Halloween

Not so spooky stories.

I love fall, I hate Halloween.

Come at me. I don’t care, as long as you’re not wearing a Jason mask with a knife in your hand, fake or otherwise.

I don’t want to be scared ever. Horror movies are so not my jam. I would rather watch two hundred hours of someone making jam over a scary movie. Does this make me uncool? Fuck if I care. Blood and guts are meant to stay neatly tucked inside one’s body, thank you very much.

However, Halloween is a vehicle for dressing up; this I can get on board with.

Nothing scary, of course.

Every year as a child I went as some variation of “Fairy Princess.” It was the late eighties and my dream was to have a store bought Barbie costume, which consisted of a cheap polyester “satin” dress of some sort and a horrific looking plastic Barbie mask. The pink Barbie high heels would have to be purchased separately.

Despite my desperation for this outfit, my evil mother refused store bought and handmade all our costumes with tender love and care.

When I imagine five-year-old Candy, begrudgingly slipping into her beautiful couture tulle gown, strewn with glitter and jewels that mother had spent hours hand sewing, all I can picture is Debbie from Addam’s Family Values.

The scene where she’s about to electrocute the entire Addam’s family while she’s playing them a slideshow of her traumatic childhood.

“All I ever wanted was a Ballerina Barbie. In her pretty pink tutu. My birthday. I was 10, and do you know what they got me? Malibu Barbie. That’s not what I wanted! That’s not who I was. I was a ballerina, graceful, delicate!”

I didn’t appreciate my mother’s “I can make that!” attitude then, but when my son was old enough to start choosing his own Halloween costumes, I knew what to do.

Off to Spirit Halloween we went.

“Look baby, you can be a Power Ranger, Darth Vader, or even Barbie. Everything we need comes in this plastic bag, on a hanger, ready to go. How easy is that?”

He looked up at me, his eyes wide and said the words I hoped to never hear out of his little mouth

“I want you to make my costume.”

I grabbed a Darth Vader outfit and shamefully walked up to the check-out.

Halloween morning arrived and he asked “Did you make me my costume yet?”

“What? You have a costume. Darth Vader.”

I was met with disappointed eyes.

“Please can you just make me something.”

If you recall from the Kimono I made in beauty school, my sewing skills are bleak. I convinced him (and myself) a ghost would be the ideal homemade costume for that year.

I got to work frantically outlining eyeholes on an old pillowcase. I cut a scalloped edge along the bottom. I may have even added some lace. A couple arm holes and we’d be good to go.

Watching my five-year-old son begrudgingly slip into what looked like a white cocktail dress with eyeholes, a panic washed over me.

He waddled to the mirror in his pencil skirt and adjusted himself to be able to see out of one of the crooked eye holes and asked

“Am I supposed to be a bride?”

Darth Vader and I trick-or-treated that year. It was the last time he wore a store bought costume.

Larry (father of said child, light of our lives, ex of my dreams) from that moment on committed to making our son the most elaborate Halloween costumes every year.

He’d spend months working on these creations. His whole house covered in scraps of foam, cardboard, craft paint, and hot glue. What started with an Optimus Prime truck that really transformed gave way to increasingly more complex costumes. The Predator, Iron Man, RoboCop, the list goes on.

Hours of fitting and refitting as our son grew faster than Larry could work.

Meticulously cutting templates for fabric and precision fastening parts together. His brain works different than mine, I like to eyeball things.

Every year when his masterpiece was done, our son would excitedly slip into his outfit and head off to our town’s local Comic-Con to collect his first place trophy in the costume contest.

Our child eventually aged out of dressing up. Larry looked at me solemnly last week and said “Comic-Con is this weekend.” His longing for what was felt palpable.

This morning in the car on the way to high school, my son looked at me and said “I might dress up this year, do you think we can make something?”

Halloween is tomorrow, for fucks sake.

In the years a yore when I would go to parties, I would always make my own costumes.

My days of dressing up and hooking up with men dressed as Vanilla Ice are done, but since I am my mother’s daughter, my Betty Boop costume that night was completely homespun.

JC (ex husb) loves to cosplay. Not only on Halloween, anytime really. When we were first dating he’d answer the door wearing a leopard print onesie and a blonde 80’s hair band wig, on a Tuesday.

One night while I was working late, my son who could have only been about three at the time, was crying “I miss mama!”

JC, who’d never been around kids before, left him crying in the room and went to his closet and got into full drag, including the 80’s hair band wig. JC pranced back into the room where he’d left my crying child and announced

“Mama’s home!”

His cries stopped, hitched, then turned into screams of horror looking at this wanna be Mrs. Doubtfire version of me.

My son tells this scary story often.

Another horrifying story that I am sure will be haunting him for the foreseeable future is one that happened a few days ago.

It was his best friend’s sixteenth birthday and after school my son asked if we could go to the mall and buy him some sort of “Sweet Sixteen” gag gift.

“Let’s look at Spencer’s Gifts.” I suggested, to which he reluctantly said

“Spencer’s?”

Here’s the thing, Spencer’s Gifts used to be a store full of humorous birthday supplies, over-the-hill crap, and whatnot.

The two of us looked around at the front of the store which was mainly racy Halloween costumes, Step Brothers “Boats ’N Hoes” t-shirts, and shot glasses with marijauna leaves on them.

I knew there had to be birthday stuff somewhere. I walked up to the teenager working behind the counter and asked. She promptly marched me to the back of the store and pointed.

Suddenly I had been transported into a Lover’s Package and while I am no prude, I didn’t expect to be looking for an “Old Fart” birthday card amongst rows and rows of dildos.

After a few minutes of searching for any semblance of a birthday section I gave up.

As I walked back to the front of the store, my son stood in the doorway, his eyes wide as saucers.

“I am ruined!” he said as I approached him.

“What is wrong with you?” I asked.

“Me?! Have you lost your damn mind? There were two boys from my high school in there!”

“And?” I asked, still confused to what his malfunction was.

“And?! They watched my mother walk up to the counter, ask for something specific, go back to the sex toy section, look around awhile, then announce loudly ‘There’s nothing here I want!’ and leave.”

“Ok well, yes. Now I can see how that might look like I have taken my son vibrator shopping with me, but just tell them the truth! We were looking for a gift for your friend.” I said in earnest.

“I will not tell them that. This is on you. I’m going to say ‘My mother is a maniac! She has an addiction and we are helping her seek treatment’.”

We walked in silence through the mall until I asked if he wanted to get an ice cream cone.

“Sure.”

Eventually, in my twenties, I got my dream of wearing a store bought Halloween costume.

Mandie (bff) and I planned on going to Seattle that Halloween and staying with my old roommate from when I had lived there a year before. To prepare to return to my old Fremont stomping grounds, I did what any twenty-something girl would do, I crash dieted.

I ordered NutriSystem.

Which was delivered to my house in a box that could fit a human inside. One month’s worth of shelf-stable tv-dinners essentially. Everything was low-calorie, dry, and disgusting.

When our Halloween weekend arrived I packed up my packets of food and away we went. Mandie had with her a sexy Snow White costume she bought, It was adorable. I decided since I didn’t have a store bought costume I wasn’t going out.

“It’s fine, you go. Have fun.”

I said as if that was a sane thing to say to your best friend who drove three hours to have a night out with you.

Listen, I was starving. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Mandie begged and pleaded with me to just wear anything I had and draw a cat face on or something. I wouldn’t bend.

The man who lived at the house we were staying in that night came out of his bedroom to offer us a solution.

“I have two Halloween costumes, you can have one and I’ll wear whichever one you don’t choose.” he said looking at me sweetly.

“One is a taco and the other one is bottle of Jack Daniel’s.”

I stared at him blankly as if to telepathically say to him “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

Before I could open my mouth, Mandie chimed in “I’ll be the bottle, Candy can wear my Snow White outfit.”

No true friend would allow such an act of selflessness occur, surely I would take one for the team that night.

But then I remembered the time Mandie made me give her back the coat she had let me borrow half-way through a freezing night out.

“Ok!” I said and slipped into Mandie’s Snow White dress.

I will never lie to you here (that’s a lie) but even without being on that terrible astronaut food diet, I can’t hold my liquor.

It wasn’t long after Mandie Jack Daniel’s and I waddled into the bar that I got cut off.

There are only a few, maybe three times, I can recall Mandie being big mad at me, this was one of them.

Her little face snarling through the hole of the bottleneck as the six-foot-six, three hundred pound bouncer dressed as Shrek took me by the arm and told me I had to leave.

“Please! I beg of you. My friend wore the Jack Daniel’s bottle and let me have the cute costume, I can’t make her leave now. I won’t drink anything else, I promise!” I pleaded to Shrek.

Surprisingly he showed me mercy.

“I can’t let you loose in the bar, but you can work the door with me tonight.”

I looked up at him, wide eyed, and nodded.

He picked me up and plopped me down on a stool and gave me the hand stamp.

While Shrek and I got to know each other over checking IDs and the peanuts he had rustled up behind the bar to feed me, Mandie in her Jack Daniel’s bottle got to live her best life at the bar that night.

Anyways, Happy Halloween.