When Halloween rolled around in 1975, I was in sixth grade and still making friends at the new school my parents had transferred me and my brothers to earlier that fall. We had long been public school kids, but when I graduated fifth grade, my parents suddenly decided to move all three of their sons to the Catholic school across the street. This would be my academic home for the next three years. After years of dressing in street clothes to go to school, I now wore a hideous blue-plaid uniform daily. And I had to mind my manners in the presence of nuns.
Halloween that year fell on a Friday, which is a school day, which is why I feel certain the events I’m about to describe took place on that Saturday, the first of November.
I’d been invited to a classmate’s home for a Halloween party. No costumes, just fun, food, frivolity.
My new friend Christopher lived on the other side of town, the nice side. And as my mother drove me to his home in the car, we passed the town’s nature center, which was dominated by a giant pond that was the site of the town’s annual trout-fishing contest. The pond was enveloped by several acres of woods that thinned out at one point and opened upon a baseball diamond.
Traffic slowed as we approached the baseball field.
Police officers spoke to each driver in turn, peeked into the cars, asked a few questions, then waved us on.
The baseball field itself was crawling with cops. State troopers and plainclothes officers in windbreakers. The ones in blue windbreakers marched along the edge of the woods with German shepherds on leashes. Radios squawked, and everyone spoke loudly to be heard over the sound of the helicopter whirling overhead.
I asked my mother what was going on. She had no clue.
When we reached Christopher’s house, she told me to wait in the car while she spoke with a few other moms who had congregated on the porch to consult with Christopher’s mom, who we kids called Mrs. C.
The council of moms took their sweet time. Heads nodding. Hands gesturing.
When Mom came back, she popped the car lock and told me to get out.
“It’s okay,” she said, “You’re going to play in the backyard and inside.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“But the police—”
“It’s okay,” she reassured me. “They’re looking for somebody. He was working in somebody’s house over here. Then he ran away, and they’re looking for him.”
I was what, eleven years old? That year I had begun methodically reading adult mystery novels. My imagination and my capacity for anxiety exercised themselves nightly as I gobbled up these books. (A story I have partially related here.)
Mom was being vague intentionally, I’m sure, but I did not have to be a Baker Street Irregular to know that if this many cops and dogs were looking for this person, he was no saint.
I couldn’t tell you what we kids did for fun that afternoon. It was Halloween, for Pete’s sake. We didn’t need a campfire or the cover of darkness with which to embroider our ghost stories. We had the perfect, homegrown plot points to fashion a far more terrifying tale.
Even as we played, we traded bits and pieces we’d gleaned from our moms as we were dropped off.
Here is what the adults had told us: The object of the quarry was a man who showed up to work as a house painter at one of the homes in the area. He’d erected a ladder outside some lady’s home and commenced painting. When she returned from running errands, she was startled to find him inside the house, rifling through her possessions. Surprised by her sudden entrance, he bolted. His description matched that of someone police were already looking for crimes we kids could not comprehend.
Nevertheless, we tried.
He was a robber!
He did bad things to people!
He was a murderer!
No—he was not actually human, but half-man, half-monster!
Moreover, we felt certain that he could not have committed these heinous crimes in New Jersey, where we lived and which was, as everyone knew, an oasis of tranquility. No—he must have done these bad things across the river in New York City. Where else?
Would they catch him?
He had fled into the woods. Maybe he was too far gone to be stopped now. Maybe the dogs would not pick up his scent. God knows what he would do if the cops didn’t find him in time! What if it got dark and he was still on the loose? Did his monster side come out at night?
By the time Mrs. C called us inside to eat, our minds were inflamed with dark tales of the fugitive’s past.
The house smelled delicious. They had a real-life fireplace, something I’d always been curious about. The decor was autumnal and wonderful.
As I shoveled spoonfuls of mac and cheese and franks and beans into my mouth, Chris’s mom explained the afternoon activities. Before things had gone awry, she had planned a grand scavenger hunt.
Her original party plan called for each of us kids to split into teams of two and wander the neighborhood, knocking on doors to ask homeowners if they could provide us with any of the innocuous items on a long list Mrs. C had probably copied out of a book of kids’ games.
But now, in light of the current neighborhood situation, she thought it was best if we worked the neighborhood in larger groups, led by Christopher’s older siblings.
Chris was the youngest of six. His was a family of Brady Bunch proportions. There were more than enough big kids to go around in that household. We would be fine.
I’ve since learned that I have the ability to magnify minuscule details until they occupy a space in my mind as big as a locomotive. Something Mrs. C said had captured my attention.
It grew and grew and grew.
Terror seized me.
Then I did what nervous kids have always done when they became anxious. I barfed into my lap. Quietly, you understand. Delicately. And quickly, probably fluttering an oversized orange Halloween napkin as camouflage for my sudden action.
Then I sat trembling in my seat, afraid that someone would find me out. I might have been content to sit there for all eternity, and never get up.
When I was finally outed, Mrs. C was more than kind. In that family, she was no stranger to barf. She whisked me to a bathroom, where I changed into a pair of Christopher’s jeans. (What a slender fellow he must have been, relative to me! I can still feel the denim digging into my hips.) My clothes descended to the basement for a wash.
And off we went on the scavenger hunt. It was as safe as safe can be, though in retrospect I wonder if the people who answered those doors wondered at the wisdom of sending gaggles of little kids around the neighborhood that afternoon in the company of high schoolers.
I had never been on a scavenger hunt before then or since. Here’s what I can tell you. The list they gave us was not written in stone. More like a suggestion, really. When the list commanded us to extort a stale dinner roll from a neighbor, we felt certain a toasted slice of bread would do nicely instead.
Sometime late in the afternoon, we learned that the police manhunt had concluded with success. A great evil had been plucked out of our midst. It was just another cool fall evening in the suburbs of Jersey again.
When she arrived to pick me up, my mortified mother was presented with my washed and dried wardrobe, and an all-too-compassionate story shared by Mrs. C.
“Well, with everything that was going on,” she told my mom. “Can you blame the poor boy? He must have felt terrified.”
And for years after, that was the explanation my mother trotted out when the memory of that messed-up Halloween was dredged up. A bad man who did bad things to women—my parents always employed that phraseology—had spread terror throughout the borough. And in his quaking heart, Joe did what he always did when he got a case of the jitters. And who could blame him, really?
Christopher and I went on to high school and college together. We worked in Manhattan as young creatives, and saw each other often. And when the spirit moved him, he regaled acquaintances—usually women to whom I was attracted—with the tale of that creepy Halloween.
Only, his story differed from his mother’s on one point. Gleefully, he told people that Little Joey barfed not because a rampaging murderer was on the loose but because he was a little Italian American kid whose belly knew only the taste of lasagna and manicotti, and rebelled when pumped with the likes of American fare such as mac and cheese.
But you know what?
They were all wrong. Mrs. C, my mom, even Christopher.
No. After fifty-one years, let the facts be admitted to a candid world:
It was not the ax murderer in the ’hood that did me in. Nor was it the copious amount of American food on tap that afternoon.
Friends, what really struck terror into my heart was the soon-to-be-launched scavenger hunt. I did not know what that was, and it frightened me to no end.
I did not understand why they wanted me to knock on doors and ask complete strangers for things such as six inches of kite twine, a rubber ball, and a tarnished penny.
Why would I want these things? For what purpose? I didn’t need them! Why would I bother people I did not know in order to get them?
A murderer I could stomach. Surely, they would get him in the end. But the thing that lurked in my mind was far more terrible. I could not stomach the thought of making strangers go out of their way for me. It was bad enough knocking on peoples’ doors for candy each year, but at least the culture had paved the way for such intrusions.
My constitution drew the line at a scavenger hunt.
It was all too much, and it still is. Happy Halloween.
* * *
See you next time!
Joe
