Halloween Night

The day had begun just like any other with my black cat scratching on the mattress at 5:30 a.m. and making her endearing little squeaky noises,  rousing me from slumber on a typical Thursday. "Halloween..." - I teased her "is that your favorite holiday, kitty?" Outside the window, the last few leaves of deep crimson and amber were clinging to the otherwise bare trees. School was already an afterthought. The day would race by in a blur with the usual kids in costume, traveling in pairs or packs, munching their candy in the hallways, and trading stories about their favorite scary movie. It was to be the last year of trick-or-treating for our nerd posse who were, as per usual, venturing out in our slovenly, ill-conceived, makeshift costumes. Opting for simplicity, Aaron decided to go again as a "dust-pan ghost" with a gray and dusty bed sheet he had pilfered from his basement.  Russell went as a make-shift sorcerer/magician with a droopy wand, a black cape and purple boots. Will wore a polyester shirt and disco pants. I wore a worn football jersey passed down from my big brother and an old Rams helmet with floppy horns attached. The sketchiest haunts in town were up and down a neighborhood called Edgewood perched on a hill where rows of old maple and oak trees lined quiet blocks with a minimum of street-lights. There were old houses there, many of which had been turned into to multi-unit apartments; but the people were generous, gave away lots of candy, and seemed to revel in the scare-factor of their enclave. Pumpkins glowing by candle-light could be seen up and down the blocks, whereas the usual artificial illumination was lacking. It was a weird feeling going from house-to-house, as it had been the year before, because we looked so out of place, still young of course, but awkward, and getting too old for this kind of thing, almost like people were expecting us to start pulling pranks in dark alleyways, egging pedestrians, smashing decorations, lighting fires or stealing hubcaps as a random alternative to the most innocent routine of gathering up hordes of candies in our pillow sacks. There was this one house in particular that Aaron wanted to visit because of a girl named Marcie who lived there; she was a field hockey player and Aaron wanted to tell her that he had been to her game and watched her score a goal and that he admired athletes who weren't stuck up. Russell thought this was a tedious plan and said so; he offered to show us the glowing neon house inhabited by the aging hippies that we had heard about but had never seen because we weren't sure where it was. Wills was voting with Russell which left me with the deciding vote. I saw that Aaron was giving me a look as if to say that if he didn't find a way to rendezvous with Marcie in some inanely casual sort of way, that his life would be over, so I proposed that let Aaron have his moment of glory before venturing down to see the hippie house with the ghouls in the front yard...But soon enough Aaron began back-peddling and getting cold feet.  I just want to see her, briefly, just to confirm a hunch. I don't necessarily want to talk to her - yet. I don't really know her all that well. Just need to see if she's with some other guy, etc. etc. We gave him grief about that. And so...we went up and down a few streets, letting Aaron engage in his lost puppy routine, until Russell put his foot down and demanded that we check out the hippie house, remembering the splendid weirdness he had encountered from a year before, with a "headless hippie" driving a motorbike through a makeshift "cemetery" on the front lawn.  It was all kind of dream-like on that "final" Halloween outing - the night when I really felt an unsettling transition taking place, not just like when your voice becomes all bent out of shape during puberty and your limbs hurt and you start bumping into furniture, but an actual saying goodbye to childhood, a moment after which I would not have a full excuse by claiming that I was "still a kid" and could get away with being clueless and unaccountable for my actions. Even during that nocturnal trek, I could feel a weight of added responsibilities being piled on my back as my oversized football costume began to feel unduly fake and ridiculous.  With Russell leading us in tow, and Aaron resigned to losing out on his fateful rendezvous with Marcie, Will emerged as the lucky recipient of female attention - in part because so many eyes were drawn to his funky disco attire. I noticed him walking behind us at one point after having been whisked aside by an enthusiastic trio of admirers - each one dressed up as felines (lions, tigers, cheetahs) of one sort or another. He seemed to have disappeared for a full ten minutes until somehow miraculously re-emerging near the front of the hippie domicile just as we were finishing our climb up the hilly street. He gawked at us with his goofy smile and pointed to the side street he had used as a short cut, then proceeded to give us the run down on his three new friends and the one who had been flirting with him the most. It was sort of awkward and irritating for the rest of us that we weren't sure how to react to his success; part of me felt like certain rites of passage came easier for Wills, that he wasn't quite one of us, the maladjustment factor just wasn't there for him. His boyish charm, his love of Monty Python movies and Steve Martin comedy routines allowed for a plenty of banter between us, but his jaunty confidence did not jibe with our dark insecurities and our sometimes barely-concealed, erratic self-loathing. This night would perhaps represent for him a rapturous beginning of a long string of success; he would no doubt break ties with us in the coming months, unintentionally, good-naturedly, almost as an after-thought. Our paths simply would not cross once he and the lioness began dating. In his stead, we would invite Larry or Leonard or Ben to "hang with us" late on Friday and Saturday nights from the ever-present repository of young, hapless, somewhat spacey, under-achieving,  wall-flowerish males-in-waiting. At a certain point in the evening I looked inside my pillow case to count up my candies, noticing how many of the "goodies" I had previously relished only a year ago, seemed dated and stale now to my aging taste-buds. I wasn't sure that this loot-in-the-bag had any real value except for the sheer bulk that I had accumulated. The way people stared at us when we said "Trick or Treat..." with our strained, half-husky, half-shrill voices was beginning to grate upon my nerves. Even the hippies juggling their citrus fruit and putting on their make-shift ghost theater in the drive-way failed to leave me mesmerized and enchanted, the way I once had been, the way I once had responded to the smallest of gothic decorations adorning porches and front laws in late October. Aaron was becoming exhausted; I could tell he wanted to quit early. He gave me one of his looks that it was time to take leave of Russell and Will; we would head back to Aaron's early for a quick count of candies and then watch some lousy late-show horror movie on channel 9.  I can't do THIS anymore he said to me. My heart's not in it. We're done with this routine, my friend...  and despite all the banalities that Aaron was known for spouting, I felt that truer words had never been spoken. We were both the type that did not look forward to the future. The idea of progress had not been hard-wired into our DNA.  To the contrary, we were looking for ways to stem the tide, to move backwards, to stop time in its tracks, to make believe that each change of seasons was identical to the one before. This shared melancholy was a secret bond - but even in this regard I felt that I possessed it more than either Aaron or Russell or Leonard, if we decided that Leonard (although younger) should prove worthy of our company. Walking down Rosewood Place, a shiver came over me and I was brought back to the time - a mere five or six years prior - when those menacing oafs Dan Powell and Evan Rhodes had jumped out of the bushes and sprayed us with vinegar, defacing our costumes, snatching our candy bags, calling us "losers" and "dorks" - which in retrospect was pretty tame, but at the time left me twitching for weeks on end with panic. What a crazy year that had been, filled with my superstitions about lucky and unlucky shirts destined to bring blessing or misfortunes;  the year Aaron and Brett and Guy and myself formed our secret society against the world, before Brett's abrupt departure in 6th grade and Guy being sent away for special help because of certain emotional difficulties. He had bragged to us that he broke down crying every day - he had counted he said - that the random (and, as we ourselves witnessed, sometimes ridiculous) crying spells broke out something like 565 days in a row, and when his parents finally discovered the streak, they sent him to another school and we never saw him again.) I had always loved this street because of the rose buds and orange blossoms of early spring, but now a certain grey house and its prickly hedge retained the aura of past trauma. For old time's sake, it seemed, Aaron purposely took us down that stretch as if to show our victory over time, to underscore for me that the spot where this sad, visceral encounter had once transpired was no longer that same spot, only a barren square of sidewalk next to an untrimmed hedge near a flickering autumnal street light. It was eerily quiet on this residential block from which the other treat-or-treaters had already fled;  we walked in the middle of the street and felt the weight of so many similar walks to and from school.