Saturday, October 30, 1999
Like most long-married couples, my wife and I have come to have a few traditional ways of celebrating Halloween.
We soap each other's eyeglass lenses when the other isn't looking.
We give pumpkins away to the neighborhood kids, then retire to the kitchen and carve up our credit rating.
We push each other's buttons at unexpected times, then run giggling into the night.
And sometime during every Halloween season, we try to sneak into a "haunted house" or "haunted cornfield" without paying, just because they're usually run by charitable organizations like the JayCees or the Kiwanis and my wife and I promised each other on our honeymoon to be evil incarnate at least one night a year in commemoration of the god-awful punch served at our wedding reception.This year, however, I thought we might want to scale things back a bit, since we've both just turned 40 and all.
I suggested we settle for a quick drive past a haunted lemonade stand and turn in early.
"Wake up and smell the citrus!" my wife had replied, somewhat less than encouragingly. "The young ghouls of today are far more interested in haunting the Web and terrorizing unwary cyber folk than in trying to poison people with the remains of last summer's ant-infested drink mixes!"
I carefully suggested we try to find a haunted fruit stand then instead.
"Get real! They were all put out of business a few years ago by that Alar scare! Our poor local farmers just couldn't compete with the big-time professional fright shows even the smallest multi-national conglomerates can muster these days."
And so it went last night, back and forth, until the hour grew late and in a desperate attempt at a compromise we decided to head out to our local Haunted Grocery Store...."There doesn't seem to be any place to park," my wife seethed as she circled the lot for the 666th time in our 1987 Buick Flying Dutchman.
"Just ease it into that empty handicap spot there and be done with it," I told her. "Anybody willing to fork over money to get into a place as poorly decorated on the outside as this one is obviously disabled in the head, if nothing else."
"Well, ok - but if that lumbering zombie of a carry-out boy there says anything to me about it, I'm skinning you alive and tossing him your bones."
"I think you're more likely to be overtaken by the next glacier headed for Ohio than that poor shuffling Karloff wannabe," I sniffed. "Now let's hurry through the automatic doors with that elderly lady there so we don't have to be bothered with triggering the auto-opener with our own body mass."Alas, the scares were hardly any better inside. No matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't remember the last time I'd seen so many tired old clichés strung together in a row without so much as the shadow of a fresh idea squeezed in between them.
There was the tired-eyed manager with the cheap toupee at the never-been-cleaned customer service center attempting to bite off the head of a customer in mid-complaint.
There was the stupidly attired guy from the local soda pop bottling plant, refilling the Coke and Pepsi bottles from a single tank as people brought them back for the deposit without his bothering to even rinse them out first.
There was the almost-scary Muzak of another time and place obviously meant to send chills up and down my spine but which only succeeded in making me long for the Haunted Grocery I'd visited once which had had the wit to regularly interrupt their Batty Manilow with the truly scary pleas of cashier #2 begging for someone to come verify a two-party check for her before the faceless fiends in her lane ripped her limb from limb."At least it's better than the Halloweens of my childhood," I tried to put the most positive spin on it all that I could. "My mother could only afford to send one of us to go see the Haunted Bubblegum Machine, and my sister pulled the long straw every time."
"Shut up, stop trying to squeeze the last bit of excitement out of that weird imported veggie, and come on," my wife commanded. "You start reminiscing again about your poor childhood and we'll never get out of this Hanna Barbera hell."
We joylessly shuffled on.
Past the withering fruits and potatoes which bore no resemblance to the fresh and beautiful items depicted in the ad flyers exactly as if we were trapped in some low-budget version of "The Picture of Dorian Gray."
Past the puffy cans of SpaghettiOs, the oddly moving steaks in the meat case, and that regulation green slime mold slowly laying claim to the entire bread aisle.
Past the stockboy who had gotten himself "horribly" stuck between the swinging doors leading to the back room where unwashed Chinese coolies could clearly be seen smoking and drinking as they unloaded merchandise from a hijacked garbage truck just inches away from huge tanks of propane....
Of course the bleach and drain cleaners were intermingled with the fruit juices and baby food.
Of course the sounds of distant chains being rattled always turned out actually to be The Confused Elderly Woman Roaming The Aisles Forever With A Cart With Three Badly Jiggling Wheels.
Of course the teenage temp with the out-of-control floor waxer never quite managed to kill anyone...."This really is pretty sad," my wife confided as she stepped over the sixteenth Mystery Spill of the night.
"Indeed it is," I readily agreed as we walked between freezer cases displaying regrettably cartoonish thermometers reading 82 degrees.
As the umpteenth wide-eyed "lost" little tyke brushed rapidly past our legs, wailing for someone - anyone - to help her find a place to pee, I decided I'd had enough.
"If I see one more item stamped with a price that has no relation whatsoever to the intrinsic value of the item and which wavers and disappears before any of it can make its way into the hands of the farmer most responsible for producing that item, I'm gonna slit my wrists with one of these box openers the stockers have conveniently left scattered across this tediously slippery floor," I whispered to my wife.
"Should we swing past the fish case on our way out and liberate those clawed creatures that begged us to break the glass and save them?" she inquired, mocking the tears one such rubbery creature had actually elicited from even my jaded eyes.
"Let's just scoop up a handful of those crushed cigarette butt samples they were offering atop the deli counter and get out of here," I hissed impatiently over the audible throbs of my worsening headache.
The decision made, we virtually trampled the kids sneaking tastes of canned dog food in our haste to get to the check-outs and be done with the place.
After a mere 67 minutes in the Express Lane behind a headless coupon addict, we were free - free!
Not even our being rung up as "2@$1.69" after the quick eye scan of an Evil Cashier Who Obviously Never Gets Any could dampen our spirits as our feet brought us closer to the exit.
"Need help carrying your shock out to your car?" an amateurishly pimpled youth wanly inquired after he'd smashed my wife's melons with a case of beer and offered to suffocate me with my choice of a paper or plastic bag.
"Umm, I think I can get it - thanks," I almost managed to get out before shrieking with laughter at the sorry absurdity of it all.
"You know, we never did pay our admission," my wife confided to him, probably more to distract the poor fellow from my rather embarrassing collapse into a heap of giggle-emitting flesh than out of any sudden infection of morality.
"Admission?" the boy stuttered, refusing to step out of his role as a brainless cog trapped forever in a soul-destroying capitalist system despite having obviously been on everyone's feet all day.
Being the basically kind-hearted person I am, I could have just slapped my wife for putting him on the spot like that.
Instead I merely raced home and pushed her buttons extra vigorously.
After soaping both sides of her glasses, of course.
Thank goodness Halloween comes but once a year!
Back To A Slightly Less Deadly Dull Entry
Home To Paw Through The Treat Bag
In Hopes Of Finding That
One Entry That Won't Rot Your Brain
Forward To Halloween Day Itself
Just To See If Any Ghouls
Can Actually Resist Carrying This
Entire Journal Off To Hell
(©1999 by Count Clueless)
