The Weekly Screed (#884)

Halloween… before parents

by David Benjamin

Time was, Halloween was kid turf — just kids. The grownups’ job was to hunker inside, answer the door and fill bags. On any given Halloween in those Wild West days, a kid could cover every prosperous block from Lemonweir Creek to Elizabeth Street and not spot one adult on the loose. My kid brother Bill and I usually teamed up with my mildly disreputable cousins Danny and Bobby. One year, we took along my annoying best friend Koscal and a neighbor brat named Dougie who cussed like a sailor.

“Little kids” couldn’t apply. Nobody got a chaperone. If you weren’t old enough to run wild by yourself after dark, you were SOL ’til you got big enough for Halloween.

Our costumes were makeshift — pirates, ghosts and hobos, mainly — anything a kid could throw together in ten minutes out of closets, garages and woodsheds. The point was not fashion. It was treats — loot, goodies, tooth decay — as much as you could accumulate in a mad, greedy dash through town.

Costumes themselves didn’t matter so much as our undergarments. Bobby, the oldest among us, was a nine-year trick-or-treat veteran, and he knew how cold — and sometimes wet — the last day of October could be. Under his costume, Bobby wore long johns and a thermal undershirt, flannel shirt and blue jeans, a sweatshirt, a winter jacket, woolen gloves, double socks and “fast” shoes. These were either sneakers (though we called them tennis shoes), which I was wearing, or broken-in slant-heeled scuffed-toe “hard” shoes. We had to cover all of Tomah in about three hours and we couldn’t afford foot issues. An untimely blister could leave a kid alone on the curb, with a gut-gnawing case of chocolate deficiency ’til Easter.

No combat-hardened trick-or-treater ever carried a paper bag, not even one of those epic shopping bags from Sears — because it might rain. One hour of steady drizzle turns your typical 1950s A&P grocery sack into papier-maché. You’re suddenly standing on a wet sidewalk on Kilbourn Avenue with all your candy strewn at your feet, and your friends are helping you out by glomming it up and shoving it into their… not bags. Pillowcases. Every kid carried two. When you’d filled the first one, you whipped your reserve out of your hip pocket and kept right on rattling screens and pounding doorbells.

Moving stealthily — except for the odd burst of whooping, hollering and TV jingles — we roamed to the south end where there rich people in big new houses gave out fancy home-made treats, then all the way north to Glendale, where old biddies would pinch your cheek, say you’re a lovely little girl and give you an extra Tootsie Roll. Our trail of pillage took us down Kilbourn and up McLean, and side-to-side from Butts Avenue by the lake to the shores of Council Creek. We were a burnt-cork band of commandos,  buccaneers, French resistance fighters — Filipino guerrillas! — striking swiftly, seizing our booty and galloping through the night to the next house, the next block, the next trembling neighborhood, never resting never stinting never —God forbid — sharing anything.

Over by the locker plant, an old goat named Ashman (of course, we called him “Assman”) spent all year chasing kids out of his apple orchard. But on Halloween, he was all smiles. He ushered kids into his garage where he had a great, dripping Rube Goldberg apple press and he handed everyone a huge glass of fresh-pressed apple juice, bite-sweet and dense with pulp — an annual shock that tasted better than any fluid we’d ever drunk. Beside the press was a bin heaped with apples from which old man Ashman encouraged us to help ourselves. “Take three or four! G’head! G’head!” he’d say. We loaded up on Assman apples, but none of us — except for that night — ever questioned the kid dogma that our genial host was, still, a picklepuss grouch. We figured he just went nutty on Halloween.

It was a night to go nutty. Halloween presented an extraordinary scene to any kid who paused long enough in his frenzied candy harvest to look around. For one night a year, the streets belonged entirely to us — not just the broken-home second-floor dead-enders like Bill and me, but every kid in town. For a few precious hours, all kids were not just created equal. We were in charge! Kids cavorted brazenly in the middle of the street, raggedly costumed and flamboyant in twos, and threes, gangs of six. We yelled. We sang. We capered and cussed.

Now and then, we might spot a mom or dad leading door-to-door a toddler — in an adorable hand-sewn angel outfit or decked out as a pintsize dracula. But these saccharine family tableaux were unwelcome oddities. All Hallows Eve was one night when grownups in public were out of place and tolerated grudgingly. If we saw a kid as old as six still leashed to an adult, we’d soak the the little sissy with a rain of derision. We even dared, behind our masks, to taunt the parent.

“You’re too old for Halloween, you old fart!” Dougie would yell from  inside his pumpkinhead.

“Hey, lady! Go home and bake some damn cookies!”

Saying “fart” and “damn” to an adult was something a kid could do only on Halloween. And even then, only a certain breed of kid.

We were that breed. Well, Danny and Bobby, Dougie and Koscal were, and sometimes brother Bill. Me? I was a model of decorum. I never said anything I might have to confess to Father Mulligan.

We kept up a brakneck pace for the first hour and a half, then slowed enough that we could sing the entire Blatz beer single in six-part disharmony without gasping for breath at the end… “Blatz is Milwaukee’s fi-inest beer.”

By the time we’d done the Glendale loop, and crossed back over the railroad tracks and hit the long lucrative strip of Jackson Street, we were footsore and trudging. We dropped Dougie on Pearl before doing Lake Street. After zigzagging up a half-dozen blocks of Hollister, Danny and Bobby peeled off, then Koscal. Bill and I were by ourselves when we crossed over McLean toward our apartment.

We didn’t bother to trick-or-treat. It was just past nine p.m. and we were sated. One more filling-yanking Heath Bar held little appeal. Except, when we saw an apple some kid had dropped from his bag, Bill and I both went for it. We knocked it around ’til we saw why the kid had discarded it — a big brown rotten spot. Bill lost interest, but I grabbed the apple and gave it a mighty fling. We watched it soar into the glow of a streetlight and then plummet down, right onto the hood of a late-model Chevy Bel Air. The apple split into twenty gooshy pieces with a clang that echoed up the block and lit, almost instantly, two or three porch lights. Bill and I took off, clumsily, weighted down by four sugarplum-swollen pillowcases. We covered a block, limping and huffing, and looked back. No one had bothered to step outside.

The Chevy’s owner would discover his mess in the morning and probably shrug it off. It was Halloween, after all.

Bill and I slowed to a crawl ’til we made it home.