All Hallow's Eve

I never really got into the dress-up aspect of Halloween. Not that I didn't have the desire to be someone else as a child--when you spend as much time getting your ass kicked at school as I did, you spend most of your time wishing you were anyone else but that goofy-looking kid with the corkscrew teeth and the Jerry Lewis crewcut staring back at you from the mirror every morning. The costume choices of my misspent youth, however, did little to alleviate the situation--somehow, hiding yourself in a Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp costume just made the bigger kids want to chase me down the block that much more.

Even my one arguably successful costume--a homemade getup intended to bear some resemblance, however slight, to Elwood Blues--still brought more grief than reward, since the one question I got all day long was, "Where's Jake?" Telling the other kids that Jake was "still in the joint" or that he was "on a mission from God" just didn't do the trick. At least I got to wear sunglasses and a porkpie hat in school all day long.

So, perhaps understandably, throwing on a mask or makeup has little to no appeal for me, even as a relatively burly adult.

But decorating my swingin' bachelor pad for Halloween and watching funny/frightening/frighteningly funny movies with my friends? Does that appeal to me at all?

Oh. Hell. Yeah.

So if you are ever, um, unfortunate enough to be walking through La Casa del Terrorany night immediately before All Hallows Eve, you're likely to see any or all of the following:

Rubber bats dangling from the ceiling and affixed to the bathroom mirror (though, to be briefly fair, the bats on the mirror are there year-round); Godzilla duking it out with Gamera atop the refrigerator (which is decorated with old-fashioned Halloween postcards) while King Kong and Fay Wray look on in fascination/disgust; a glow-in-the-dark paper skeleton taped to a closet door; Mars Attacks lights wound around the shower curtain pole; a skull with a Weiner Whistle clenched between its teeth; a Bride of Frankenstein doll whose hair looks more mussed than usual (maybe she and the Monster had been vigorously shagging the night before? are my action figures getting more action than I am?); 18-inch tall figures of Bruce Campbell and Bruce Lee standing back to back under the living room lamp, with the Tick and the Terminator guarding them from behind; an honest-to-badness Ouiji Board, vintage 1937, with a crystal ball and a tarot deck before it, all waiting for the wrong person to ask the wrong question at the wrong time; pumpkin lights strung across the living room windows; a tin dollhouse, played with by Mom in her misspent youth, now desecrated with Blade climbing out of the chimney, Skeletor and the Shadow leaning out of the windows, and Winona Ryder and a Dalek on the balcony; posters for The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project bookending the living room; and more monster toys, movies and postcards than you ever thought one person could reasonably possess.

You're also just as likely to see good friends parked on the couches or the futon or walking about the apartment, marveling at the display and wondering aloud if it looks like this all year round. (No, it really doesn't. As I told one friend this past Saturday, "For Halloween, I dail it up to eleven.") They come. They watch movies with me. They share my joy. They share my holiday. And those bittersweet memories of bad Halloweens past? They fade away like a vampire at sunrise.

I like Thanksgiving. I love Christmas. But Halloween? That's my day. And I hope it's yours, too. Have a happy and safe one, kids. And eat much, much more candy than you should--the sugar buzz will do you good.