When I was young, very young, I dressed up as Superman for every Halloween. Understand though that when I saw “ young” I mean before Superman suits had fake muscle chest, but also before I had memories. When I was young and all of my thoughts were framed through my father's camera and slid projector I dressed as Superman for Halloween. I do have one genuinely honest memory from those Halloweens though, I remember my mother knelling down in front of me and pulling my curl down over my forehead, just like Superman’s.
We were in the hallway of our old house, at the bottom of the stairs, standing on the long rug that ran between the bathroom and the playroom. The bathroom shone a glorious white. White lighting, and yellow light bulbs and white, slick, smooth, cold porcelain tiles glared out of the bathroom and into the halls and out all the windows of the house. I doubt it was late enough at night for it to be dark out, even for a night in late October, but in my memories it was pitch black outside.
After years of being the man of steel my curl would evolve, transform me, straighten and lengthen itself, pressed down to my forehead with my brothers hair gel, a tight widows peak, an orange devilock draping down my little Halloween melon head. For many years I put on a new cape, black and red replacing gold and blue, that I tied tight around by throat, damp with sweat and rain all October. For a month I lived as a little Dracula child, hiding under beds and behind trees, falling end over end into piles of leaves, stealing away with lengths of rope to hang bodies from trees and build giant spider’s webs. Halloween would transform me too, evolve me, turn me into little beasts, raise me from the dead, turn my face whiter and my blood redder, and let me walk out at night, set lose, a full fledge vampire sucking down sugar and ready to eat the black out of the sky, to unhang the moon and drop it in my pillow case like some treat I’d claimed as mine that night.
For a long time I spent Halloween with my best friend, my brother, Jake. Jake was my best friend from one Halloween to the next, not because he was my brother, or because for years he was the only other person in life I knew besides my parents, but because he was exciting. Jake was what Halloween was supposed to be: trouble. Lots and lots of trouble. Once in a psychology class someone asked me where I learned what it meant to be a boy from and my first thought was that no one has ever taught me more about getting into trouble than my brother, the kid who taught me what it was to be a boy growing up, who through torture and demonstration showed me how to hurt people, hide things, steal junk, dig holes and run from anyone. My older brother Jake showed me not only how to be a monster on Halloween, but how to be a terror every other day of the year too.
...to be continued.
Caleb Michael, ghoul
