Every morning since October began, I have gotten to work and braced myself before opening the door to my department, not because I hate my job or anything, but because everyone in the office has brought in various candies and cookies for Halloween, ostensibly to share generously but in fact to get the damn things out of their houses and thus prevent themselves from eating too much. Like most writers, I am constitutionally unable to refuse free food, so every day I vow to resist the sweet du jour on the front desk, but every day I end up chasing my morning bagel with party-
size Butterfingers and Nestlé Crunchlets and clever little macadamia candies in the shape of maple leaves and bakery cookies dipped in chocolate with orange sprinkles and heaping handfuls of Brach’s candy corn and those Pillsbury cookies that come in a loaf of dough with holiday shapes in the center, which I have slowly become addicted to ever since my neighbor in the next cubicle started bringing in the ones with the bunnies in the middle, and which now come with pumpkin shapes and also with little cocoa-flavored bat shapes that look like Rorschach blots, and she keeps baking whole rolls of the damn things and bringing them in to work, knowing full well that I will dart in and out of her cubicle all morning, just like the experiment where the rat keeps hitting the bar for pellets of food and winds up so fat that its little legs can’t even reach the ground, and every day at about noon I suffer from a sugar crash that makes the detox scene from Trainspotting look like an afternoon in the sandbox, and my boss stands over me, fanning me with a file folder and yelling, “I need 500 ccs of regular Coke and a box of Junior Mints, STAT!” while I lie on the floor moaning and trying to reach the Pez dispenser in the bottom of my bag.

I thought I would grow out of my forbidden-fruit lust for candy, but I haven’t. My parents took a pretty hard line on sweets, so if we wanted candy, we could save our allowance and load up on Skor bars on the sly, or we could wait for that pinnacle of childrens’ High Holy Days, Halloween. I always loved Halloween. I loved planning my costume; my mother didn’t love this part quite so much since she usually wound up designing our costumes, but she did a really good job, so we forgive her for eating our Halloween stash when she thought we didn’t notice (Dad, on the other hand, has a few Snickers bars to answer for). I loved going over to my best friend’s house and conducting elaborate voodoo ceremonies to sway the Munsons from giving out apples instead of candy. This witchcraft never worked, and neither did the anti-raisins spells we cast over the Wagners’ house, but we never gave up hope, and one year the magic accidentally settled on the house two doors down from us, inducing the foolish Schillers to leave out a bowl of M&Ms with a sign reading, “Please take only one per person — BE HONEST.” Suckers. Anyhow. I loved seeing the trivial damage wrought by toilet paper-packing vandals on Mischief Night; the adults clucked their tongues at the swaying fronds of Scott Tissue, but I secretly wanted to do it myself, and one year I snuck out under cover of night with a couple rolls of toilet paper stuffed down the front of my jean jacket, and my friend and I papered the car of an annoying biddy who for years yelled out her front door at us not to ride our bikes on the sidewalk, and as we finished the job by hanging the empty cardboard tube on the antenna of her big old late-model Cadillac, her grandson burst out the front door and shouted, “Call the police!” and we took off giggling in hysterical terror to our respective houses, only to find out later that someone had started a leaf fire down the street from the old biddy and the grandson hadn’t even seen us, and that night after we had gone to bed, it rained and pretty much turned the several rolls of Northern festooning the old biddy’s Seville into a papier-mâché cast, which couldn’t have pleased us more had we planned it that way.

And naturally I loved going trick-or-treating. I liked the school Halloween functions okay — we could give our costumes a dry run, and the chaos of several hundred little girls getting changed into and out of various complicated outfits generally interfered with at least one class, not to mention the annual kindergarten costume parade which snaked through the building each year so that the “little kids” could show off their costumes to the whole lower school, and some of them loved it but some of them became mesmerized with terror and one of the teacher’s aides had to drag them along by the hand lest they become rooted to the floor long enough to think of bursting into tears, and frequently one of them would throw up from the sheer exhilaration of the parade, and we always prayed for the cookie toss to happen in our classroom, because by the time we all filed out into the coatroom and Jimmy from Maintenance arrived with a mop and swabbed the decks and sprayed some institutional- strength Lysol around and we all filed back in, long-division hour would have ended. (Come to think of it, we spent a lot of time hoping someone would speeyack just to liven things up. New Jersey doesn’t get very many earthquakes, and nobody at my school had the stones to pull the fire alarm, so if we wanted to get out of the dreaded cursive lesson, we could either wait for a band of extremely unambitious terrorists to descend on the building, or someone could take one for the team by eating some dodgy potato salad at lunch and hoarfing all over her desk, thus exempting all of us from endless rows of capital “Q.”) But the real problem with school- sponsored Halloween fiestas lay in the anti-theft nature of the snacks — endless rows of cookies, cupcakes with orange frosting, and other highly perishable items that didn’t lend themselves to our stuffing them into our bookbags by the double handful.

No — to build a true stash, I had to go trick-or-treating. (I also had to convince my mother that 40 degrees and dropping or not, no self-respecting ballerina would wear a windbreaker out of the house.) I had to bring my little brother trick-or-treating also, a responsibility that tended to interfere with my master plan of hitting every domicile between our house and Manhattan, especially since during those years his very existence tried my patience to its utmost, so my best friend and I would try our best to ignore the little imp dressed as Pac-Man that tagged along behind us chanting, “Chomp chomp chomp chomp — hey Sar! Wait up! Chomp chomp. Hey Sar! Mom said not to eat any candy until we get home! Chomp chomp.” Surrogate nagging aside, my brother did have the occasional benefit; in exchange for standing between him and any large barking dogs, I extorted a fee payable in Kraft caramels. He also freed us up to go to the forbidden “houses of people we didn’t know,” a strategy that brought us that much closer to the Shangri-La of elementary school — a trick-or-treat bag whose handles had broken under the strain of a full bag of candy. But no matter how full the bag, we could not eat so much as a jellybean until our parents had combed through every single Three Musketeers and Goldenberg’s Peanut Chew, looking for pinholes or razor blades or whiffs of cyanide. Our attempts to point out that the Thomases sang in the church choir didn’t convince our parents that they probably hadn’t injected our Now & Laters with arsenic, so we sat there salivating until my mother had subjected every single item to her X-ray eye, and once any suspicious fruit and unwrapped “grab bags” had gotten the boot, we could have a few pieces of candy. After that, over the next few days, we had to ask permission before eating any of our loot, apparently because our parents thought we would gorge ourselves to the point of barfing, but parents tend to forget one of the cardinal rules of childhood, namely that people under the age of twelve will jealously hoard their candy for weeks — some trading between siblings may take place, but beyond that, a Scrooge-like rationing system designed to make the candy last as long as possible prevails. At our house, we could afford to eat a bit more at a time, because my mother laid in a large supply of full-sized confections from Fannie Farmer every year, even though nobody ever trick-or-treated on our road; it had only one streetlight, which made it too scary to bother with since it only had houses on one side of the street. One band of hardy souls would come to our door each year, leaving the rest of the candy for us, and I strongly advise anyone thinking of climbing Everest to take a Fannie Farmer peanut bar with them; I think I still have part of one in my stomach that I ate in 1986.

In later years, Halloween lost some of its luster. Too old to go trick-or-treating and too young to do much of anything else, we gathered at someone’s house to watch “scary” movies, most of which featured a lot of fake blood and even faker disarticulated limbs and, fakest of all, Jamie Lee Curtis’s breasts. Eleven girls piled onto a couch in a darkened TV room clutching diet Cokes and bags of Smartfood, the credits rolled, and a nervous giggle rippled down the couch, followed by the offended observation that someone had farted, and then the movie began and immediately people moaned in anticipation, and then someone would scream just to freak the rest of us out and everyone would turn on her and tell her to shut up, like, God, and everyone then settled down and crunched their popcorn and slurped their sodas peacefully until the first woman-in-lingerie-investigates-danger scene, at which point our friend the Resident Alien would gripe, “This is soooo unrealistic,” and then emit a blood-curdling shriek two seconds later when the blood started flowing, which made everyone else start screaming and squealing, and a few brave girls kept watching while the others hid underneath pillows and yelled, “Omigod, omigod, gross, I’m gonna puke,” and then asked us to narrate the action so they wouldn’t have to look, and by the end everyone had screamed themselves hoarse and we had to medicate our throats with large quantities of ice cream.

These days, the “treats” include alcohol and the parties have themes like “dress as your favorite dead person” and “anything goes.” For various reasons, I cannot reveal at this time what the Couch Baron and I have chosen to dress up as, but let’s just say it involves cross-dressing and whips. Sometimes you need to lose
your innocence. Happy Halloween.

Share!