Happy Curmudgeon Halloween -- (An Original Short Story)
"A coot, a codger, a crank and a curmudgeon all walk into a bar.
Who orders a drink first?
None of the above, they just eat all the free peanuts, complain, and go home."
“I got an old rusty bolt.”
“I got a door hinge, but it doesn’t even work.”
“Well I got two things this year, two of those gears.”
“Were they from the front porch buckets?”
“No, he dropped them into my sack this year, almost went through the bottom, like McDermott’s fork two years ago.”
“That was Neo-Classical.”
"Well I can top all of you….I got a shoe.”
“A whaaat?”
"A tennis shoe. One shoe...it’s green, and smells like it came out of the river.”
“Grosssss”.
You just gotta love Halloween. Every year, a new adventure in theoretical CandyLand. Halloween, that magical holiday…when you dress up in your best alter ego, with the potential of scoring enough candy in one night for the next 57 school lunches. Not that your booty would even last half that long. Enough candy to provide everyone in the group with at least two new cavities and the misery trots for the next week and a half. All that glorious, sugarsweet stuff.
We dreamt about it all year long. Three Musketeers, Snickers bars, Rootbeer Straws, Milk Duds, and all the other glorious sugarfectious delights. It was always an adventure to dump out your bag at the end of the night and compare what you had.
“I got six Mars Bars, and seventeen MilkyWays.”
“I got a whole bag of Candy Corns.”
“Orange, or brown in the middle?”
"Orange.”
“Aaa...I like the brown, taste better.”
In most neighborhoods of Middle America, you rued that next day, October 32nd, when it was all over for the year. That next day, when you traded healthful foodstuffs with your best friends, and discovered way too many green-dyed popcorn balls, or worse, taffy apples on a stick. Affectionately referred to as “potatoe mashers”, after the German grenades tossed during wars past, since they were shaped somewhat the same, at least in our budding minds. Those things tasted great...as long as you scraped the outer casing of taffy off with your front teeth like a snow shovel on a curved driveway, just as soon as you got them. But leave them in the booty sack too long, without gnawing off that outer layer like a pond beaver… big trouble. Those gewballs on a stick would suck up and glom onto anything within twenty feet. The bottom of your sack would end up a huge mishmashed ball of inedible, unintelligible, paper and chocolate-bar mess. Hard to chisel apart, even harder to eat.
The worst was to just get a regular apple.
Those usually got thrown at a regular telephone pole.
Such were the pits and pratfalls of the annual foray into CandyLand.
But not in our neighborhood.
Halloween was MUCH more adventurous than all that.
Each year we got to visit Curmudgeonville.
It was the only time we went anywhere NEAR that house.
The house on the corner with the old guy inside.
The house without much sticking paint.
The one that looked scary EVERY day of the year.
Curtains always drawn tightly shut.
Stuff piled up in front of the garage door all year long.
The house with the roof that looked like it could use a new one.
It was always a new and grand experience, come the end of the night, to discover what you got from the crusty old guy that lived there. At least this year he was personally doling out the surprises as we filed up the long, cluttered walk, and on past the front door. Last year was more of a Halloween schmorgasbord of self-help collectioning.
I remember it like it was just a year ago.
We steeled our nerve out front in the dark street, then traipsed up the long, even-darker driveway and up onto the front porch, to ring the doorbell and wait. We pushed the button, and nothing happened.
To the left of the screen door, he had a row of plastic 10 gallon buckets, lining his front porch walk. All stuffed to the brim with old car transmission parts. Short, shiny drive shafts, large and small gears and bearings of all sizes and shapes…mostly stuff that only a guy in coveralls with his name stitched over the ripped pocket, and fingernails that hadn’t been clean since 1972 would be able to properly identify.
We rang the doorbell again, and still, nothing happened.
Soon, the front-window curtains swayed back and forth ever so slightly. Something was stirring within.
The screen door suddenly swung violently wide, and out popped a bald, fuzzy-eared, bushy-eyebrow-ed head.
“WHADDAH YA WANT? ....Oh.”
We eeked out a high pitched, “Trick or Treat”, in feeble, fearful, costumed unison.
“What are you supposed to be?...A Damn Pirate...a goofy looking Ghost...and a Square-Headed Green Man!”
We just stood there in full, quiet costume.
“Well?”
We all shrugged in full-costumed unison.
“Help yourself to whatever you want outta them buckets there. Only take one or two each though, I got a long night ahead of me.”
We all looked at each other, and though we couldn’t actually SEE each others faces, there was no doubt that each had a look of complete “huh”, going on behind our pirate eye patch, goblin hood, and Incredible Hulk mask.
We were shocked into a full group unison of inactivity.
After a moment or two, and some further admonishment from behind the screen door in front of us…we stirred.
“Go ahead, it don’t bite...and don’t take all day...I’m not paying good money to heat the outdoors.”
We all grabbed whatever would fit in our bag and headed back off the porch.
Not that we particularly NEEDED any old automobile parts for anything we could think of at the moment. We just thought it prudent to hurry along on our way. Wandering the long walk back down the driveway, we passed many more piles of unidentifiable detritus lining the egress. Old wet cardboard, bent bicycle wheels, broken yard implements, eggshells and other discarded foodstuffs, and a what appeared to be a large, old, wood and paper model airplane that looked like it had experienced a bad run-in with a large tree.
Though a bit beat, the plane still looked pretty promising to each of us...and we stooped to stared at it with thoughts of a major fix-up whirring about in our small, creative minds. We were all still fully entranced, marveling at the yellow model airplane in quiet thought of possibility, when a voice barked out our way from behind the front door bushes, causing all of us to jump in Halloween-uniform unison.
“Don’t take the yellow plane though, I might still fix it up...”
Once our hearts kicked back in, we doubled our pace and scurried on down the driveway, and out into the inky black of the neighborhood beyond.
After the long walk up and back that crazed driveway of the night, the standard evils of Halloween seemed pretty tame to our still-wet-behind-the-ears-of-life, experiential ways. All those things they discussed with such gloomy abandon, like clockwork each fall as late October approached. Each year it was the same, rather horrifying talk, delivered as part of an all day, in-school assembly...
Alcohol sodden drivers in large automobiles, madly running down small children in ghost costumes with eye holes cut much too small for adequate visual safety.
Razor blades carefully tucked away in candy apples to slice through our gullets with reckless abandon.
And the worst, small-child costume-flambooee.
According to the program, it happened every year, in just about every neighborhood of every city far and wide. The sad, unsuspecting trick or treat-er in their shiny new discount costume, wandering too close to a candle-lit pumpkin, instantly bursting into full conflagration, running this way and that with reckless abandon across the neighborhood, spewing fire everywhere in their wake.
“Remember, there's a lot of dried leaves out there this time of year.”
The Horrors of Halloween...drilled into our still-soft heads of youthful experience by our adult leaders.
Somehow it all paled by comparison, when you had just run the drive and walkway gauntlet of the Curmudgeon of Crosswood Avenue. We figured we were ready for anything after that trip.
Once we got down the block, we stopped under the hedge apple tree in old man Kurths' lawn, to dump out our new-found scrap metal booty, just to see if he had topped the previous year. The metal, internal combustion car parts all smelled really bad. A strong odoriferous combination of transmission fluid, chemically altered white-plastic bucket, and motor oil. Not much of any use…except a lot of shiny, stinky metal.
“Remember two years ago…when he tossed a bunch of silverware into our bags?”
“Yeah, we didn’t know WHAT it was...making all that katink-ka-linking noise when it fell into the bag...until a fork tore through Jimmy’s bag, and stuck in the top of his shoe.”
“Do you suppose that old guy was giving away his good silverware?”
“Ttch...”
“What a weirdo.”
“Where does he get all that stuff?”
“I don’t’ know, but he sure has a lot of it.”
“Yeah, but did you see that airplane?!”
“Yeah, I bet we could make it fly.”
“Maybe next year, he’ll give us that plane...”
The silence of thought and giddy possibility was deafening.
Finally, Jimmy S. piped up... “Nah, probably get a dead BassFish.”
We all laughed aloud under our masks, as we hefted our bags, and headed for the next row of promising houses on down the block.
~FINTO~
Posted: 10/31?/2016 @ Unknown Time ~ Post No. 2