10.31.11

Halloween on Alta Dr. meant you had to hit at least three houses - Roger's, Janette's, and Jo's. The holiday was a big event for our neighborhood and for the surrounding neighborhoods, my brothers and friends and I filling pillow cases to the brim with a better catch every year - the blue and red and silver fish flopping and jostling their paper fins as they struggled for breath - ultimately giving up their chocolate and nougat ghosts to greedy costumed fishermen.

Roger's house was stage-right, dark and dismal. As you approached along the driveway, you could just barely see a table on the porch. Closer and there was a bowl of candy on the table. A simple setup, novel, but there was, of course, a sickening twist.

 ***

Roger's daughter was an acquaintance of mine at school and the victim of one of the first terrible injustices I can remember. We were graduating Junior High School together, an exciting time. I remember one day walking to the bus and watching a couple kissing passionately, on another day I observed a boy throw up, on another I heard whispers of "that one redhead" being raped, and there were always dirty stories of dirty videos, lingo, slang, new vocabularies that had to be learned quickly on penalty of ostracization, on another day there was my first girlfriend giggling with nameless cohorts, on another a fear of wetting my pants, on another a fear of someone noticing the awkward angle of my pants due to the quintessentially pre-teen concentrations of blood that frustrated me to no end in the nature of their volatile, seemingly random occurrences; "random" in the current context being synonymous with embarrassment and thus, death - all these memories floating in the estuary of pubescent emotion and imagination where nervous feet still prepare to board the bus. It is like some migratory settlement, some open market of the newest signals, symbols of confidence being exhibited by frantic-eyed performers, their audiences simultaneously dazed in awful rapture and secretly plotting their individual means of perfect mimicry. That was the world of the bus.

At the end of eighth grade I asked Roger's daughter to sign my yearbook. As she was doing so, a tall, muscular boy named Brandon approached us. He insulted her, she defended, and he insulted her again before leaving us, my yearbook still in her hand. She finished writing her sweet congratulations and best wishes; she handed me back the yearbook and walked away weeping.

***

Roger's porch was lit by a solitary black light, casting unearthly shadows of perfect terror. And there, in the middle of the table, on a silver platter, was Roger's head, pale and bloody. "Take one please; only one piece of candy," the head would say in a hallow voice, as though its vocal chords were no match for the undead decay creeping up slowly from the empty veins at the neck. Roger was always just seconds from the guillotine, freshly lulling open his tired eyes to observe the world as if for the last time; each child the son or daughter of some French revolutionary, screaming as a parent chuckled, delighted at the memory of Her Majesty The Blade.

Stage-left was Jo's house. No twists here, only the most finely crafted jack-o-lanterns I have ever seen.

***

Jo was one of my dearest childhood friends and, to the best of my knowledge, is still one of the best artists of all time, ever. I was friends too with Chris and Kevin, but this latter friendship was much more about looking up sexual words in the dictionary, trying to figure out what a condom was, and getting caught repeatedly looking at Playboy magazines whilst (to the grave, no pun intended) swearing that they were only the latest issues of Sports Illustrated.

But Jo's friendship was much more meaningful, we would draw or paint together in her garage and talk. She loved Greenday and mohawks, she showed me once a model of a M*A*S*H helicopter she had made, she showed me her art, we often rollerbladed together.

At one point Jo owned a pair of large toads. One day we were in the garage observing the toads - one was sitting on top of the other. "I think they're mating," I said. That was my only awkward moment with Jo.

One summer Jo came back from school to visit. She had a purple mohawk and piercings. She came over to our house and told our family about her new adventures, we laughed at her stories (somehow a bumblebee had once gotten caught in her mohawk) and were excited for Jo, we loved her, I loved her.

***

Each pumpkin on the walkway leading up to Jo's front door was a brilliant work of art. There were symbols or scenes, witches, beasts, dragons, everything - a museum made mausoleum, the artwork displayed in creeping beauty to visitors with images of Roger's severed head still fresh in their minds. At the door there was usually only a simple bowl; that's just how Jo's family was, a bit reclusive, a bit mysterious. I would never enter the kitchen or living room of that house until years later, when Jo and her family had long since stopped curating the eery walkway.

Across the street was Janette's house, the piéce de résistance. Even before you approached the house, even before you approached the cul-de-sac, you knew about Janette, the witch, her wailing cackle piercing the night at regular intervals, carrying on for miles. At Janette's there was no candy, there was something else: witch's brew. Her evil screeches billowing from her like the clouds from her gigantic black cauldron. The witch herself was disgusting, sitting, one would imagine, on a chair made from the bones of eaten children. As she poured you a drink, you wondered what frightening ingredients had been added, what subtle poisons might be found within. Long, green fingers handed you the styrofoam cup from which you drank your doom; Hawaiian Punch, devious.

Janette died of cancer a few years ago. Every Halloween I remember her, hear her witch's laugh resounding in my head, taste the brew. It tastes like childhood, it tastes like cool autumn nights when I didn't wish my mattress was an ice block before falling asleep. It tastes like something instantly lovable and instantly respected. That was Janette to me, stubborn, but friendly - powerful in personality and sweet in understanding. Dedicated to community and neighborhood and family, a mover, and the finest screamer I have ever heard. No witch I have met comes close. Halloween isn't the same without Janette, but at the same time, Halloween couldn't be what it is to me without her.