TONIGHT IS NOT HALLOWEEN

Published Oct 30, 2023

Last night I attended a Halloween party in Montauk as a late to the Goa rave scene hippie babacool. French for hippie. The oldest man in the house. Richie Boy and his wife were costumed as a non-bald Uncle Festus from The Addams Family, and Sandy B was the sexist sorceress within the four walls. It was October 26.

Halloween has traditionally been celebrated on Oct. 31 for most of my life, but four years ago a Connecticut State Representative had floated an ill-conceived idea to reschedule the holiday to fall on a weekend.

"Halloween is fun night for the whole family, but not so much when you have to race home from work, get the kids ready for trick-or-treating, welcome the neighborhood children, and then try to get everyone to bed for an early school and work morning."

Both Democrats and Republicans lambasted his suggestion, which included trick-or-treating in daylight for safety's sake.

I also disagreed, but this year New Yorkers have already been sporting Halloween costumes for over a week.

Call me old-fashioned, but celebrating Halloween on any day other than October 31st is a sacrilege for Satanists and like-minded pagans. Yesterday a friend phoned that he was having a Frankenstein party a three nights early. We argued about the date, until Shannon explained Halloween's Celtic origin as Samhain, which marked the division of the year into halves of light and dark when the otherworld was nearest reality.

“It was a night of fire to cleanse the world.” I knew my Irish heritage. My mother’s family came from the West of Ireland.

"And they carved turnips, not pumpkins," Shannon stated with authority. His fiancee Charlotta was smart and he had mined Google's vast abyss of useless knowledge to impress the German artist.

"So the band should have been Smashing Turnips." The Chicago alternative band had been big in the 90s. "Plus it's hard to carve the Jack 'O Lanterns with eyes and mouth on a turnip.”

"I almost sliced off my thumb splitting a turnip two years ago."

"And hollow pumpkins smash easier."

"Not if you carve smaller eyes and mouths on a pumpkin."

"Why?"

"Because the pumpkin will rot within a day, if the holes are too big." I had also been researching 'pumpkin soup' on the Internet. Getting smart didn't take much of an effort these days. Neither did getting stupid. "What are you going as this year?"

"Some kind of monster." Charlotta was hosting a Halloween party on the right night at Chez Oskar on Malcolm X Boulevard. Old Yellah believed in tradition and so did Shannon. "The first Halloween in America was supposedly in 1911. Someplace in hockey-puck land."

"Canada?"

"Yep."

"Then Happy Hallowmas." My Halloweens dated back to 1958 to Falmouth Foresides, Maine, when my mother warned that I couldn't go out 'trick or treating' unless I finished my beets.

I had never eaten beets. Most of our vegetables during the colder seasons came from cans. Mushy peas, sweet corn, flabby asparagus. Never beets, but now canned beets paved the path to chocolate paradise. I poured a glass of milk to wash down the purple vegetables. My older brother in his pirate outfit watched my struggle. I wore a skeleton costume. My younger sister was dressed as a ghoul. Gina and Frunk finished their beets. They actually liked them.

"What are you waiting for?" asked my brother. "We're missing out on all the good chocolate."

"Nothing."

I put the first sliced beet in my mouth. My tongue skated around the jellied vegetable. The bittersweet chunk tasted twenty years old. I swallowed it whole. My throat constricted on the unchewed beet's passage toy belly, but I got it down.

Only two more to go.

"No more milk." My older brother pulled away the half-filled glass. He had a date with Sandy, the girl next door. The five-year-old had dressed in white up as a good witch.

My best friend Chaney was going as a clown. His sweetheart's costume was that of a ballerina. I had asked Kathy Burns to walk the rounds with me. She had decided to accompany Jimmy Fox. They were dressing as Tarzan and Jane. I didn’t have a date, but I would have chocolate, if I ate the beets.

I stuck the fork in the second beet slice and stuffed it deep into my mouth. Maybe too deep, because I gagged on it. My father's clapped my back and the beet slice back onto my plate. My mother was not amused by my upchuck.

"Stop playing with your food."

"I'm not playing."

"You better not be. There are starving people in China."

Her family had gone through the Depression. Food on the plate was meant for your stomach. This was 1958. Eisenhower was President. America was a Land of Plenty. The beets belonged in the trash, not in our house. Two slices took two minutes to stuff down my throat.

"No." They came from a can and I vowed never to eat beets again.

After kissing my mother, I ran around to the back of our house and threw up the beets.

Only one thing would get rid of the taste.

I hit every house in our neighborhood for candy and chocolate. My bag bulged with treats. My friends and older brother had done no tricks. Chaney had kissed Sandy on the cheek.

Reaching my house, I climbed upstairs to my shared bedroom and stuffed four Baby Ruths in my mouth. I chewed them into mush and they sluiced down my esophagus into my stomach. The combination of chocolate and beets played havoc with a six-year-old's constitution. I ran into the bathroom to empty my belly into the toilet.

The color of my upchuck was purple.

I drank a glass of water and returned to my bedroom. My brother was separating his candy into groups. I picked up a Baby Ruth and chewed it a little more slowly than the first four. It was not a beet or a turnip or a pumpkin or a kiss from Kathy Burns.

It was sweet chocolate.

And there was plenty of it.

As there will be forever as long as Halloween is celebrated on October 31.