What would you do.........

I am a 32 year old man and if I could get away with it, I would come over to your house tonight as a trick or treater. I’m not kidding.

I would show up in a great costume but not a store bought costume because I can’t afford those things right now and everyone knows that the best costumes are the ones made from the curtains like in Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music. I would have to buy some make up, or as I am a dude, colored justice gel as saying “make-up” makes me sound like a chick. I would not use my Mom’s colored justice gel because then I would really be a sissy. And if as a kid my mom used some of her colored justice gel on me for Halloween I don’t want to know about it.

My costume would be something in the scary realm complete with fake blood and gore that ever so briefly you would have to ask yourself if it is real or colored corn syrup? Who knows, that’s the beauty of Halloween. Maybe that’s a real stake through my vampire heart or maybe it’s just a piece of wood duct taped to a belt that I have then strapped to my chest and covered with a shirt. My Halloween costumes are made to make you think.

But unfortunately I am to old to do any trick or treating without getting the massive pedophile stare. And I can’t say that I blame parents because I would look at myself the same way if I came to the door. However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t partake in the other rituals of Halloween that I enjoyed as a kid.

Every year, a couple of weeks before Halloween I pick out a book or two that is designed to scare the shit out of me. That was always some of the fun about Halloween. One year it was Stephen King’s “IT” and I couldn’t sleep for a week. Another year it was the Exorcist. These are all mood setters to get you ready for the big night.

Because on the big night is when you start really watching the scary movies. As a kid I absolutely loved this and haven’t changed one bit since then. What made it more difficult was scoring the scary movies that your parents wouldn’t let you watch. It would start with some King Kong or perhaps the old Dracula, which by the way still is one of the best done horror flicks of all time. Something about the movie being in black and white added to the terror factor. One year I had to sleep with my brother because I was scared shitless. I was 15.

But as I grew older I started getting to see the Jason Vorhes and Friday the 13th movies. The true gore fests with boobs. It was exciting on so many levels as a kid because it was so many things that you weren’t supposed to be seeing. The gore and the teenagers having sex at the lake, both of which you didn’t understand and didn’t do but good lord if it wasn’t intriguing. Mom and Dad never let us watch this kind of stuff but everyone had that one parent that really wasn’t into the whole parenting thing and they would have a copy of Nightmare on Elm Street laying around somewhere. This applies to other movies as well. My friend Jimmy had a step mom who was 23, she was uber hot. She let us watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High when I was 7. She couldn’t see the harm in such a thing. The harm was the confusion that was happening in my pants.

I don’t know what has always intrigued me about the really scary movies but during Halloween, I would become obsessed with them. Not only would we watch those movies but we would take it so far as to debate them. This is a debate that we still have, 20 years later.

The question is “What would you do if you were being chased by Jason Vorhes, Michael Myers, or Freddy?”

As a kid, this is a good question to ask. There’s always a small part of you that would insist that this stuff was real and that someone could really kill you in your dreams or could still be alive after taking a machete to the head. The rest of your brain would try and convince the kid part of you that this was always make believe but you would never really want to admit it because god help you if you jinx yourself and Freddy does come after you. This is pretty much the reason my answer to the question of “Do you believe in ghosts” is a big fat and strong “No Comment.” Because I’m still a little afraid that if I say no, I will get haunted just out of spite and that if I say yes, I’m inviting them in. So for the record I firmly declare that I neither believe in or disbelieve in ghosts, please leave me alone.

So as a kid it helped to be prepared and really concentrate on what you would do if a supernatural ax murderer was coming after you. We did this because we were also boy scouts and everyone knows that if this really happens you can only count on your buddies because your parents will laugh at you all the way to the nut house.

My bravado would disappear in my answers and I would always say that I would run. But I wouldn’t run fast because that always screws you in the movies. Running fast just mean that you would lose sight of your killer and he would hop on a bus and beat you to your destination and then hack your head off. Only fools did this. I was more strategic. My plan was always to just jog backwards, he whole time keeping my adversary in plain sight. If I was indoors then I would just run around the kitchen table, making sure to keep it right between us. Eventually, the killer’s mojo would run out or some hot coed would stumble in unrepentantly and he would go after her thus saving me. Seriously, I spent years developing this plan.

My friend on the other hand had a different way to go. He acknowledged that there were certain unavoidable truths to this situation. First, only about 1 in 30 will survive the onslaught of the supernatural kid killer. It will always be a hot teenager. We were 9 and boys, so not much luck there. Second, no matter how far you run or how clever you are, the killer will always pop around a corner for you, most likely when you are about to get lucky with said hot teenager. Third, there will be no help because no one will believe you. Fourth: Guns, knives, poisons are 18 wheeler trucks are of no use to you because the killer will always take your best shot but then just get back up the minute you turn away to call for help.

So he came up with a solution that would work for him. Very calmly after years of thought, he would announce that he would just kill himself. He would take away the sport of it and just off himself before the killer could get to him. He would try to make it quick and painless but that wasn’t really a concern. He would shoot himself, cut himself or run himself over with the truck. Being a debate, I had to throw in some curveballs. What if he didn’t have a gun, or poison, or an 18 wheeler available to him. He said he would go find a hammer and brain himself. I gotta admit, the man could be original. But I took it one step further. What if he didn’t have a tool shed, access to a kitchen with knives or a the Ebola virus.

This is where he showed his real dedication. He said that he would go outside his house, find himself a steady brick wall, bend over from ten feet away and then just run full speed, thus braining himself. I asked if this wasn’t enough and it didn’t kill him. He said he would get back up, bend over again, and run harder. He said that he would continue to do this until he was in fact dead. And what if he couldn’t find himself a good brick wall?

He said he would climb a tree as high as he could and then do a nose dive straight off, thus achieving the same affect. It was obvious that my man had given this a lot of thought.

But of course, being who I was, I would point out that if he did do this I would just go bury him in the Pet Cemetery.