REALITY LURKING ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT

 

Right on schedule at 6 P.M., I dutifully place my chair in front of the house, flick on the light and wait to be assaulted by pint-sized ghosts, goblins and witches. The first to arrive are three princesses about three feet tall.  Their eyes are wide with excitement and apprehension.  “Trick or treat,” they say tentatively.  I toss snickers bars into their waiting bags. A miniature Batman approaches, his dad hovers in the background.  He holds out a bag and looks at me expectantly.  “What are the magic words?” I ask.  He hesitates. “Please?”

I laugh.  “How about trick or treat?” I offer a mounds bar.

With a momentary break in the action, I pick up Time Magazine.  The ten-year-old civil war in Sudan has claimed 800,000 lives; another 700,000 are in imminent danger of starvation.

“Hi, Mr. Singer.”  Four thirteen-year-old boys dressed in black, stockings over their faces.  “What are you guys,” I ask. 

“We’re terrorists.”  

“Terrorists, huh, well, if you promise not to terrorize me, I’ll give you the treat.”  They don’t find that funny.  There are no smiles behind the masks.  I toss them tootsie pops.

What a crazy world, boys dressed as terrorists.  Thanks to the media, terrorism invades our consciousness to the point where barely pubescent children mimic the killers of innocents.  What do they know of terrorists?  Not much.  But they already have a hint about the real world beyond our housing bubble.

I pick up Time.  A war is raging in Serbia. Sarajevo is planning to turn an Olympic stadium into a cemetery. “What else can we do?” laments the city’s mayor. “In the Dobrinje suburb, people are burying their dead in their gardens.”  How many people have died in the war?  The article doesn’t say.  I’d rather not know.

 My ten-year-old daughter, Melanie, shows up with a friend; they are dressed as fifties girls.  Melanie asks for extra treats because, well, I’m her dad.  They disappear into the spooky night.

Fifties girls. I lean back on the chair and shake my head; the time I lived through is now a long-ago historical era, a period piece of flared skirts, brimmed hats and hoola hoops.

The trick-or-treating children never heard of Sarajevo. Bombs, rapes, war and starvation are unknown countries.  Their world tonight is one of wonder.  Too bad they can’t live in this secure, happy world forever.

War, famine and death are part of the greater reality. But the reality of the micro world is more personal; it creeps in like a black cat on silent, padded feet, and is a lot scarier than witches and ghosts.

We all went through it. I haven’t forgotten…

Sixth grade was idyllic, life flowed from day to day with nary an insecure thought.  Life was fair, orderly and secure.  Friends were always there; acceptance and belonging were as natural a part of existence as the concrete streets.  But in seventh grade, life started edging into new and uncomfortable directions.  

Three hulking Juvenile Delinquents were in my home room class.  They were fifteen or sixteen years old; we were barely twelve.  Some were six feet tall; we were closer to five.  They had been left back three or four times.  The rest of us kept our distance from them; they inhabited a different dimension. 

Beil with his greasy, blonde hair was just plain mean.  He squinted and scowled all the time.  Carruthers had a big, black pompadour and seemed a bit dreamy.  He told our home room teacher, Mr. Metzelaar, that he would drop out of school as soon as he turned sixteen. The third JD was a handsome Italian kid who could have been Sylvester Stallone; black hair slicked back into a ducks ass. He wore a cross over his tee shirt.   The JDs had metal plates on the heels of their shoes called taps. which they scraped on the sidewalks and halls to affect toughness and coolness.

We called these guys, “rocky.”  While the rest of us carried big loose-leaf binders, they carried small binders to show their disinterest in school.  These stylistic affectations were part the tough-guy persona, portrayed perfectly by Marlon Brando in 1954 in The Wild One. A movie review reported, its “main appeal would seem to be to those lawless juveniles who may well be inspired to go out and emulate the characters portrayed.”

That may have been true, but none us remotely identified with the JDs. 

Stevie, Artie, Kenny and I concluded that these guys were “phonies.”  They were “trying to look cool.”  But to some extent, so were we.  When the weather turned colder, Stevie asked if I was going to wear the usual hat with the aviator earflaps that tied beneath our chins.  I had been thinking the same thing.

 “They look dopey,” Stevie opined.

 “They’re not sporty,” I added.

“What would the girls think if they saw us with those stupid earmuffs?” Stevie said, more of a statement than a question.

And what would those greasy JDs think? 

Moving from sixth to seventh grade was akin to expulsion from the Garden of Eden. We bit the apple and became self-aware.

We knew we were naked.

We knew we were vulnerable. 

Uncertainty crept in like the mists of death on Passover night.  Do I look right?  Do I act right?  What do other people think of me?  What do I think of myself?  Do I measure up?  And if I don’t measure up, what can I do to spruce-up my image.  Self-awareness manifest itself as masks.  The JD’s had their style, so did we. For the first time in my life, I began to recognize the lengths people go to polish their images – for now and to forever.  We called it, “phony,” not yet recognizing that we were too.

Meanwhile, the world became ominous.

On a cold, sunny day early in March, I was returning to school after lunch when I came upon a group of five menacing boys.  One of them was wearing the exact same winter coat as I, and that was enough to set them off.  They acted as if my coat was a personal affront to their dignity, and insisted I hang around with them instead of returning to school for the afternoon.  Feeling intimidated and outnumbered, I went along.  They were cutting school, something that never occurred to me.  At one point, we hopped a bus on the Grand Concourse, which means we all jumped on the back bumper, held on and rode to the next few stops.  They hopped the bus, not because they needed to get somewhere, but just to do something wrong.  I was only twelve, but it was clear to me that not only was this stunt both dangerous and pointless, but they were trying to be bad.  They liked being bad.  They wanted to be bad.

After an hour they let me go and I returned to school.   I felt terrible about missing my classes, but even worse, was ashamed about not putting up much resistance.  I never told anyone about that afternoon, but it gave me much food for thought – about people in general and myself in particular.  As I made my way back to P.S. 79, and then climbed the empty stairwell to Creston Junior Jr. High, I understood that some kids are mean and hurtful; that’s the way it is.  But why would these guys want to be mean?   Why did they seem proud of themselves for cutting class and hitching rides on busses?  The whole thing struck me as “phony” in some way.  

A few months later, in early spring, in the courtyard of our apartment building, a tough kid named Butchy Reiner threw a spaldeen right at me at fairly close range.  Then he did it again. It wasn’t just the sting of the ball that so enraged me, but the utter pointlessness of it.  Why hurt someone for no reason?  I didn’t think about consequences, I came at him in a rage, fists flying.  When I came to my senses, Butchy was on the ground crying.  He accused me of throwing punches at him when he wasn’t looking, and he vowed to get back at me.

 Butchy had a reputation as a tough kid, but as Artie pointed out, “He just acts tough because he’s shorter than us,”

 “Any of us could probably beat him up,” Stevie added, with an uncertain emphasis on “probably.”

Now he was on the ground, crying, proving Stevie correct.  But the truth was that I was still afraid of Butchy, and was looking over my shoulder the rest of the week.   A few days later, he lay in wait for me and threw a few punches; I ran in the house crying.  Washing my face in the bathroom – licking my wounds so to speak - I pretty much wanted to kill Butchy Reiner.  Lying in bed that night, still fuming, it occurred to me that Butchy, like the juvenile delinquents, was a phony; he liked being tough and mean.  But as I drifted off to sleep, I had something of a revelation:  yes, Butchy was a “phony,” but a different kind of phony than the JDs.  In that moment, I still hated and feared Butchy, but his actions somehow made sense. He was compensating for his size.  But I didn’t understand those kids who dragged me around.  

Phoniness was bouncing around my head that year.  Meanwhile, other realities crept in.

In the spring of sixth grade, the really smart kids were tracked into the SPs which meant they would complete junior high in two years instead of three.  Stevie and a few others made it.   I was considered, and they discussed it with my parents.  Because my IQ was four points short, and my math scores were not above grade level, I remained on the normal junior high track. It didn’t exactly bother me, but it lingered.

Meanwhile, the brightest kids were winning academic awards, and I wasn’t.  Tevel, a kid in my Hebrew class was so mischievous that we called him Tevel the Devil.  But back at the Junior High awards assembly, Tevel the Devil won a bunch of academic awards.  I remember with great clarity sitting in the assembly wondering why I wasn’t winning any awards. In eighth grade I upped my efforts and was awarded an academic pin.  

Meanwhile, the Reality Hits just kept on coming.

Early in eighth grade, when we were just turning thirteen, I had more to chew on.  I called on Stevie to come out and play.  He declined, saying he was studying for a science test.  I shrugged, went to the front courtyard, and yelled up to Artie’s apartment on the fifth floor, something I’d done about a million times before.

 A few days later, I again called for Stevie and he again said he had to study for a science test.  Studying weeks for a test made no sense to me whatsoever, until he explained he was not studying for a science test but the science test: the Bronx High School of Science, an elite high school for the best and the brightest.  At the end of the year, while I was finishing up eighth grade, Stevie would be completing ninth grade and then going to high school. 

 Something about this left me uneasy.  Stevie made the SPs; Stevie would be going to an elite high school.  I would not be going to the Bronx High School of Science.  Tevel the Devil kept winning awards.

All of this continued to bother me in a vague, unarticulated way.

On a Saturday morning, I approached Stevie’s apartment, splaldeen in hand.  Stevie, his dad and another man were talking in somber tones in the lobby.  I motioned to him to come out and play, but he made a disgusted face and waved me away.  The hell with him, I thought, and stomped out of the building.  A few days later we learned that Stevie’s older sister had Polio and would be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.  The man who had been talking to Stevie’s dad was a doctor.  During the next two years, whenever I was in his apartment, Stevie’s sister was in the wheelchair, but was always positive, smiling and kind.  The Salk vaccine was being tested almost at that exact moment, but it was too late for her.

The world of Junior High was a hardening dose of reality.  But it grew stranger.

Early in eighth grade, after we moved to a new apartment, I spent the night at Artie’s house back in the old neighborhood, to attend Kenny’s Bar Mitzvah.  After getting in our beds, Artie pulled out a girlie magazine, which quickly produced an erection in his pajamas the size of a tent pole.  “Look at this,” he said, pointing to it. “Do you wanna see it?”

I didn’t know what to say. At the age of thirteen, I had a sense of what was going on; I had more than a passing interest in girls, Artie’s erection notwithstanding. I shrugged, turned over and escaped into the comforting darkness of sleep.

“Trick or treat!” a black clown.  A Nestle’s crunch and a tootsie pop. I turn back to the magazine.  Muslim fundamentalists set off a bomb in Cairo, killing four.  “Her shoulder had been blown away,” said a witness, “and her legs were slashed.  A man nearby was nothing but a torso.”

 The greater world beyond is surfeited with atrocities. Discomfort and danger lurk in the neighborhood.  In the real-world bullies lay in wait for you; polio could cripple you; girls might laugh at your earmuffs; some kids went out of their way to be mean and nasty.

Innocence must end. We all went through it. But let it linger. There will be time enough for the reality and mystery of human suffering, personal insecurities, and the strange world of human failings.

8:00 PM.  The street is mostly quiet now.  A few of the older kids with negligible costumes show up with open pillowcases. Two adorable Asian girls appear – Cinderella and her Fairy god mother.  Wide eyed, uncertain, excited.  They get caramel and tootsie rolls.

8:15 -   Quitting time.  I turn off the light, munch on a Milky Way, look up at the stars, and wonder – strangely - how Stevie’s sister is doing.

                                     AFTERWORD

This piece was published in the mid-1990s. 

Two thoughts.

1.  I wonder how many people know about the war in Serbia thirty years ago.  What caused it?  How many people died?  Don’t remember?  Neither do I.  Do we remember the estimated 2.5 million of deaths from war and famine in the Sudan?   Neither do I. The mass miseries (the reality of the world) pass us by and disappear.  The reality of our personal insecurities and minor miseries are more likely to stay with us.

2.  On this Halloween of 2024, the Darfur region of Sudan is again suffering a terrible famine because of the fifteen-month civil war.  More than half of Sudan’s 48 million people face starvation because of war between military factions.   More than 10 million people have been displaced and fled to pushed to flee to neighboring countries.