Halloween 2023

Halloween 2023

The night before I’d told Dave I wouldn’t see him tomorrow since I was taking off for Halloween.

He asked why.

“You going to a party?”

“Nah,” I said. “I like to be home to pass out candy to the kids.”

He looked at me as if I’d just dropped my pants.

So I said, “You remember getting candy as I kid. It was awesome, right? Well, I figure on Halloween it’s my turn to give back.”

So I took a night off work for Halloween.

But – the day before – the same day as I’d spoken with Dave, the old man had called. He wanted to know when we could do something together, again.

I told him how I was taking the next day off. I said we could do something in the afternoon, but I needed to be home by 6 p.m. to pass our candy.

He asked if we could go out to eat. I agreed. We set a time.

He said maybe we could go to Steak ‘n Shake since it doesn’t cost me much money. I said we could do that, or go to the Chinese buffet where the pretty Asian girl that works there always dotes on him like a baby, which the old man finds delightful. I’m always amazed at her. She presumptuously sits right at our table and does stuff like wipes his mouth when he needs it and tucks a napkin down the front of his shirt so he can wear it like a bib. Meanwhile, I’ll sit there stupidly slurping egg drop soup. I always imagine she thinks I’m a terrible companion to the old man. There she is, attending to him like family, when he’s really a stranger, while I sit across the table in my gluttonous obliviousness. I dunno, maybe it’s a cultural thing. Or, maybe it’s personal. I’ve always wondered.

So the next day I picked up the old man and asked him if he’d decided where he wanted to go.

He asked, “Do you have any coupons?”

I knew what that meant.

“You want Long John Silvers?”

“Could we? If you got coupons.”

“Just so happens I just got the mail. Let me check.”

I’d thrown the mail in the back seat to look at it later. There was the magazine of coupons. I flipped through the magazine and there was a coupon for Long John Silvers.

I tossed the magazine in his lap.

“There you go,” I said.

“I know it’s expensive,” he said.

“Well, we haven’t been there in a long time. It’ll be okay.”

He looked at the coupons.

“We can do the one for 8 dollars.”

“But the family one’s the best deal,” I said.

“It’s 25 dollars,” he said.

With drinks and all the other shit, it always comes to even more.

But I know he likes the family deal cause there’s always enough left for him to take home.

“It’s alright,” I said.

“We’ll do something cheaper next time.”

“Yeah,” I said.

So we went to Long John Silvers. And the bill came to $35. A bit steep, but I thought, “Fuck it,” since I’m sometimes short-tempered with him and I always regret it later. Today, I’d decided, I was gonna try really hard to make up for sometimes being irritable with him.

As we sat and ate away at our grease-soaked mound of a meal, he went on, as he always does, about the state of his life and his dream of still winning the Lotto. He went on and on about all he was gonna do with all those millions, not only for himself but for me too, as well as society at large. All that good stuff, sprinkled in with how he was gonna use a bit of that money to make his daughter’s life a living hell, the same way she’d made his.

He concluded it with, “My life’s been nothing but bad luck, but the Lotto would make it all better.”

I’d heard it all a thousand times. But I’d made that promise to myself to be nice, so I took things gently.

I said, “Sometimes you gotta make your own luck, you know.”

He said, “There ain’t no way of hitting the lottery other than luck.”

I said, “Maybe your aspirations have been too high.”

He, too, looked at me as if I’d just dropped my pants.

“Sure, winning the Lotto’s better than being poor. But so is living in comfort. Simple comfort.”

“Like you,” he said. “You live comfortably.”

“I shouldn’t complain,” I said. “But, in a lot of ways, like a lot of people, I made my own luck. I made some decent choices about what kinda work I wanted to do. And I stuck with it. And I’ve saved some money instead of blowing it all on stupid stuff.”

“So now you live in comfort,” he said. “Unlike me. I ain’t got nothing to show for my life.”

“I made a lot of my own luck,” I said. “By looking at what other people did, and following their lead. My aspirations were reasonable, not outlandish.”

“Well, I’ve always been a dreamer,” he said.

“Everybody needs to dream,” I said. “But they can’t be a bunch of pipe dreams. Living on pipe dreams leads to nowhere.”

“Then I guess mine were all pipe dreams,” he said.

I asked, “Besides winning the Lotto, what were your dreams?”

“You know,” he said. “I always wanted to be a famous actor.”

“But you never went to Hollywood. And you never took an acting lesson. So how was that supposed to happen?”

“I dunno. But you got a good life. You’re really lucky.”

“I’m not lucky. I don’t win shit. I just come up with a plan for what I want, and I try to get it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But, when it hasn’t, I didn’t give up. I made another goal and came up with another plan. Shit, I’ve probably failed more times than I’ve succeeded. So there’s not much luck in that.”

I paused.

“It’s sorta like doing all sorts of things to figure out what you’re good at. Then, when you find it, you stick with it, even if it’s not glamorous. Sometimes you gotta accept that you weren’t meant for a life of fame, fortune and riches.”

“I envy you,” he said.

“Well, it isn’t all roses. My luck with women’s never been great.”

“But you’ve had some nice ones.”

“Yeah. But I lost them all, too. So there’s not much luck in that. In fact, instead of passing it off as bad luck, I gotta admit I did a lot of things wrong. That’s a fact.”

“Like what?”

“I got involved with some women I wasn’t good for. Or, they weren’t good for me. Or both. Lying to myself about myself, which means I was lying to them too. I’m sure I’ve been a lemon to some women. And some were lemons to me.”

I was afraid of baiting the old man into telling me again about his second wife and how he’d wanted to kill her for cheating on him. The same wife he never had sex with before or during their brief marriage.

I knew I’d either have to keep silent in order to keep the day’s promise to myself. Or, be gentle by suggesting that the marriage’s failure wasn’t so much due to bad luck as a lack of intuition or maybe even intelligence on his part.

Thankfully, the subject of his sexless second marriage never arose.

We finished our meal. He said, if I had time, he’d like to stop at Goodwill. He had 10 dollars at home and maybe he could use it to buy a DVD or two. Plus, he likes looking at the electronics.

So we went to Goodwill. Going in, we passed the hat rack, which had a cowboy hat hanging on it. I took it off the rack and told the old man, jokingly, it’s what he needed.

“I like it,” he said.

“You want it?”

He needed a cowboy had like I need a second cock. But I figured, whatever, I was committed to being nice, at least for one full day.

“If it’s not too much, I’d like it. I got 10 dollars at home. You pay for it and I’ll pay you back.”

I put the cowboy hat in his lap and pushed him in his wheelchair over to the DVDs.

“You can look while I go through the clothes,” I said.

In no time, I could hear him on the other side of the store talking to the cashier about his DVD collection. He talks about wanting to go to Goodwill to look around, but he’d really rather talk to anybody who’ll listen about anything he wants to talk about. It’s a bit frustrating, but I get it. He’s old. He’s alone. He needs to talk. He needs to connect. He needs to feel human, so I let it go.

I found a shirt. I was ready to leave. He’d found 2 DVDs and he still had the cowboy hat. So we went to ring out and I asked if he was still sure about the cowboy hat. He said he was, so I put it on his head.

I said, “Well, it looks pretty good. I don’t blame you.”

The cashier – the one he’d been talking with – said, “You said you wanted to be like Clint Eastwood.”

I said, “She’s only known you 5 minutes and she knows all about you.”

I doubted she knew about the Lotto….yet. If he’d had 5 more minutes, she’d probably have known all about that too.

I took him home. He wanted me to wait while he got the 10 dollars from his safe. He keeps what little he has locked away to keep his junkie granddaughter’s girlfriend from stealing it. His daughter had gotten him the mini safe for Christmas. Since he owns nothing but junk, I’d asked what he needed it for and what he keeps in it. At the time, he told me, “My money. And my fake Rolex. And my homemade porno tapes.”

I’d said, “You’re daughter’s gonna love finding those someday.”

He’d told me she already knew about them.

I told him to not worry about the money for now. I wanted to get home. I said I’d get it next time. I imagined by next time, he’d forget, which would be fine.

I got home and took a nap. An hour later I woke and got ready for the kids. The mob comes in the first hour, from 6 to 7.

I set up outside beside my glowing, blow mold ghost.

I love Halloween. There’s such a purity and innocence to the children’s excitement.

I sat outside with the bowls of candy.

I saw Michael Meyers and princesses and doctors and dinosaurs and little kids dressed as cartoon characters I’m too old to recognize. If I had kids or grandkids, I might, but I don’t.

I watched as a toddler in an animal suit wavered between a gallop and a spill on the concrete, trotting between the driveways where the neighbors passed out the candy. Sorta like an entranced, stumbling drunkard racing for a free drink.

It made me smile.

I thought, “It doesn’t last long.”

Then I wondered what we, as adults, might enjoy as much as these kids and all that free candy. What could we do for ourselves to give one another such joy.

I thought of a night of free sex. Free money. Even better, maybe, free love. Free consolations to our fragile egos. Free assurances from our nameless neighbors that, even though we fail, we’re still alright.

Imagine it, one night in which we go from house to house, getting a tiny bit of what we need with nothing asked in return.

Imagine it, going door to door, costumed to remain anonymous. Masked to conceal our shame or embarrassment while a friendly neighbor offers us whatever slight condolence or reassurance we may need.

What a pipe dream.

Anyway, I sat there in the cold, my left foot aching and both feet freezing. Knowing that I’d be going inside shortly to a leaking toilet I had to worry about. And knowing, before the end of the night, I’d wrestle with the inner turmoil of never knowing if I’m treating the woman I once loved the way she wants or deserves to be treated.

Yeah, just like those kids going back to school in the morning. the rapture from their innocence and joy only lasts a few hours. But, at least in that brief time, a lot of things felt right.