00 pm after emptying three bags of candy, roughly 400 pieces. That’s 400 children coming by, often in groups of four, five, six or more. Some of them obviously care, took some pains to do up a costume. Others are only in it for the free sugary treats and couldn’t be bothered to do much more than don a crappy drugstore mask. I’m not sure I should resent this as much as I do but often I’m the only one handing out candy in our stretch of houses down this end of the street. I tend to feel like a sucker, especially if I go to extra lengths Like last year when I borrowed Matt’s HDMI projector to rear-project old black & white horror movies on a sheet hung from our raised garage door. We don’t decorate because we can’t possibly compete with the people on Boulevard East whose house looks like Spirit Halloween exploded all over it. It’s one of those places people travel to from far and wide. It’s not that I don’t want to decorate: I don’t want to stash that shit the rest of the year. We don’t have the room.
I may be borrowing Matt’s projector again...
I suppose I was the standard kid in that I’d run home after school on Halloween, throw on a costume (usually all-purpose “Ragamuffin”) and be out trick-or-treating by 3:30. I could get in three solid hours before it was too dark. I went out with my neighbor, Tommy, and two or three other kids. It was different every year. Sometimes my friend Jeff would come along. Sometimes I’d go out with my brother. That was the worst. Trick-or-treating with my brother Marc was terrible. He’d always shoulder me out of the way to get to the door first. He’d get right up front, shake his bag in a “more, more” gesture if he didn’t get as much as he wanted. When he was sated he’d shoulder you out of the way again and run down the steps to shoot off to the next house, leaving me to catch-up. It was exhausting. I think he was hoping - just once - to get to a door just as someone was running out of candy so you’d arrive after him to nothing.
The last year I went out – I was probably 11 or 12, Marc a year older – we went to a corner house with a high brick stoop. It was a good ten steps up and the front door was a dozen feet above ground. On either side of this wide stoop were bare rose bushes. Old Man Stein across the street had the same bushes, with stickers that cut you to ribbons if you need to push your way in to retrieve an errant football or frisbee. Marc and I are standing at the top of this high stoop and this woman comes to the door. She isn’t old but she’s real crotchety, like she’d been bugged one too many times that night. It was dark and she opens the door and scowls at us. Just inside the front door I see a large metal candy bowl brimming with Hershey’s miniatures - Krackel, Mr. Goodbar, Hershey’s Dark and regular Hershey’s – and full size Nestle Crunch’s and Forever Yours. It wasn’t crap. Crap was (get this!) pennies. What the hell kind of cheap, lazy bum gives pennies to kids for Halloween? Why not just give them empty cans and tell ‘em to redeem them for nickels? I swear, every kid I knew would chuck those pennies as soon as they got off the stoop. Other Halloween crap? Candy apples, jawbreakers, gum balls, licorice and anything marshmallow. Give me chocolate with some Smarties or Pixie sticks. I’ll even settle for some nice cookies, properly wrapped.
So there we are, Marc and I, awaiting the good stuff, when this wiseass lady asks my brother, “Can you do a trick?”
“You want a trick lady?” my brother (dressed as a pirate) replies.
Then he quickly shoves me off the stoop into the sticker bushes.
The lady and my brother laugh and she gives him lots of candy. I struggle in the sticker bush awhile and then Marc comes down, extends his hand and hauls me out. When I shove him back and call him a dick he opens his bag wide.
“Look!”
“Whoa!”
I go back up the stoop, knock on the door. The lady opens, looks me up and down, laughs at me again, then holds the bowl up to my bag and tips it in. I make out pretty good.
When we get home my mother demands we replenish our own quickly-depleting bowl before our private gorging. Marc and I stick our heads into our respective bags, pull out all the crap and put it in the bowl.
That was the last time I went trick-or-treating.