Halloween, Part two

...continued...
When I was in middle and elementary school I’d trick or treat with Sean Anderson and my older brother would go out with his older brother, Bret. Sean and I were really good friends for a long time. Through kindergarten and most of elementary school Sean and his brother would come over for Halloween. We’d spend the whole afternoon running around the backyard, digging through the basement and pulling up weird toys and play weapons to bash around with. Just as it would start to get dark Sean and I would pull out a bin of old clothes, torn up shirts and knotted neck ties, old blue jeans with paint and fake blood smeared all over them. I never really knew what we were those Halloweens; sometimes zombies, sometimes scientists, sometimes just accident victims. I’d plan and plan for weeks what I was going to be each year for that one night and yet somehow it was easy enough to in just a few moments of drastic searching to transform Sean and myself from too laughing kids into two incredibly amused laughing faces of death. Every year something strange seemed to happen to Sean and I. Like one year, when we were invited into some old woman’s house and introduced to her comatose husband and like he was still all there, or when we thought we saw a UFO, or a T-Rex, or a woman with out a jaw, or when Sean got hit in the head so hard we thought he had a tumor, or the someone pointed out that Sean was black and didn’t live in our neighbor hood. I don’t know what we found more insulting that year, that someone would say something like that to two kids, or that after they did they gave us both apples instead of candy.

In my last year of high school I spent the Friday night before Halloween with those who at the time were the three people closest to me. Though they didn’t know it, or one another yet, to me they were the better part of every Friday night I’d had or would have for a long time in one way or another. I don’t really know how to write about this. Maybe if I put everything in context and added in all the details it’d make sense. But it isn’t that easy. It wasn’t just any other Friday night spent in a movie house; it wasn’t just a triple feature, it wasn’t just the week before what would be my last real Halloween. It was a lot more than all that. It was three really bad movies, with awful stories and flying fireballs. It was a headless lion tamer, a woman on roller skates, and eleven other orange ghosts. That night skeletons danced from the rafters, plot holes were left empty and Denmark became a mysterious island full of transvestite and murderers. Also though, that night was the first night I’d sleep next to a woman I loved. From that evening two things became very clear to me; firstly, that I was in love, and they loved me too, something as scary and exciting as any Halloween or murderous she-male. And secondly, that at that time I was friends with those choice few who I knew then and know now will be my friends for the rest of my life.

Two relationships began that October night, but only one lasted… As for the other, well, I guess love is much like Denmark, and we’re likely never to know exactly what happens there…

That same year, the first year I didn’t carve a pumpkin for Halloween, was the last year I went trick or treating. I’d bought a pumpkin- I just never got around to carving the damn thing. I did everything late that year. It wasn’t until the doorbell was ringing once every minute that I realized I needed to be out there too, running up and down the streets, shouting and laughing and getting louder and louder with every lost neon-orange-scattered-sunray. So I called my oldest friend, and Joshua came right over.

We were in prime trick or treating conditions, strong walking legs with upper bodies able enough to carry our knotted and wet pillow cases. Between us we would take turns wearing a football helmet, one of us an out of season coach and the other a bench warmer… Or something like that. We weren’t really that into it. We were more into the conversation mauling about between us as we trudged through the trenches of brittle leaves pilled high on either side of the street. Yes, maybe we were too old to be trick or treating, but we didn’t care. We didn’t much care for anything that year. We were seniors, we were old friends, we were tired, and it was kinda just nice to once again be with someone who was always there, someone who grew up fearing the same things as me, the same movies and monsters and classes and choices. Joshua and I had become friends under a willow tree looking through a toy magazine that was like porno to the two of us. Under that tree we wondered over art and star wars and miniature women. Growing older Joshua and I would stay friends. Throughout middle school we’d spend Friday nights at one another’s home. His dad would always rent two classics horror flicks for us and we’d pop in the VHS’ as soon as it got dark. The movies weren’t that scary by any current standards but we didn’t know that. That’s when I first watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and it’s the night I remember best. If we weren’t scared by the movies we would let ourselves get scared, make ourselves fear the glowing puppets and masks, fall into the hoax before us and roll in terror at our own jokes and horror stories. I learned what fear was with Joshua, what being scared and being a monster meant, and how one quite often lead to the next. When we got older things would change, and the glowing silver grey TV screen would turn brighter, more colorful, wavy with pause lines as we hesitated in the still silence of three o’clock, waiting, hoping no one else was awake besides us as be watched and rewatched over and over again the three second sex scenes in The Black Robe or Little Big Man. And even in that stillness I learned more about fear and waiting and excitement than I had ever before without Joshua. Years later in a haggard little Parisian motel room Josh and I would lie awake, too scared to use the bathroom in the early morning, talking back and forth between our cots as an old man walked up and down the hall, crossing-and-recrossing past our door. I reached up and scratched my nails hard against the cold rough wall and the noise was so chilling that I even scared myself with it; lost myself in the gag. I wasn’t just scaring Joshua, I was once again scaring myself with him; that moment, in that small room, my own nails imitating an old fiends dry grasp, Joshua’s breath in sync with mine, I was terrified and excited all at once as I hadn’t been since childhood. I had never felt closer to any other human being than I did at that moment to my oldest friend, Joshua Saganski.


...to be continued.

Caleb Michael, ghost