Halloween

I don't like the holidays these days
no reason to, really.
nothing to celebrate.
So Oct-Nov-Dec is a tough stretch
but I'm a trooper.
So how 'bout a trip down Memory Lane?

I got jumped Halloween night when I was in 5th grade,
it was to be my last Halloween anyway.
11-12 years old? I was kind of milking it...
the kiddee candy & parties belong to the single digit youngsters.
Not someone veering on Junior High.

But when I was little,
Halloween was pretty wonderful.
We'd host Halloween parties every other year,
my mom goading my brother & I to clean the cellar
starting as early as September...
All that sweeping & re-arranging until one 1/2 of the cellar
was immaculate
and the other was well-stacked bric-a-brac.
A blanket would cordon off the descending steps
& lead the guests into a well-lit, festooned place.
Iced oatmeal cookies hung from strings
apples bobbed in a frigid metal drum...
chairs arranged & pin-the-tail-on-the-something-or-other.
Parents escorting cousins & family friends.
When the party did spill over to the culmative Spook Walk
(oh so non-PC, mind you)
it was via an old Winnie-the-Pooh fold-out tunnel,
sort of a vinyl catepillar
that slid under the curtain divider
& led through the shadowy, witch lair
to the cellar door...now ajar.
Outside was cold & dark.
And the walk ensued w/ my mom leading, narrating...
pointing this & that out w/ the flashlight.
Oh look, there's the Scarecrow Man on the front lawn,
you know the one...
the man-sized, newspaper-stuffed mannequin w/ his plastic pumpkin head
(got us in the local paper one year,
my toddler brother & I posing in B&W delight)
A calming, inanimate reference point
until he jumped up & down,
shouting jibberish & frightening the children,
all clasping on their rope life-line,
a kindergarten class on a field trip to Bradbury's October Country.
Scarecrow Man was my dad then,
strange to think he'd agree to something like that,
but I guess my mom loosened him up somewhat.
Boy, that's changed.

So those early memories are good.
Although I suffered my 1st panic attack on the verge of Party #1,
all the build-up & expectation
only to be smashed by poor costuming.
I wanted to be Spider-Man that inaugaral year
but what did my mom get.
Quasi-Spider-Man...
some green-faced mask w/ webbing
& a yellow! 1-piece tie-up cheapie costume.
Green & yellow?
Spider-Man's red & blue, for Pete's sake!
Oh I was an angry, ungrateful brat,
& I suddenly couldn't go on w/ the party.
Taking a 4PM nap,
& staring at the wall's late afternoon shadow descending,
submerging the room into slow tranquility.
I think it was more nerves than production design,
the thought of all those guests coming to MY house.
But I got through it somehow.
I'm in the old Super 8 movies, after all.
Running from one game to the next,
an impatient, bossy do-it-all.
Boy, that's changed?

Anyway, flash-forward to the spiraling tail-end of childhood,
that last Halloween.
I was a tall, lanky kid w/ fine hair
& rather remote.
I was only comfortable putting together plays
and STARRING
as King Midas or Daniel Boone or Doctor Doolittle...
I also was in full arts-and-crafts mode.
My costume that year was fairly simple,
I was a magician.
But not just any moustached, Lincoln-hatted magician...
No way, Jose!
I made a tubular mask from thick construction paper,
that not only constituted said stovepipe hat,
but the magician's face itself.
Cut a few slits out for the eyes,
nostrils & some sort of breathing access...
I broke out the magic markers for facial detail &
viola!
Magician-face!
And I had a cape & I borrowed my mom's white gloves
& I dressed in a Sunday school suit
& I went on my merry way to meet up w/ my buddy,
PJ Connors.

Only at the end of PJ's street a.k.a. Junior Terrace,
although it was barely dusk...
there were a horde of these older kids spraying shaving cream
obscenities on the street itself.
I thought it was the Christmas's at 1st
(that's not holiday confusion, there was actually a family
in the neighborhood whose last name was Christmas).
I was already experiencing technical difficulty w/ my mask,
I could barely see & had to tilt my head this way & that...
yes, I may have misaligned where to cut the eyeslits :>

ANYWAY--

These kids stand up the moment I round the corner of Junior Terrace,
there was like 5 or 6 of 'em.
& I knew right then & there,
this wasn't no Christmas Party (sorry).
"Who are you?" they asked...
Man, I was so dopey dumb...what a set-up & I...
fell right into it.
Cue me--
"Why, it's me, Ted Cormey," I say... & I lift my mask to reveal my
dumb dumb dumb face
& they get me right in the freakin' eyes & mouth
& all I can feel is a horrible, rash stinging
& all I can taste is shaving cream & air-pumped mint.

I was blinded,
my mask plunked off somewhere.
I thrashed & threw my fists out & connected...
But they all got their shots in.
Well, ha ha Mooney's & Lombardi's
(for that's who it was indeed...the most fearsome, thuggery
bullies in all of Martin E. Young Elementary School,
although light years from their home terf)
I didn't have any candy to pillage.
I was brought down & bashed down
before I got the sweet sugary goods.
& maybe that only incensed them all that more,
but I was a fury,
& I do remember, no exaggeration,
actually taking 2 or 3 of 'em out, knocking them flat on their
asses
until the littlest Moody
and therefore the most dangerous
came up behind me & slammed what felt like a sledghammer
into the back of my leg.
Turned out it was just some well-endowed tree branch,
as thick as a thermos & packed hard wood...
Well, I went down then swearing & they all scrambled off
laughing.
I remember that...
because it was funny to them.
What good fun.
And I remembered losing it them,
swearing after them that I'd kill them.
Yes...I used the k-word.
I wanted them dead.

And the crying because I was hurt & the shaving cream stung
& my good suit was ruined
& my mask forgotten...
& I walked all of the 1 minute back to my house
& startled my grandmother in the doorway...
who had come down off the hill to distribute candy at our house...
& I screamed at her.
& I screamed at my parents.

I stayed in that Halloween.
Lying in my parents bed as my leg swelled up.
My older cousins came by to visit,
& they knew the older Bombardi's
& they promised to make things tough for them in Junior High...
but it was all moot.
Even finding out later that PJ Connor's mother had seen the whole
thing out her window,
saw my beat-down from her porch,
yet didn't lift a finger.

So there it is-- Memory Lane. Some good, some sucky.
And things these days...well, they're neither.
OK they're sucky.
But no joy is fine now,
I'll get beyond this time.
Until maybe Oct-Nov-Dec in some foreign land
is __________________.