Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Halloween Fallout

By Bob Wire, 11-01-10

	You gotta love a good parallelepiped-based costume. Speaker, Maddie C., Lida C. and Rusty get ready to get their candy on.

Bowl of candy by the door, check. Six pack of Red Hook ESB in the reefer, check. The Big Lebowski in the DVD player. Check. Red contact lenses for the dog. Check. Bring it, Halloween.

I’m still suffering from a tremendous headache this morning, and it has nothing to do with the Red Hook. Both Rusty and Speaker designed costumes out of cardboard boxes this year, and they required several cans of spray paint. Or as we used to call it in the sign biz, the Norweigian Airbrush.

With damp weather and temperatures hovering in the 40’s, we decided to paint their boxes (hers a vending machine, his a Rubik’s cube) in the heated garage. After 15 minutes we had to open the doors, heater be damned. The fumes were so bad we were getting headaches and dizzy spells. We tried to fend them off by scarfing box after box of Hot Tamales, but it didn’t seem to help. Unfortunately, since we’d waited until the last minute to make these costumes, there was no changing course. At one point I went into the bathroom to blow my nose and it looked like a Jackson Pollack painting.

So we ate pizza in the kitchen while the costumes dried, and afterwards the kids trudged off with their friends, crop dusting the neighborhood with paint fumes. Their mom accompanied them, although Rusty and Speaker made her follow at a distance, so as not to embarrass them. (Let me just point out that they were the ones with their heads poking out the top of a cardboard box.) Barb complied, understandably wanting to tag along and share what might be their last trick or treat jaunt. Who knows? Kids lose interest in this thing at different ages.

As for me, I was happy to kick back on the couch and watch the Dude and Walter, and nurse my headache with some oat sodas. The doorbell rang every few minutes, of course, and I’d have to pause the movie so I could hand out candy to whatever team of urchins decided to ignore the NO SOLICITING sign I’d nailed to the jack o’lantern on the porch. Every Halloween I super glue a couple of rubber devil horns to my forehead, no matter what costume I’m wearing. This year I wore sweatpants and a paint-smeared t-shirt, so the horns WERE the costume. As I took a pull on my second bottle of Red Hook, the doorbell rang, setting the dog off on a frenzy of barking. His blood-red eyes glistened.

“Be right there!” I yelled. I paused the movie and trotted down the stairs to the door. I opened it, and there were two girls standing there. They looked to be about 14 or 15, a little ripe for trick or treating if you ask me. They held out their pillowcases without saying a word. “Yes?” I said.

“Trick or treat,” they mumbled in unison, like I’d asked them to say good morning to their home room teacher. I looked at the tall, slender girl on the left, who was wearing street clothes and a parka.

“What are you supposed to be?”

She sighed, and flipped a fur-lined hood up onto her head. “I’m an Eskimo.”

“Yeah? And I’m Justin Bieber. No costume, no candy. Beat it.”

The girls looked at each other in bewilderment. The Eskimo said, “we can egg your house.”

“We’ll TP your yard,” said her friend.

I shook my head, my hair brushing against my little rubber horns. “Sorry, that’s my policy. No costume, no candy. And Carly, if I find one speck of eggshell on my car or one square of toilet paper in my yard tomorrow, somebody’s dad is going to receive an anonymous phone call about how his underage daughter was seen smoking a cigarette and drinking a Zima outside the theater where she was watching the new Twilight movie this summer. Now scram.”

I closed the door and went back to my movie. My head was still pounding, and it felt like someone was driving a tent stake into my brain stem. I snapped the top off another long neck. The doorbell rang. The dog barked.

When I opened the door, there stood three small kids, two girls and a boy. He wore a Spiderman costume, and the girls were dressed in intricate, furry, glittery get-ups. I could only guess that they were some kind of simian princess fairies. “Trick or treat!” they yelled, thrusting their candy pails in front of them. Now that’s more like it.

“Hey, kids! Happy Halloween!” I dropped a handful of candy into each of their plastic, pumpkin-shaped buckets.

“Are those horns real?” asked Spiderman, who looked to be about seven.

“They sure are,” I said. I watched his eyes grow wide. “You want to touch them?” I leaned over and he reached a tentative hand toward my left horn. Just as he made contact, I cut loose with a horrible growl, and grabbed his arm. He let out a shriek, as did the two girls with him. They turned and ran down the steps to their waiting moms while I cackled madly. “Happy Halloween,” I called out, waving. The moms looked at each other and just shook their heads before moving on to the next house. Boy, some people just have no sense of humor.

I wound up giving out three bags of candy, and it was the busiest trick or treat night in recent memory. Probably the good weather, I thought. Plus, with Halloween being on Sunday this year, parents had all weekend to work on the costumes. Next year, if my kids decide that they’ll trick or treat again, I’m going to steer them away from the spray-painted cardboard costume. That is, if I’m able to recover from this year’s paint-related dain bramage.

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