Candy

For me, Halloween was never really about the candy and, as far as I know, I'm the only kid to go on record saying that. Don't get me wrong, I was always up for a creamy peanut butter cup or a sticky watermelon jolly rancher, but it was never the reason I'd spend days thinking about what I was going to be on October 31st. All of my friends, however, would let this time of year get the best of them, some going as far as to having a typical child-like meltdown. And, when I didn't join in on the drama of it all, they were thrown off by my self control, perhaps even threatened. "What's wrong with you Chester? they'd shout, "Don't you like candy?"

"It's alright," I'd say, and they'd glare at me with utter confusion.

They would lose their minds and their voices, creating their own type of Beatle-mania over the prospect of free junk food. It was what they dreamed of – an endless supply of sweet goodness – when all the while, my sweet goodness was trying to look up a girl’s skirt. Because they couldn't understand where I was coming from, they'd spout out their usual default explanation, "That's cause he's gay!" and walk away laughing.



What I could never figure out was how lanky boys with Oreos jammed in their braces could call me gay. I was the anti-gay. I was the typical heterosexual nightmare for every parent who was wondering what their daughters were doing, with me, in the middle of some field at ten o'clock at night. So if anyone was gay, it was them. They were the ones with bone dry hair that their stay-at-home mom's had combed out for them, with their stale breath from dodging a good brush. They were the ones who still laughed at farts and sported sweat suits with their initials on them. They approved of fist fighting over whose football team would win the Super Bowl. I was passed all of that. In fact, I never subscribed to that stuff in the first place. Perhaps it was just my innate sense of originality. Sports were not my life, women were. So, the costume I wore had to embody much more than just some way to get candy, it had to make a statement about who I was and what I had to offer. I kept to myself, while judging those dumb enough to fall for the adult world's plan to control us with candy. I looked down on the cute farmer costume and showed very little respect for the clever roll-of-toilet-paper-person from down the street. I saw past the gimmicky team costumes, “brothers and sisters”, “BFFs”, “moms and toddlers”. I couldn't stomach the parents that beamed with pride at their little creations, who'd make sure their kids said their overly rehearsed "one liners" to all the neighbors as they passed. I hated the smirks and the approving smiles from all the adults as if I needed to feel their assurance that we were all growing up to be such fine young men and women. I despised all of it. The only thing I wanted was to look cool, and that shit wasn't cool.



When I moved to New Jersey at the age of ten, my mother thought that it was the style to dress me up in sky blue pants with matching suspenders, a Hawaiian shirt, and high top Reeboks with the thick, thick tongues (you know which ones I'm talking about). My hair was drenched in Flex gel (the first to take a chance) and stuck straight up. Since I had been blessed with the healthiest head of hair known to man, it tended to curl, which is why a lot of people thought that I was a girl on my first day of fifth grade. I was cool. I studied my father's record collection and wanted to be Elvis. In fact, I was so obsessed with fame that I hired my two best friends (who only knew me for a couple of weeks) to be my body guards. From what? I wasn't quite sure, but I soon learned that it wasn't from the girls going crazy, but the boys who wanted to drive my face into the grass at recess. I was a complete weirdo who talked with a funny Bronx accent and swore so often that parents cut their kids off from me like I was heroin. In my mind, I was a badass. I was a cautionary tale and I loved it.

It was then that I started to notice the sports thing. Everyone loved sports. It was taking over the minds of my classmates and their parents. So, when Halloween came around, the guys didn't care how they came across to the girls, because they simply didn't like them. Or, if they did, they'd approach it like the bottom of the ninth. I remember our school’s point guard, Ernie, pulling a girl’s hair on the front lawn and, years later, doing it with her in the back seat of his car. In fact, I even opened myself up to the idea and tried out for the basketball team. Even though I was horrendous, I still did my best with the lack of coordination God gave me. The coach would scream, "Don't worry Chester, you're hair looks great." Which would send the guys into a fit of laughter, while the “coolest” kid laughing, sported a bowl and tail haircut and was only popular because he could shoot a rubber ball through a hoop? What happened to cool?


That year, I watched my friend, Dominic, cry in front of our whole fifth grade class when his mother took half his bag of goodies away. "Get in the goddamn car Dom. You've already got two bags at home!" He moaned and sniffled his way into the Caravan and I stood there shocked at how uncool he would allow himself to look in front of all the ladies. And for what? Candy? Get a grip, I thought. No, Halloween was worth that much.

So with my introduction into the neighborhood and the pending threats from all the kids, I decided to think of an aggressive costume, with flare. I decided to be a werewolf. My mother, of course, added the flare, with her innate sense of style. "Here Chestah. Try this on."

"No, Mah!" I cried, terrified she would miss her mark, yet again.

"Put it on. It's the style" she said (which instantly meant that it wasn't). I stood in the mirror with a yellow flannel, my father's old jean jacket and enough fake facial hair glued onto my skin to let me pass as a child Deadhead.

"There" she proclaimed with an enthused Bronx accent, "You're the teen wolf."

What was she talking about? The movie? I thought for a second. She had a point. Michael J. Fox was pretty cool. I loved the film and I knew it was just the right touch to impress the girls, show up the guys and still look tough. I went with it and, to my surprise, it was a success. I pranced around, making my friends’ homemade costumes (tin foil and cardboard boxes) look like a joke. The older women (seventh grade) were inevitably going to catch on that I was a man with potential, and the boys? They could swing their pillow cases full of sugar claiming victory for all I cared – the bottom line was, I looked cool and they didn't.



Besides falling off your bike or getting beat up in front of the girl you liked, what wasn't cool was the inevitable change that took place between the ages of twelve and thirteen. A crackling voice, two growth spurts and acne pretty much sucked whatever confidence I had and left me to dwell in the land of ordinary. Instead of being an ambitious kid, I was an uncomfortable looking teen who so desperately needed to hide. If it were the world of fame, I would have gone from being Elvis to Art Garfunkel. It wasn't my fault, as far as I could tell – just the nature of the beast. I was a strong contender coming out of the gate, but I'd lost my way around the track. Tufts of hair hanging off a fifth grader certainly wasn't going to cut it for someone in the seventh grade, although, I tried to hide as much as my face as possible. "You're a pepperoni face!" screamed Ted Devill, the hottest girl in school’s little brother. I wanted to kick the eyeballs out of his head, but instead, I had to take it, as all the girls giggled at his inappropriate honesty.



If ever there were a time to reinvent myself, it is now, I thought. I needed a hit and so it I realized that the only hope I had of redeeming myself was by being Batman. Not the silver, wilted one from the 70’s but the strong, black one from the late 80’s. "Wow, Chestah, you're the Batman" my mother said, as I stood in the living room with a mass of rubber covering my face.



The cape wasn't as thick as I would have liked it to be, but I made do. I stood in the mirror and there was Batman. Nobody would question that I looked the part. The only thing that separated me and Mr. Keaton were the two zits that camped out on the left side of my chin. Who cared? I thought. I was Batman from ten feet away or closer with my sister’s Maybelline. It could work.



Unfortunately, within the passing of those same two years, my mother had grown busy. Unable to focus solely on restructuring my reputation, due to me getting a baby brother that year. I was on my own. "I need you to get me boots, Mah" I'd insist on telling her, at least twice a day.


"I'm gonna get them tomorrow, Chestah, I'm busy!" she'd shout.

It was three days before Halloween and, there I was, sweating bullets after having done an inventory of the things I didn't have to make my costume complete. I figured out the chest and leggings with all the time I was left to sulk, but the one thing I couldn't get past were the boots. I needed the right boots to make it a hit. There were only four stores in town and none of them had anything to do with shoes. "Can you take me to the mall" I begged my father.

"I don't got the time pal. And whose gonna pay for this, cause I can't!" he'd reply.

By the time Halloween arrived, my face was on overdrive from the stress. Zits had turned into what looked like a bad rash. "I promise I'll go out and pick the boots up tomorrow," my mother said, "Just give me a fuckin' moment to breathe." I don't think I slept that night. I went to school, confident that my mother would take care of the one thing that was holding me back from having a show stopper for all my friends to see. I'm sure you've already guessed that by the time I got home to catch my sister being painted as a bumble bee and my newborn brother, a scarecrow, my boots were nonexistent. "Whatta you want me to do Chestah?  The stores didn't have anything." I was in shock.

"What am I going to wear?" I screamed.


"Go look in the closet and see if you can find anything from your father's shoes. He's got some boots" she assured me.

I scrambled. I was knee-deep in what looked like the back room of a consignment shop. Old shoes with different types of leathers and none of them were the sturdy boots that could support my outfit of steel. "Here. You could wear these" she said. Little boots that came up to my shins, go-go boots that my father probably wore to clubs in the early 70’s.

"No way. This looks so stupid!" I shouted.

"No it doesn't, Chestah. You look like the Batman."

After a lot of pacing and contemplating, I wore the boots. I'd already lost hours of trick or treating and my friends were wondering if I had gotten cold feet. I was Batman from the waist up and Nancy Sinatra from the waist down. My thick Batman legs were reduced to skimpy tights. I had feminine qualities, and my ankles swam in four inches of boot. A thin plant in a pot. I was not Batman. My friends thought things were okay, until they caught a glimpse of me walking. I couldn't help but think of how these two elements were attempting to make a person look cool – the boots in their heyday and my outfit that year – but together, things just didn't work.



The following year's costume had one mission – to fix what I had totally fucked up for the last two years. Batman could have been great but, instead, I was the poor man's superhero. A joke. A streetwalking slut with a cape. It was eighth grade, I was fourteen and I knew exactly what was expected of me. There was a particular girl named Amy who I had fallen in love with and who had asked me to go trick or treating with her. I couldn't be cute and I wouldn't dare allow myself to be ambitious, so I stuck to the safe side of cool and went with a horror theme. If you can scare women, then you have some sort of power over them and, to me, nothing was scarier than Frankenstein. My mother threw the kit on the table. "There Chestah. I'll help you with the glue, once I get your brother and sister ready" she said. I was confident that, with the plastic forehead, green face paint and two things that stuck out of my neck, my costume would stand above the rest.



Basically, I looked intense. I walked around the house with my half opened eyes and stiff walk, while my mother threw herself into a fit of laughter, "Oh-my-God Chestah! You're the real deal. You are!" I met up with my friends, got candy I didn't want and had a fairly successful run. But then it started to rain. My forehead started to slip, my green paint had completely washed off, and I now looked like a kid with a plastic bump stuck to his head. "What are you supposed to be? A zit?" a now older Ted Deville maliciously spat.



Dominic, at this point, resorted to general white face paint and cheap plastic teeth – a vampire sporting clothes from the Gap. Interesting. Lazy, but interesting. Even though nobody verbally communicated how good I looked, I thought Amy was impressed. The candy was collected, we made our way home and, overall, I wasn't that upset. But then came the interesting part. While everything else seemed to come apart at its own will, I realized that I now, involuntarily, adopted a full head of black fake hair. My mother had poured glue on my real brown hair and dumped fake black on top.



"Jesus Mah, you're ripping my hair out!" I screamed. I not only screamed, but I cried. And why wouldn't I? My hair was being pulled out strand by strand. I started to look like a dog with mange.



I stood at the bus stop and ignored the strange looks I got from my friends. They'd noticed the even, flow of my brown curly hair against the longer strand of black wisps poking out at random. "Did somebody light his head on fire?" I imagined them thinking. It was like styling a portion of your head while the other half had a mind of its own. Over the course of two weeks, I'd noticed globs of glue stuck to my scalp. I tried so hard to pull it off, but had to make a trip down to the nurse several times as my head started to bleed. She took a look at it for me. "Just don't touch it Chester. Stop picking at it and it will eventually come off." My mother dabbed enough rubbing alcohol on my head to make me feel dry and buzzed. One day in the shower, I pulled what looked like a worm off my head – the remainder of the glue.



I never got very close to Amy. While I was her best friend for two years, she dropped me in high school the first week. I never dressed up for Halloween again. For the next ten years, I laughed at my siblings’ cute costumes, reached into their bags and unwrapped peanut butter cups. From that point on, it was all about the candy.