admin
22 December 2023
Ah, Halloween. Brings back... one, two... two memories for me. Exactly two. One of them I’m not permitted to disclose in the U.S.A. until 2045. (It involves tweezers, one huge tube of bologna, and a Chihuahua in heat. I was ten! Didn’t know no better.) So, for this extra-special Halloweeny Pure Lard, I’ll write about my second Halloween memory, when I learned that there was no Santa Claus, that Abe Lincoln likely used the \"N-word\" with reckless abandon, and trips to the hospital aren’t fun. Especially on Halloween.* Especially in a plastic, store-bought Batman costume.**
It was 1981 in Elyria, Ohio. I was a lad of seven. Full of life and Jell-O Pudding Pops. Just a constant intake. It was disgusting. Despite my always-full belly, the excitement building around All Hallow\'s Eve was reaching fever pitch. This was only my fourth or fifth Halloween (since I was in an incubator my first two or three years of life), and I only really remembered one or two of them being merely siete (for our readers de España). Thanks to the then-modern advent of the still picture camera, however, one thing about all of my previous Halloweens was hard to miss: I had been Superman for every single one of them. Usually a store-bought plastic costume with a hard plastic mask of a white guy with dark hair that I perhaps unnecessarily wore rubber-banded around my white-faced and dark-haired head.
But it was always that gay pride icon Superman.
I knew I had to change, lest Superman become stale. But what to wear? What to be? A monster, like Dracula? A ghoul, like the Chinsang from the Black Lagoon (expertly portrayed by Bela Lugosi in 1948\'s classic monster comedy romp Abbott & Costello Meet Tastes Like Chicken)? A ghost? Perhaps a fantastical Serbian prince? No. I had to at least stay in the superhero genre. Just not being Superman the one day a year it wasn’t frowned upon was hard enough.
I decided that, instead of praying to gentle baby Jesus and his dad God for advice, as I did in those days of yore, it’d be more appropriate to seek answers from the Devil, seeing as how Halloween is his holiday and all.
Not sure how to go about this, I got a bottle of ketchup. It had to substitute for goat’s blood, as I didn’t know any goats and was pressed for time. I dipped my chubby finger in the bottle and proceeded to draw a pentagram on my forehead with the red condiment. I then began to intone an unholy prayer: \"Dark lord Beelzeboob, grant me--\"
Before I got any further, a bat flew through my bedroom window with a hella-loud crash! Not a baseball bat, but a flying, disease-ridden rodent!
\"A bat!\" I shouted. \"I shall become a bat and strike fear into the very hearts of that superstitious and cowardly lot... the trick or treaters!\"
I scrubbed the pentagram off my forehead because I didn’t want to scare my mom into making me go to church on Wednesday nights in addition to Sunday mornings. Pentagram-free, I went to her and demanded to be taken to Kmart at once!
Growing up, Kmart was a Halloween costume mecca. They had all the latest and greatest toy-inspired plastic costumes, as well as the toys to go with them. It was more heaven to me than a bunch of clouds! But finding a plastic Batman costume to fit me was tough. At a mere seven years, I was already six-feet tall, 250 pounds (and I haven’t stopped growing; at last doctor’s visit I was ten-feet tall and 800 pounds-- the second biggest man in history, next to Thomas Jefferson who, as we all know, was 12-feet tall and a metric ton, but that’s neither here nor there).
In the end, after much hissy-fitting from me, my mom had to buy two plastic Batman costumes that she then made into one XXXXL costume with a pair of scissors, some glue, a blowtorch, and a little willpower.
And that’s the delightful story of my first Halloween as someone other than Superman.
*As you now know, none of that Santa, Lincoln, and hospital stuff was a part of this Lard. I just wanted to hook ya\' from the get-go.
**This was kinda part of it, though. Remember? No? Then read it again, ya\' fink!***
***Sorry about calling you a \"fink\". That wasn’t cool of me to call you names because you have a memory problem.
It was 1981 in Elyria, Ohio. I was a lad of seven. Full of life and Jell-O Pudding Pops. Just a constant intake. It was disgusting. Despite my always-full belly, the excitement building around All Hallow\'s Eve was reaching fever pitch. This was only my fourth or fifth Halloween (since I was in an incubator my first two or three years of life), and I only really remembered one or two of them being merely siete (for our readers de España). Thanks to the then-modern advent of the still picture camera, however, one thing about all of my previous Halloweens was hard to miss: I had been Superman for every single one of them. Usually a store-bought plastic costume with a hard plastic mask of a white guy with dark hair that I perhaps unnecessarily wore rubber-banded around my white-faced and dark-haired head.
But it was always that gay pride icon Superman.
I knew I had to change, lest Superman become stale. But what to wear? What to be? A monster, like Dracula? A ghoul, like the Chinsang from the Black Lagoon (expertly portrayed by Bela Lugosi in 1948\'s classic monster comedy romp Abbott & Costello Meet Tastes Like Chicken)? A ghost? Perhaps a fantastical Serbian prince? No. I had to at least stay in the superhero genre. Just not being Superman the one day a year it wasn’t frowned upon was hard enough.
I decided that, instead of praying to gentle baby Jesus and his dad God for advice, as I did in those days of yore, it’d be more appropriate to seek answers from the Devil, seeing as how Halloween is his holiday and all.
Not sure how to go about this, I got a bottle of ketchup. It had to substitute for goat’s blood, as I didn’t know any goats and was pressed for time. I dipped my chubby finger in the bottle and proceeded to draw a pentagram on my forehead with the red condiment. I then began to intone an unholy prayer: \"Dark lord Beelzeboob, grant me--\"
Before I got any further, a bat flew through my bedroom window with a hella-loud crash! Not a baseball bat, but a flying, disease-ridden rodent!
\"A bat!\" I shouted. \"I shall become a bat and strike fear into the very hearts of that superstitious and cowardly lot... the trick or treaters!\"
I scrubbed the pentagram off my forehead because I didn’t want to scare my mom into making me go to church on Wednesday nights in addition to Sunday mornings. Pentagram-free, I went to her and demanded to be taken to Kmart at once!
Growing up, Kmart was a Halloween costume mecca. They had all the latest and greatest toy-inspired plastic costumes, as well as the toys to go with them. It was more heaven to me than a bunch of clouds! But finding a plastic Batman costume to fit me was tough. At a mere seven years, I was already six-feet tall, 250 pounds (and I haven’t stopped growing; at last doctor’s visit I was ten-feet tall and 800 pounds-- the second biggest man in history, next to Thomas Jefferson who, as we all know, was 12-feet tall and a metric ton, but that’s neither here nor there).
In the end, after much hissy-fitting from me, my mom had to buy two plastic Batman costumes that she then made into one XXXXL costume with a pair of scissors, some glue, a blowtorch, and a little willpower.
And that’s the delightful story of my first Halloween as someone other than Superman.
*As you now know, none of that Santa, Lincoln, and hospital stuff was a part of this Lard. I just wanted to hook ya\' from the get-go.
**This was kinda part of it, though. Remember? No? Then read it again, ya\' fink!***
***Sorry about calling you a \"fink\". That wasn’t cool of me to call you names because you have a memory problem.
artid
2735
Old Image
7_2_lard.jpg
issue
vol 7 - issue 02 (oct 2004)
section
stories