lickhaven

[Much of this collection is repetitious, a pastiche of elements I’ve sent out over the years. (Hmm, this may be the first time I’ve ever used the word “pastiche” in print. I’m not much concerned with its meaning, just like the sound, though it could be the name of a dessert I wouldn’t particularly enjoy eating.)]

After dropping my daughter Morgan’s friend off in West Philly on a Halloween evening, I stopped at a light on Baltimore Ave. Suddenly there’s a slam against the driver’s door – and a gorilla staring in at me. I snapped alert and then started laughing. The teen backed off, removed his mask and waved, laughing too.

I snorted and howled and whooped the whole way home. I can’t think of another single incident that so thoroughly delighted me.

As a kid on Halloween, instead of being my usual terrified self, I could become a fool for a day: There were no rules, no one or nothing I could offend.” I don’t remember what I wore on Halloween at Hastings Ave. in Havertown, but after we moved to Philly, age 8, Mom made me a strange costume based on a Welsh tradition of the “button king.” Or so she claimed – I can’t find any reference to it online, so maybe she just made it up.

At any rate, she bought me a one-piece dungaree work outfit, kid-size, and sewed buttons in patterns all over it for my third-grade Halloween. The next year, she added yet more buttons. It was something special, and I liked it quite a bit, though no one understood what it was about.

At least once I dressed as a girl. Can’t imagine doing that at any other time as a kid – I would have been mortified to the point of sinking into the ground like Rumplstiltskin. I was a gypsy girl in a long, flowing, patterned skirt, rouged cheeks, eye makeup. That was the year some yob tried to steal my goodie bag. I warn’t no girl, held on like a pit bull and kept the bag.

I don’t remember other costumes from my Philly kidhood, though I know I fervently prowled the city streets for treats. But I’m clearer on my adult party-going on All Hallows Eve.

I bought the one and only suit I ever owned in 1968 and wore it seldom. By the late ’80s, the seam on one leg had parted and I’d stapled it together. But for several years I wore it to Halloween parties, because dressing as a junior exec was, for me, the most ridiculous costume I could imagine. Though I did find that it made me stand straighter with a drink in my hand.

For another party, with no costume handy, I turned a jacket inside out, wore it backwards, tied my wristwatch to my forehead, carried an umbrella turned upsidedown and entered as an alien from an unpronounceable planet. Kinda dumb, and less inspired than it might sound.

When I was first courting Linda – when I was first thinking of courting Linda – I went to a party across Baring St. where she danced in a gossamer butterfly costume. I had tied a pillow to my back and thrown an old horseish blanket over me, carried a walking stick and hulked along as a hunchback. But ah, underneath I was the king in disguise, with a kilt and false medals.

I had planned to throw off the blanket at some point and announce my true identity, but when the sort-of time came, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. That kind of overt exhibitionism I didn’t have it in me – then.

But my favorite and most renowned Halloween appearance featured far greater exhibitionism, the kind of thing that I generally internalize, that comes through only in my writing but hides from daily life.

I was living in the infamous House on 34th St. in the early ’60s, after returning from the disaster of grad school at Stanford and my mother’s descent into dementia in Palo Alto.

At that time, Penn still dormed men and women students separately. The women’s dorm was a block and a half from the House, a textured-brick rectangle with alternating horizontal and vertical windows, designed by Eero Saarinen to look like a forbidding castle, complete with a bridge over a non-existent moat. The top was fringed with outward-curving metal prongs like sparse hair (pubic?). Oddly enough, the inside held an open, airy court used as a dining hall during lunch hours. Here, the “coeds” were allowed to mingle with male humanity (until curfew).

Come Halloween, I was taken with the idea of appearing as Christ on the road to Calvary. Dressed only in a loincloth fashioned from a hunk of sheet and a crown of thorns woven from a vine, I pasted a fuller false beard over my unimpressive real one, dribbled red food coloring down my forehead from the crown, tacked a scroll with “INRI” to the cross member of a hastily constructed cross, which I dragged along 34th St. (a major traffic artery) and into the women’s dorm. I even fell the requisite three times along the way. I have a picture somewhere that documents it.

Halloween for Linda and me pooped out over the two decades we lived in the rear of our Baring St. communal house. Few kids found their way back there, and of those, the majority were ferried around by their parents, who dumped them on a street corner and waited with the motor running while they hunted down goodies.

When we moved up to rural Sullivan County, we found that Halloween was a major decoration holiday (with contests!) that almost rivaled Christmas, but we’re invisible from the road, so no werewolf visitors appeared. Anyway, the official outlook on trick or treating up here is oddly conscribed, as though the local establishment expects that kids out on their own might be dismembered by ghouls.

In the two decades since, the decoration mania has become more muted, not sure why. Perhaps our imaginations can no longer hold nothing scary enough to rival the real world.