It’s hard to believe my last real Halloween of trick-or-treating and general disarray was more than half my life ago. Back then, I would have found it even harder to believe that at twice my age I’d still be dressing up for Halloween, especially with little to no real possibility that strangers would offer me candy.
Those mid-youth Halloweens were fucking amazing, those snugly after when our parents stopped insisting on dragging our dumb asses around and before my voice changed and I hit six feet in height. I think other parents had a tough time giving candy to a kid taller than they were. Anyway, there were only four or five of those prime Halloweens, really. And many had a general trend: Go to school, get candy there, maybe have a costume parade or something, cutting away some class time. Cool. Then on the bus ride home, plan out your evening with the guys. We’d hit a bunch of streets by one or two of us, then retreat to someone’s house for pizza and to get warm and maybe dry, deflect questions from the mom, and then hit the other neighborhood.
One Halloween ended up being an almost perfect storm of activity. It was 1994, our penultimate go-round. I was still twelve, my birthday being just a couple of days later, so I still had some youthful energy and justifiable irresponsibility in me. We’d done away with the plastic pumpkins and gone straight for the pillowcases, like the little hoodlums we were becoming. Our prank arsenal had similarly escalated, from silly string straight to shaving cream. I only remember talking about flamethrowers, hairspray cans with matches taped in front of the nozzle.
The situation with girls was escalating, too. Seemed like they were multiplying, coming out of the woodwork, always slightly glowing, slightly hovering. We’d always lived in their midst but also never quite among them. Whether they were noticing us or just noticing us noticing them, we found each other on the same radar that year as never before. And it was after pizza at my friend’s house that we ran into three of these lovely creatures, two of whom we’d known forever, just down the block.
It was a combination of sugar, pizza and hormones that drove that conversation. Three of us, three of them. Like Alvin and the Chipmunks or the Brady Bunch, only less realistic than either. I remember we circled each other like a bunch of matadors with some awkward invisible bull at our center. Little eye contact was made but there was some pretty big talk. I swear it was they who had the rolls of toilet paper. We had no choice but to take control from there.
And we got that house good. It was all dark, clearly no one was home. I was still pretty good at baseball then and was happy to toss the rolls over the higher branches out in the front yard, because if that don’t impress ‘em, nothing will! For those twenty minutes it was like a fantasy camp for our younger selves. It was all of us joining together in an act of creation and destruction. The voice in my head was straight out of The Wonder Years. I admit that I got away from myself when I rolled up some toilet paper, put it in the middle of the street far, far from any leaves, took out the matches I got from somewhere and set that fucker on fire right in front of the house we’d desecrated. Organized chaos. It was our peak.
The problem was we’d picked our friend’s next-door neighbor’s house.
And so I’ll never forget his father coming out of his house, the house where we’d just had dinner, walking down the hill a little bit, and shouting out, “You’d better take ALL that paper down or else. And put out that fire!”
We did, and we did. And then we scattered and Halloween as we knew it would be over forever.
Facebook hammered home this point just this weekend, when I read that one of the three girls, never Jeanette to my hopeful Simon, gave birth to a girl of her own. I wish them all the very best, and for the baby, that she’ll have as much fun one day as I had that night.