Modernize Halloween? Too Frightful
There really is something special about Halloween, and the season’s dark charms do not end with childhood.
Even amid the pressures bearing down upon the modern man and woman, it is the rare individual who doesn’t respond to the wisps of clouds sliding across the full moon, the chilled wine of the autumn air inhaled deeply into the lungs, the layers of shadows that pool darker and deeper the further you get from the streetlight.
Why not admit to these feelings, indeed why not celebrate them?
Why not crank Halloween up a few notches and modernize the tradition so that grown men and women go door to door proclaiming ‘trick or treat!’ before heading to the next house down?
It’s best not to get carried away though. There may be good reason why this notion has never taken off.
The whole process may prove too scary for many of us.
I do not say sitting on the front porch with our pots of candy that we will jump like startled deer at the first sight of a skeleton or a member of the walking dead cheerleading team or The Wolfman or Frankenstein’s monster.
These are the frights of childhood and are easily managed.
The modern fright cuts much closer to the bone.
Take this harmless-looking fellow in a nice suit coming up the drive. He is carrying an official letter and after pausing and peering to make sure he has the right address, he looks up at you, beaming.
“Congratulations, sir! I am here to inform you that your daughter has been accepted to Harvard or Princeton or The London School of Economics or MIT or some other damn school that costs per day what you paid for your first house. I know I have made you a very happy man!” He waves the letter like it is something good and not a summons of doom.
You stand there with a smile frozen on your face. A shiver of frank terror runs through your nervous system, like a prey on the savannah who just now is starting to get the feeling that he is the entrée on tonight’s dinner for a pack of some ferocious beasts or other.
The smile on the face of this man in the driveway, isn’t there something ghastly about it too? Doesn’t it make you shiver, this kind of demonic cheerfulness? He must be a madman.
You thought the kid was joking when she said she was going to send her SATs to these schools! You’re proud of her and all that, but you considered that you had covered the situation nicely when you drove her by the local community college and told her solemnly that you had always dreamed about sending her here, to your alma mater, and after a lifetime of saving it was now within reach.
You guess she didn’t take the bait. You should have known when she said, “Oh, Daddy, don’t be a silly I’ll just send my scores around to all the school for a lark.”
For a lark.
The word rings in your ear like the tolling of a bell of doom.
You wonder as you stand there looking at this ghoulishly happy man just how many shifts a day the human body can work, and determine first thing in the morning to scout out the prime panhandling locations in town.
As it turns out, you don’t have time to think much further than that, for that cute young couple from down the street is coming up the driveway, arm in arm.
The very picture of nice young couple! He is a veterinarian and she is an orthodontist, one of those marital pairings of high-end professionals you see on this block. It’s nice to see young people succeeding.
In the spirit of the night they are still in their professional garb, he in his white coat, she with one of those paper masks that cover the mouth to prevent the spreading of germs.
They are a relief to see after the college admissions guy, who has gone to the next house down. You see Fred Chambers chatting with him on his front porch and clawing madly at the air as though driven insane. His oldest son Douglas must have gotten accepted to University of Chicago.
“Nedra! Justin! I see you’ve come in costume!”
“No costume,” says Justin solemnly, “we have some serious business to discuss, Hank.”
“Well, it’s Halloween night, maybe come the morning we can talk about….”
“It’s about your dog,” interjects Nedra flatly. “He needs braces.”
You can’t quite take this in.
“My dog needs what?”
“Your dog needs braces. On his teeth. To straighten his smile,” she says, making it as plain as it can possibly be made.
Your dog needs braces? You don’t give four minutes of attention a day to the mutt, much less to his teeth. ‘Whatever,’ would just about sum up your attitude to your dog’s teeth.
“That’s nice of you to think of us, but I think we’ll be perfectly fine just going along like we have always…”
Justin breaks in. His tone now is a bit colder, in fact, he has the same tone that you imagine one of the more intense characters in the Edgar Allen Poe stories might use while explaining why exactly it is he had a dead guy buried under the floorboards of his living room and how the only thing he doesn’t like about the situation is how his heart, the dead guy’s, not the narrator’s, keeps beating like a tom-tom.
“You know how nuts the little lady is about that dog, Hank. She’d do anything for it, wouldn’t you say? You remember the yak rawhide toys she ordered from the store, right? Pre-chewed by native Sherpas who jawed away on the stuff in the shadow of Everest to soften it and whose family had done this whacked-out chewing thing for generations? Just for your dog? That set you back a cool three hundred dollars. For some stupid chew toys? You remember that, don’t you, Hank? And do you remember that you just bit your lip and thought of what a good wife she was, and just took the hit? Just took the hit like a man? Wait till she hears that her dog’s teeth aren’t straight, she’ll be frantic. Don’t be a hero, Hank.. Take the hit again.”
“I appreciate your concern and all, but I really don’t think…”
“OK, Hank, have it your way.” You hadn’t known that cute little Nedra could speak in such a deadly, unearthly voice. She always seemed so nice! “Now your cat needs braces too.”
“I have a cat?” you stutter out.
She checks her records. “Two cats in fact. Turns out they both need braces.” She sighs ominously. “I can keep going all night, Hank. All night. Once we talk to the little lady, Hank, we’ll have your goldfish in braces. Just give in, just give in.”
You scream a little bit, quietly, well, not that quietly apparently, for Marge across the street looks up and right at you, and you say, or better put, sob, “All right, all right, put the stupid braces on the stupid dog.”
“And cats,” reminds Nedra.
“And cats,” you croak in a defeated voice.
You think to yourself that there were lines of work that you had always considered going into, say, counterfeiting, or safe-cracking, or embezzling, and now might be the time to explore your next career. You wonder if they offer classes at the local junior college in these fine professions.
Well, thinking of your good old and very cheap junior college, that just gets you thinking about Harvard or Princeton or all those other stupid schools, and sets off a fresh round of shrieking.
And then they seem to swarm upon your driveway.
Here is the guy from your high school class, trust me, just a guy, just a guy! who got it into his head that there was money to be made by renting out the empty space in people’s glove compartments of their cars, so that as you are driving around you are also speeding the flow of international commerce by carrying single sticks of gum, and antacid tablets, and bottles of contact solution, and jars of baby food as you go, and there’s this app where you swipe left or swipe right to see who exactly you meet along your way might need a stick of gum and contact solution or jars of baby food and what-not, and then the algorithm makes a match and you meet at a central spot and make the exchange, whereby he is now carrying the contact solution in his glove compartment that you had been carrying and you are now carrying the old can of soda that he had been carrying up until that point, and then, driving away, you swipe the app again to see who might need the old can of soda.
It is the digital economy in supercharged action and is an absolutely ludicrous thing for a set of misfit ill-bred orangutans to do much less human beings, but here we all are, doing it at every chance, here we all are, Glove.Co it is called, and it has made this guy, I’m back to him, the guy from high school, billions, absolute billions. Decided to monetize the empty space in the world’s glove compartments. Sheesh.
“Hi, Hank!” he says, “say, I misplaced one of my Mazerati Formula 1 spaceships in an inattentive moment, you haven’t seen it, have you? Here, let me light some ten thousand dollar bills and we can look for it in your shantytown backyard.”
Oh, and then there’s the two auto mechanics looking at a diagnostic readout of what all is wrong with your car, shaking their heads dolefully. They always travel in pairs you know, and they are having a discussion now as to which will break the news to you and which will catch you when you faint. They creep up the walkway, softly wailing like spirits from the Greek underworld, ‘It’s your electrical system! It’s your electrical system!” There names, you see now, are stitched into the front of their work shirts. “Ernie,” and “Brad.” You don’t want to get dragged down to Automotive Hell by two guys named Ernie and Brad, you wanted it to be more special than that, but, boy, it looks like that is exactly what is going to happen here.
Brushing past these two is a fellow who identifies himself as someone from the Social Security Office.
You think he is there to let you know what your monthly benefits are going to be once you escape the rate race of full employment, but no, he just wanted to inform you that due to your answering ‘yes’ on the fourteenth question on page eight when you filled out your Social Security form back when you were eight or nine, due to you answering ‘yes’ to that question it turns out that not only will you not be receiving benefits once you retire, but in fact, you are obliged to send a monthly check in that amount made out to the Social Security Office itself.
The guy holds up the form, now crumbling with age, and points to your childish scrawl, “See? See right here? See, you said so right here, that’s what you agreed to. See?”
You want to take up the issue with him but you don’t have time because here comes the Demon Roofer and the Barbecue Madman and the Dawnest Before the Dark Guy who specializes in looming disasters that befall guys just like you, or to be more specific, you, you yourself, and well, they just go on and on.
They are lined up down the street now, The Lunatic Boss, The Nutrition Dictator, The Sorrowful Lawn Guy, The TED Talk Guy, The Most Unimpressed Man in the World…but wait, who is this standing patiently in line?
Oh, it’s The Utter Rationalist whose demeanor is generally one of complete puzzlement and it is usually directed solely at you.
He has asked you, it seems, what it was you majored in in college and when you tell him what it was he takes a second to clear his head and then says, “but what in the world did you think that was going to do for you?”
Though you aren’t sure yourself what your thinking was at the time, you don’t like his attitude so you tell him that a lot of people would be proud to be where you are today and again he shakes his head and looks at you all confused, “but why would that be?” It seems to baffle him that you exist at all. He shakes his head some more.
These and others, it seems they have gathered and descended upon you, as ghouls are said to do when they have spotted a helpless victim and communicated the fact across the ghoulish network, and they just can’t wait to get up to the porch and say their piece.
It is hard enough on a person to manage these characters when they pop up at random times during the course of the busy day, but it is scary as all get-out when they stack up like this.
No, no, far better to face the monsters we know, the Frankenstein creation, the werewolf, the vampire, the ghost. They are far easier on the modern nervous system.
