Once upon a time when we were small and scared of nothing, we would go out into the October dusk and beg for candy from strangers.
The pretext was that we weren't begging for candy but that we were demanding it as ransom against the vile wickedness we might do if no candy was forthcoming. The pretext was that we were little mobsters engaged in some protection racket; they would give us the Milk Duds and the Black Cow and the Sugar Babies and no soap would get on their windows or TP in their trees.
Of course we weren't little gangsters, but children pretending. Our threats were empty and the strangers knew it. We wore gaudy macabre paper costumes and cheap plastic masks and even as we--as the kids now say-- "leaned into" our characters we recognized the inadequacy of our transformation into princesses or superheroes.
Our costumes might more rightly have been considered disguises: In a dime-store mask no one would think you were actually the character the mask was meant to represent, but they might not recognize you as your childish self.
The people we begged from weren't strangers, but friends and neighbors, whether we knew them or not. Part of our community. People like us no matter what their color or their faith. They lived where we lived, and their proximity to us was enough for us to consider them fair game, of our tribe.
For we were small and scared of nothing.
Still, we told each other chilling stories. The one about the claw hanging from the door handle of the bad teenager's car after they drove away from some lover's lane in a panic.
The one about the boys who pestered the old man so by ringing his doorbell and running off that he determined to sit behind that door with a shotgun on his lap and blast blindly through it whenever he heard their footsteps on his porch. But his next visitor was--surprise--his little granddaughter, come to hug his neck and raise his spirits, but he couldn't know that, waiting there behind that door with that gun across his knees, and so he cut her in two and her blood (his blood!) slicked the floorboards, and that is why even though we were scared of nothing we never went to that house in the October dusk.
You could never say you didn't believe in ghosts because there was a Holy One that Father talked about, and if your grandmother in heaven could see and hear you and know your thoughts impure and strange, how was that different from a haunting?
As we grew up and went to football practice and day camps, the nothing that we feared began to form itself into discrete shadows that suggested man or beast or plain bad-luck cancer. Some of us met monsters in church sub-basements and at play practice, or in offices where questions of our agency were never raised.
And in those days these things were never spoken of, and we buried our traumas for the day when they would rise like zombies. Big boys and girls didn't cry, not over what is over and done with and cannot be changed.
We were less small, but like Adam and Eve we'd received the curse of knowledge, and some of us discovered in ourselves an unsettling capacity for ignoring whatever better angels bade us do. And as the first curse words slipped our lips and we understood that consequence was neither certain nor all that drear, we exulted in our potential for misbehavior.
We drove fast and drank too much and one of us wrapped a Trans Am around a tree, and before his funeral service a few of us went out back behind the cinder-block chapel and someone produced a flask of Old Crow and we poured out a little on the ground like we saw the South Central homies do on TV, and someone said something dry and bitter about how we ought to envy the young and pretty dead. And we all nodded in our starched dress shirts and ties.
For we were small and pretending to be scared of nothing.
As we get a little further on and we worry about our kids because you have to, you can't let them run wild in the October dusk in the nowadays world where there's candy-colored fentanyl and AK-rockin' would-be school-shoot-'er-uppies. Because we think that something's changed, gone off, and that the people that we used to be aren't who we are.
They drag race down Broadway and the cops don't even care.
Little kids will knock you down and take your money.
And it doesn't matter that they come at you with charts and numbers explaining how it's safer now than it has ever been in human history, or that nobody has ever put any poison in a Pixie Stix 'cept for that guy down in Houston who did it to his own kids; your brain perceives the dream as real and so it doesn't really matter whether ghosts can be detected by blacklight or by sensors that measure electromagnetic fields, you're already haunted enough by the real things you've seen and the possibilities you've imagined.
You have learned the hard way that optimism is irrational in a world run by gravity and the laws of entropy. You know everything is going to stop. The stock market will crash and we'll be left with nothing. You're not a child.
And I'm like you, all grown up and scared of a lot of things, but not so much of monsters, who are rarer than the cable shows would lead you to believe. I'm afraid of failure and of letting people down, of being able to adequately express failure and the impossibility of making myself perfectly known.
And once or twice a year a dream will evaporate away and leave me shivering in dread and guilt, in the icy certain knowledge that some long ago and wholly forgotten crime will be found out and everyone I know will suddenly and completely understand my entire life has been a furtive campaign, an attempt to dodge responsibility for some crime committed long before I was born.
We are older now and so very tender, so alert to our own limitations and the vulnerabilities of all that we love. We are rightly fearful. Which allows us the possibility of being brave.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com