The Halloween Girl

by O'Brien, Jeff

  But back then my father and his comrades were all awarded with honorary Sheriff’s badges a week later. Even the drunken grizzly from the third floor.

  Cassie came out of her apartment to thank them, still looking as scared as she had sounded before her rescue. But my father was the first to assure her that if that asshole ever set foot near her again, he’d finish the job he started. Al and Tony echoed that sentiment with a tone of sincerity that shook me deeply.

  Nowadays, I realize that my father just liked having any excuse to beat on someone. But still, the solemnity in the air was heavy at that moment.

  I remember starting to cry and running back inside the house to do so. Ron Sullivan would have been ashamed of his boy crying, especially in front of police and neighbors. He didn’t want anyone thinking he raised some “pussy kid who’d probably end up queer”, which he referred to me as many times in my childhood. If he caught me tearing up, I’d be sure to get beaten over it at some point in the near future. Probably as soon as he finished his next drink.

  I ran back up to my bedroom to compose myself and be a distant spectator. I saw the police tell my father and his two other heroic friends to get back inside and sleep it off. I didn’t know what “sleep it off” meant back then, but as I remember that night, my father had that smell on his breath that he usually had when he came home late.

  The real moment that still chokes me up a little from that night is when after the cops drove off, instead of going inside to “sleep it off,” my father and his two buddies immediately began repairing Cassie’s front door, adding an extra bolt-lock to it just in case Brent should find a way back to her. I thought it was weird that they had a bolt lock on hand, but blue collars just seem to always have these things.

  That night certainly was ugly, as were many of the people involved, but it ended in a classic bit of American suburbia that seems to be long dead these days.

  I never think pleasant thoughts of my father, but when I reminisce on that night, I remember the brief moment that I liked the miserable prick.

  After that tumultuous night had come to an end, all was well on my quiet little street for a few months. Things had gone right back to normal. My father ignored my mother and came home late to sleep on the couch. And I went right back to thinking of him as an asshole who either ignored me or beat me, instead of thinking of him as a hero.

  The second and third floors next door continued their shenanigans and lulled me to sleep every night.

  And every once in a while, I’d catch a glimpse of Cassie on my way to school. The bruises and black eyes disappeared, and sometimes she’d even smile at me when I said hi.

  I went back to daydreaming about her at school all day, while other boys daydreamed of Christina Mauriello, the blonde princess of my fourth grade class.

  All the kids who were handsomer and more athletic than me would fight over her, and some of them would even get her attention. I just didn’t see what the fuss was all about. She was boring to me. Her natural blonde hair and trendy clothes were completely uninteresting. Thanks to Cassie, I learned early on that there was a whole lot more to beauty than conventionality.

  Christina Mauriello was not Cassie. Nobody was. And she certainly lacked the strange magnetic pull I felt between Cassie and myself.

  So on and on the days and weeks went. My parents’ drinking got worse and worse, especially my father, who in that time period entered the last phase of his life by driving into a telephone pole late one night and landing in a wheelchair until he was murdered by my mother.

  My sightings of Cassie happened more frequently as she was no longer afraid to leave her apartment. Aside from my lousy home life, my childhood had gone back to boyhood bliss with comic books, scary movies and dreams of Cassie.

  ***

  Backtracking a little.

  The very next day, after his heroic rescue of Cassie, my father beat me severely.

  He did not come home and sleep it off as had been suggested by the police. The three men who were heroes that night went out somewhere and drank heavily.

  I assume by the state that it put my father in the following day, they probably took some drugs as well.

  Now that I’m a grown man, I understand what a hangover is, as well as its different degrees of severity, and what in particular can cause the varying levels of misery.

  On a typical day, my father was just a miserable prick. This most often meant he just drank about a handle of Jim Beam and smoked a pack or two of cigarettes. His body was pretty dehydrated, which is a big factor in the misery of the next day.

  Then there were the days where I was fairly safe from his wrath because he spent most of it in the bathroom shitting his brains out. This meant that he probably imbibed mostly in the American light beers like Bud or Miller.

  But then, there were the days like that particular day, after he and his pals had saved Cassie from a more severe beating than she had already gotten, and went out to do some hardcore celebrating.

  I imagine, though I don’t have proof, that cocaine was the cause of my beating. I admit, I’ve dabbled in the substance a time or two. Not to the extent that I ever beat anyone though. However, I think that’s more a difference in my father’s personality and my own. Maybe a case for some nature vs. nurture debate.

  I only imagine cocaine was the reason for the beating because on the day of the beating my father had that same short-tempered twitchiness that I saw in myself the handful of times I woke up after a blow bender. You can imagine why my experimentations with the drug never went beyond the count of a “handful.”

  So there I was that morning, or early afternoon, I’m not exactly sure which. I do remember that until my father emerged from his bedroom, all was peaceful.

  I was still happy in the belief that Brent would not be coming back ever again. My mother was off at work and my father was asleep. So I savored these mornings because I actually had peace and quiet in my home.

  For hours I sat on my bedroom floor playing Nintendo. I believe I was playing Duck Hunt, as I remember using the handheld gun. Could have been Hogan’s Alley as well. But that’s not important. The reason I remember that it was a shooting game was because I remember my father ripping the gun controller out of my hand and beating me over the head with it until I blacked out.

  As I sat there shooting away at either a duck or targets shaped like people, I heard the mattress creaking in my parents’ bedroom, signifying my father was getting out of bed. I hoped and prayed that he had merely tossed or turned in his sleep, but as I heard his trademark groan that meant his hungover body barely had the strength to climb out of bed, my prayers went unanswered, as always. He usually followed up his rumbling groan with a massive blast of flatulence. That morning was no exception. Most kids probably laugh when they hear their father fart. I didn’t. I firmly believe that this could be the universal test for knowing whether or a not a child hates his father.

  From the bathroom that adjoined my parent’s bedroom, I heard a heavy flow of urine hit the water in the toilet, as well as splash around all over the rim and probably the floor too. I imagined that maybe all grown men grumble and complain to themselves when they piss in the morning. Turns out that it’s just a select few miserable drunks who hate their lives and feel like shit every day when they get up.

  Waiting for the noise of a flushing toilet, I was scared as my bedroom door flung open. Why would I expect the slob to flush?

  He stumbled into my room and threw a ten dollar bill at me. “You know the drill, Tommy. March your ass down to Henry’s on the Corner and get me my Jim Beam and a pack of smokes. Make it snappy. I’ll be downstairs in the living room.”

  Though I remember his words exactly, I don’t remember mine. I just remember that I offered reasonable compromise, merely asking if he could wait a few minutes and let me finish my game.

  My father’s nostrils flared in anger. I didn’t see any white powder in there, but I remember how he sniffed and cleared his throat a lot.


  For a moment longer he said nothing. Only when I further tried to reason with the man did he continue.

  “I was going to say that you could take the change to the comic book store after you came back with my booze. But now, you ungrateful little shit, not only can you not do that, but you’re going to be taught a lesson.”

  The way he began taking his belt off as he spoke will never cease to sicken me.

  I pleaded with him not to beat me. My frightened cries for help were only met by laughter and mockery.

  “Don’t beat me, Daddy,” he crooned mockingly. “Don’t hurt me! I might cry like a little faggot!”

  I guess I thought trying to block it all out and focus on the video game was a good idea. I thought wrong.

  His voice shifted from his antagonizing impression of me to his own.

  “Pay attention to me, you little shit!” he bellowed as he grabbed the plastic gun out of my hand.

  He yanked on it so hard that the cable connecting it to the system pulled the whole thing down off of the t.v. shelf. As the Nintendo crashed to the floor, I remember the screen going wild with every different color of static. Pinks and greens and blues all mingled furiously in a deafening hiss of white noise.

  Then the controller smashed against the back of my head once, twice, three times. I heard my father’s voice saying something about lessons and respect. But the next thing I remembered was waking up on the floor with a massive headache and blurry vision. I imagined my father must feel this way in the morning. No wonder he was such an asshole.

  As I awoke, I heard him fighting with my mother downstairs. She sounded scared and hopeless. He sounded like the king of the fucking world. I guess he got his booze without my help and was well on his way to the bottom of the bottle.

  I don’t remember how long I stayed down there on my bedroom floor staring up at the ceiling. But things went back to normal in my house.

  And outside my house, things had gone back to normal as well. Brent was gone and Cassie was happy and free again. I felt more connected to her then than I did before.

  Within the next few months, as my father’s drinking continued growing worse and worse, I realized a reason for this possible connection that she and I shared. After another of my beatings, I ran outside. Cassie was sitting on her front porch, and she gave me a look that spoke not only of sadness and concern, but also of fear. A fear of my father, the very man who saved her, were she to try to help me. I now know why I grew up to despise politicians and others with authority. Men with that kind of power always reminded me of my father. And I hate them all.

  But back to Cassie.

  We heard each other’s beatings and cried inside for each other.

  And that’s the way things were for a while. Cassie and I had exchanged roles and our unspoken bond strengthened as a result of it. In a strange way it felt wonderful.

  But then came Halloween, about six months after the night that the police took Brent away and put his ass in jail.

  For some reason unfathomable to me then or now, they let the bastard out.

  ***

  “You look like a fag, Tommy.”

  As I recall the night of my tenth Halloween, that is the first thing about the evening that comes to mind. My angry father’s denigrations were often my first memory of most of my days and nights from that time period leading up to this night, but that particular phrase on that night stands out, as it was a precursor of things to come later on.

  My father, who was now unemployed, wheelchair bound and government assisted, spent his days sitting in his wheelchair, drinking day in and day out. He was deteriorating faster than a corpse in the desert, and every sip he took from the bottle was like the bite of a vulture.

  After his accident, it was all downhill fast for him.

  I don’t know how he avoided any type of jail time, but I assume that since he was now an honorary sheriff due to what was probably the only heroic act of his life, he must have been given some leniency.

  He barely spoke to my mother anymore, and took most of his frustration out on me. Naturally.

  My mother had turned harder to drinking as well, which left me to be the whipping boy. Looking back, you’d think he’d have been nicer to me since I was the one who went and got his crippled ass booze and cigarettes every day. Like I said before, these were different times, when the local packie could still get away with letting a ten-year-old buy booze and smokes for his crippled father.

  I don’t know what it was that disappointed my old man about me the most. I assume it was a lot of everything about me. For starters, I was nothing at all like him. I guess he expected a football star or something like he had been as a kid. All he got by this time was a soft spoken boy who preferred listening to Metallica and reading Richard Matheson novels to playing sports. It wasn’t easy being an outcast in the Sullivan household. And something about my bizarre hobbies and mannerisms convinced my father that I was a “fag”, as he called me ever so frequently.

  Not a day went by that I wasn’t referred to as a fag or a queer or some other word to label me as a homosexual and a complete pussy. I don’t know if my father and the kids at school were in cahoots with one another, but it sure seemed that way. At school I wasn’t safe from that type of torment either, and every time I came home with a bruise or a bloody lip, my father just laughed disgustedly at me. Usually, he’d tell me that I was the reason he relied so heavily on the stuff he guzzled out of those bottles. Apparently I was his failure.

  It got to the point where I was thankful for my father’s paralysis. He had no way of getting upstairs to my bedroom, which became my one and only safe haven. For as long as possible, I would hide away in my room and take in all the music and prose that I loved so much, savoring every moment of it. But it never lasted long enough, and eventually I’d have to go downstairs to face the torment of my father.

  So there he was on that Halloween night to greet me with his favorite denigration as I walked down the stairs with my face painted up like Gene Simmons of KISS.

  I was heading off to the town square for the Halloween festivities, which they used to have in the years before those two teenagers supposedly tried to burn the church down in a Satanic ritual. After that the town’s administration grew rather uptight about things like Halloween.

  I remember that night being remotely interested in seeing a band of local musicians who were playing a Halloween themed concert, and I wasn’t going to let my lack of friends keep me from going and seeing them play the Halloween songs they had been advertised to play. I had a vision of them being some brutal heavy metal band with evil sounding music that I would delight in. And, anywhere there was to be free fried dough and popcorn for kids under twelve, I was sure to be. Food was among heavy metal and books in my circle of non-human friends.

  I don’t remember it that well; it was really a very minor event of the evening. From the best I can channel that part of the night, it seems the band was lousy and played The Monster Mash at least three times and the theme from The Munsters definitely more than once as well. Most people didn’t even get the connection of that catchy instrumental song to the day on the calendar, or even have any idea what the song was.

  I decided things had gotten dumb when the mayor ran out into the crowd in a chicken costume and the band started playing The Chicken Dance, so I grabbed a huge bag of hot popcorn and started walking home to watch my VHS copy of Halloween. My biggest challenge of the night, or so I thought, would be making the bag of popcorn last until I got home. Not a simple task for a lonely fat kid.

  I had originally intended to just watch the episodes of my favorite show Are You Afraid of the Dark that I had recorded from television onto a VHS tape, but after my Allhallows Eve was ruined by the fucking Chicken Dance, more drastic measures had to be taken.

  If only I had the faintest premonition of what waited just around the corner, I’d have stayed and enjoyed the lame festivities.

  Disappointed, I started dwelli
ng on most other disappointments in my life as I made my way home. You look like a fag, Tom, I kept hearing in my head over and over again. Perhaps I was preparing myself to get back home and walk past the living room where my father would surely greet me with one of those abhorrent lines.

  Most likely.

  As I turned onto Norwood Street a not so welcome distraction came along in the form of darkness and silence. A fear that I never knew I even had began to set in for the first time. This was the genesis of my descent into a world of phobias that would rule my life and cost me many dollars on a therapist’s couch.

  At ten years old, I hadn’t been outside this late at night by myself before. It was Halloween and I expected the streets to be full of kids in costumes, being taken from house to house by their parents. I guessed they must have been finished by this point because the way home was devoid of any living soul but myself.

  I was growing more and more petrified by the nothingness that surrounded me. The overhang of dead tree limbs that lined the streets started looking like tentacles that would grab me at any moment, or crooked daggers aiming themselves right for my heart.

  The houses were all there, but they looked haunted. Plenty of cars were parked along the sidewalk too. But they all seemed to disappear into the pitch black abyss that was swallowing me whole.

  The crisp, cool air turned freezing all of a sudden. The dead leaves that had been blowing gently around in the breeze stopped moving. I felt my heart begin to race, beating against my ribcage. Cold sweat beaded on my forehead, which left a white stain from my makeup on the sleeve of my jacket as I wiped it with my arm. I stopped for a moment, paralyzed in fear.

  I know all of these things now by the name of Panic Attack. I sensed doom. The urge to piss, shit and puke all at once boiled over inside me. It seemed as if I knew what was coming next, except it was more than just an imbalance of chemicals in my brain. I was actually right. Something fucked up was indeed about to happen.