There was a time in my life when Halloween meant more than just bobbing for apples injected with Everclear and hooking up with the girl dressed like "Baby" Spice. It meant dressing up like a woman without my mom putting me in therapy again. Halloween was a time of innocence, greed and materialism, based on false identities and mass consumption-it was the American dream! What happened to that dream? Some blame the guy two houses down who spiked his Tootsy Rolls with PCP, causing 15 Peter Pans, Supermen and Captain Planets to leap-tights and all-out of their second story windows. Personally, I blame "Reaganomics." I don't even know what that means.
I can still remember those brisk October nights of my youth (who am I kidding? two years ago) when, armed with a pillow case, a 10-year-old set of moldy Dracula teeth, six eggs and some Tums, I would set out for a night of ravenous begging and binging. I used to approach trick-or-treating like a science. There was a definite hierarchy in the Halloween candy world, and I wasn't gonna get stuck with Starburst and Mounds for the next six months.
When I was a young lad, my friends and I would have the whole neighborhood mapped out by candy distribution. The maps were color-coded to better organize a plan of attack and maximize candy volume.
Houses marked with red were the "lazy" Halloween people; they would have to be hit first. You know these idiots, the ones who just plopped a box full of Sweetarts outside their door with a penciled sign reading, "Please take one." Take one my ass! Take one whole box and pee on their cat is more like it!
The houses in purple were next, we called them "Desperation" houses. These were off-the-beaten-path type places almost always inhabited by some death's-door wrinkled chick who hasn't seen her grandkids in 10 years and would give her liver for some attention. Some of these batty babes would make great homemade stuff like fresh caramel apples (with or without razor blades, depending on whether they took their medication) and tooth-crackin' peanut brittle by the pound. If you could talk about the cyst on their large intestine for five minutes you just might walk away with enough candy to feed Oprah and Roseanne for two whole days! If you're gonna try this at home, remember not to wear a very scary costume, because you don't want a cardiac arrest on your hands. Nothing slows trick-or-treating down like burying a granny corpse. Believe me, I know.
Next in line were the chocolate bar houses, marked appropriately in rich, creamy brown. Within this category, there were necessary "size subdivisions." First were the few, the proud, the "King-size." These people were so damn nice that it fills my heart with "Almond" joy just thinking about them. Such choco-generosity almost makes me believe in God; or at least some type of magical cocoa god who lives on Mars, or somewhere on the far end of the Milky Way, where the trees are filled with nougat, and life is "packed with peanuts" up the wazoo.
But I digress. Next were the "normal-size" people, who still earn my respect, but rarely bring me to tears. Then we have the "fun-size" jerks. Fun, shmun. What's so fun about a candy portion that wouldn't satisfy the hunger of a protozoa? But these people were freakin' saints compared to the lowest form of Halloween scum, the "bite-size" bastards. Not only are these little remnants of candy smaller than stuff I've picked from my teeth, but the people passing them off as treats always had the nerve to say, "Just take two, please."
"How 'bout I take 12 and egg your car until it has the cholesterol level of Marlon Brando!" The sugar used to make me a little edgy.
Last on our list were the black houses. These were the penny people, the orange drink people, the bizarre foreign candy that tastes like squid people, the born-again Christian pamphlet people and the infamous black licorice people. I'm convinced that these individuals had never been children.
As we headed home to trade and swap with siblings, we took careful note of the houses with their lights off, those conspicuous cop-outs who were conveniently absent at 6 p.m. on Halloween. From this list we would calculate exactly how much dog crap, paper bags and lighter fluid to get for next year's Devil's night.
Sometimes DISCO STU feels like a nut, sometimes he don't.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.