The Halloween in the Hoosegow That Almost Wasn't

Halloween is my favorite holiday. Candy and costumes and creepy-but-playful aesthetics pretty much construe a trifecta, as far as I'm concerned. For ten years I've decorated my cell on Halloween and thrown together a massive mess of nachos to feast on. But everything ends. Entropy, that gray-faced, ruined daughter of thermodynamics, guarantees the gradual decline of all things. Why should my long-standing tradition be an exception?

Let me be clear: it's not that I wasn't feeling the spirit of the season. Mornings in Bonne Terre have been black and cold; the evenings have been darkly cloud-smeared. This is my kind of weather. I waited all summer for it, and now that it's here, I meet it with gratitude.

Still, I have been feeling distant. The twenty-fifth anniversary of two friends' deaths – the catalyst for much teenage misery and my twenty-one-year wrongful imprisonment – passed like a dim shadow over last week. I dwelled in it, a houseguest aware that he's outstayed his welcome. Feeling down, but not completely dour, at least I moved through my days with purpose. I threw myself at work with the usual appreciative attitude and followed my joy into the free hours. Then, at some point I read about an ancient Buddhist exhortation to "dance in the charnel ground" – that is, in a graveyard. That's a close approximation of the attitude I seek to cultivate. It's not about loving misery, it's about loving your life and living it, fully awake in every moment. There's only so much that an imprisoned All Hallow's Eve aficionado can do, but something clicked for me in that moment I read that, and I resolved to, if not dance, at least do a little two-step on the prison yard. Considering how much time I spend at work, and the few waking hours I'm actually in the cell, decorating in the housing unit seemed kind of futile. So, a week ago, I carried all of my decorations to work with me and asked my coworkers if they'd be interested in spookifying the place a bit. They threw themselves into it. We put skulls on the server cabinet and hung origami monster heads from the big screen. We stuck spider cutouts to the walls. A paper jack-o'-lantern leers from the refrigerator door in the kitchenette. Suddenly, every member of Team XSTREAM has caught the spirit of the season. Everyone wants to talk about spooky movies. A few of them are throwing in together to make a Halloween pizza.

And me? I broke down and bought the ingredients for nachos that I'd been thinking of doing without. I also scheduled a Bauhaus concert film to play on one of the TV channels that I run. Between the gothy music, the gluttonous junk-food gorge, and several other great entertainment options (my coworker scheduled David Lynch's Eraserhead for his channel), it seems that my feet have found their rhythm tonight.

Halloween in the Hoosegow VI: The Ritual

In prison, a mask is escape paraphernalia, even if it's just a paper cutout. If you're caught with one, you'll catch six months in the Hole. Giving anything away is similarly against the rules, assuming you're unlucky enough to be seen by a staff member petty and bored enough to write the conduct violation. Point being, taking trick-or-treaters at your cell door on Halloween can be a small challenge. I accepted it with childish eagerness befitting the season.

Housing unit rules be damned, on the first day of October, I hung six monstrous heads from the doorframe, stuck spiders and skeletons everywhere, and put a jack-o'-lantern on the desk. If guards wanted to act like Halloween haters, I vowed, let them come and tear my decorations down! They're not dangerous or offensive, and they all come down after a month, regardless.

I've been blogging about my love of Halloween for years. This semiannual series — my "Halloween in the Hoosegow" posts — has run the stylistic gamut, from straightforward nostalgia to overwrought horror-fiction parody, and, like the holiday itself, never gets old for me.

It takes a while to get settled, to find a groove in any new place. I celebrated my first Halloween at ERDCC in what's become my traditional way, sharing mega-nachos with my cellmate, the only guy here with whom I was really acquainted at the time. And while that was a fine, filling evening, Hopper wasn't the kind of guy who made much of a fuss over All Hallow's Eve (or any occasion at all). A certain élan is called for, nights like tonight, which is why this year is kind of special.

After a year and a half, I know some people. Several are in my sangha, the Buddhist group that meets in the prison chapel on Thursday mornings. I wanted to do something nice for them, so I bought some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and jelly beans from the canteen yesterday and went full-on Martha Stewart, wrapping a Reese's and one of each flavor of jelly bean (except black) in a baggie, which I cinched with white thread and attached a black paper spider cutout to. I made seven bags — one to give to each member of the sangha.

While I crafted giveaway candy bags, Jeff, my cellmate of the past three months, busied himself making sour taffy for trick-or-treaters. His ingredients? Powdered peach drink mix, powdered lemonade mix, coffee creamer, and water. Where there's a will, there's a way. I was surprised by how well it turned out. We discussed how to deal with those who come to our cell door. Jeff proposed requesting paperwork proving they're allowed to participate in Halloween (i.e., no sex offenders). It's Jeff's candy, so I'll let him handle that bit on his own, if he chooses to impose restrictions.

I'll likely be too full to care what he does. The refried beans are already warming up. I'm prepping the rest of our copious nacho toppings, bumping my Halloween playlist as I slice the olives, mouth watering in anticipation. I'm cooking for four here. Luke and Tim, our neighbors across the wing, are going in on this meal. Preparing it early was necessary to accommodate their work schedules. The hour doesn't matter, though. Halloween is Halloween, no matter what time of the day you choose to celebrate it.

And as the dark of night creeps on, I'll slip into a comfortable position for the lineup of horror movies on cable TV, my hunger thoroughly satiated and my burst of seasonal rebellion ended. Tomorrow morning, I'll pack up the decorations and bury them in my footlocker. There's a time and a place. Of course, sometimes it's not the place, then you've got to make it the place — hence, "Halloween in the Hoosegow."

Halloween Hootenanny

Whether your Halloween plans include haunting the streets or lurking around your own home, a good playlist is essential. I spent some time curating a very Byronic one, heavy on the retro darkwave and post-punk sounds that I love, to soundtrack my spooky shenanigans. Since the Eve of All Hallows is the only time a year when other people don't seem to mind listening to the same music as me, I figure my playlist is worth sharing. Comments are encouraged (especially if I missed something)!

Siouxsie & the Banshees, "Halloween"

Ministry, "Every Day Is Halloween"

Dead or Alive, "Something in My House"

Killing Joke, "Night Time"

Echo & the Bunnymen, "People Are Strange"

The Cure, "Lullaby"

Gary Numan, "Asylum"

Rasputina, "Transylvanian Concubine (Yes Sir, Mr. Sir Mix)"

Concrete Blonde, "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)"

Depeche Mode, "Black Celebration"

Oingo Boingo, "Dead Man's Party"

Twin Tribes, "Shadows"

Bauhaus, "Bela Lugosi Is Dead (The Hunger Mix)"

Dave Ball and Jon Savage, "Dead Neon"

Halloween in the Hoosegow V: The Festival

[With apologies to H.P. Lovecraft]

I was far from home, and the spell of the season was upon me. In the twilight I felt it all around. And because my custodians had forced me to this old town of Bonne Terre, to my new prison, I was compelled to make the most of Halloween alone, without my compatriots in the Octoberfeast Cult. We were now scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none else alive could understand. At ERDCC, I was the only one.

The mad Arab Abdul Alhazred's forbidden Necronomicon, in the awkward Low Latin translation of Olaus Wormius that I have read only fearful excerpts from, offers means by which to summon things too hideous for sanity or consciousness, but because an old tradition compelled me, I resolved myself to strange feasting on this night.

When I added tortilla chips, nacho cheese, chicken meat, and the blasphemous motley of other ingredients to my canteen list I was half afraid. Some fear had been gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my surroundings, and the bleakness of my company, and the queerness of their disinterest in basic cable's spooky October movie lineup. And when I saw how much my canteen order totaled I was fully afraid, because I had never carried the entire cost of the Octoberfeast before. But I was not afraid long, for my Southern-accented cellmate had a glad response to my Halloween decorations that reassured me; and though he made remarks that he was a dumb country boy, he expressed a quaint and ancient welcome of my weird fanaticism, saying, "It sounds good. Hell, I'll throw in with you on that!"

The calendar taunted me. After Thursday's canteen pick-up I needed to wait six days before I could commence the festival. Madness threatened to consume my soul. I felt ferocious and inexplicable cravings.

When the day arrived and five o'clock struck, however, Hopper, my cellmate, stood up, glided to his footlocker in the corner, and got two containers of cheese. Then he started for the microwave. The tortuous line to that incredibly coveted appliance formed quickly. I looked out, amid hushed summonings of the nachos' oozing brown refried-bean soul, and saw Hopper's progress along that sinuous line of dinner-marchers seemed very horrible, and as I strewed the lurid shimmering shreds of chicken across the vast expanse of that unimaginable meal, the wait seemed more horrible still. I thought I heard muffled taunting: The beans are getting cold! But what frightened me most was the flaming column our cheese could become if Hopper wasn't mindful of the timer. For in all that seething combustion no warmth would lay, but only the clamminess of an unsatisfied stomach.

Presently Hopper returned with the cheese and pointed to the heap of deeply buried chips that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain wholly remember. "That's all mine?" he gasped. I nodded in response. That he did not scream and bring down upon us all the hungry legions the neighboring cells held was a wonder.

When I went delirious at eating too much unthinkably processed, preservative-laden foodstuffs, I rested. There is something on my calendar about The Pit and the Pendulum on TCM tonight. So I will watch that nerve-shattering film, and shudder doubly because Poe's tale is indeed not new to me. I have read it before, let the years conceal what they might; and I know too the mad Arab's charnel work, full of phrases I dare not quote. Abdul Alhazred writes, I will only say, a recipe for deluxe nachos that is delicious.

A Seasonal Stew of Spooky Cinema

For the first time in sixteen years' imprisonment, October will be chockablock with shocks, thanks to my move to a new prison with a superior cable package. This Halloween aficionado and movie buff was pleased, after coming through one TV programming guide, to find so many of the suspenseful, horrific, and just plain eerie films that I love filling the weeks leading up to the thirty-first. I'm excited. Not counting the classics that'll show up all month long on the in-house movie channel — stuff like Carnival of Souls and Black Dragons — here's my must-watch list:

 

• The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
• The Lady Vanishes
• The Thing from Another World
• Nosferatu
• The Seventh Victim
• The Night Digger
• Faust
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Return of the Living Dead
• 28 Days Later
• The Old Dark House
• Isle of the Dead
• Bedlam
• The Dead Zone
• The Witches of Eastwick
• Fright Night (1985)
• White Zombie
• Mark of the Vampire
• Hellraiser
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (three different productions!)
• Curse of the Cat People
• The Bad Seed (1985)
• Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte
• Island of Lost Souls
• Mad Love
• Spirits of the Dead
• Black Sabbath
• The Pit and the Pendulum

 

There's also a PBS miniseries, The Woman in White, and my trashy FX pleasure, American Horror Story, to follow. No way could my little stash of movie snacks hold out through all of these. I wouldn’t want it to. Eating too much junk too early would spoil me on that epic junk-fest that is Octoberfeast. (Stay tuned for the fifth of my "Halloween in the Hoosegow" posts, by the way, coming in four short weeks!)

Halloween in the Hoosegow IV: Rise of the Octoberfeast Cult

1.
Wolf slammed bones at his usual table, howling every time he scored. Batty flitted around the wing, searching for someone to bleed, the mooch. Some poor wretch wailed a forlorn dirge. The zombies trudged in circles. It seemed like just another evening in B-Wing of Housing Unit 3.

I was on the phone 1 discussing matters inconsequential with a friend. Idly, the way one does in voice-only conversations, I glanced about. The nothing-spectacle held little of interest, just the usual skulking creatures, the gargoyles peering from their vantage, and the ghosts of men drifting through my sight. Then there came, from the shadow of a doorway, two pale men.

Leading, looking chronically unrested, was the one of average build. His backswept black hair vaguely reminded me of some unplaceable movie star. His portly peon wriggled up the staircase behind him, protectively hunched over something gathered in the hem of his shirt. I thought of a child afraid that her skirtful of freshly picked daisies might blow away in an errant wind.

Both men reached my door at the top of the stairs, knocked, and sneaked sidewise looks in my direction. What was this? My mild amusement gave way to nascent suspicion.

Doyle, my cellmate, opened the door and they spoke. His expression, as he apprehended whatever the Grub's shirt held, bespoke doubt. The three of them turned my direction, said a few additional words, then averted their gaze again. It was starting to feel like a conspiracy, unfolding right before my eyes.

The Grub stepped into my cell. He re-emerged in a moment, shirt empty. I said goodbye to my friend.

We passed on the steps, the odd pair and I. The tired-looking superior smirked in response to my inquisitive look, exposing a single gleaming canine, but he said not a word. When I entered, Doyle, bewildered, was arranging several tiny heads on the desk.

"They heard you're into Halloween," Doyle said. He rotated an origami skull to face us. "The movies, the candy — they know about the nachos, Byron."

"Then these are an offering."

Doyle nodded. "Seems so. You gonna let 'em in?"

2.
Dawn was hours away when I tracked them down, the men who left the heads. Bobby's eyebrow peaked and the Grub's cheeks plumped with a smile at my approach.

"We knew you liked Halloween," Bobby explained.

"Like, that you were super into it," added the Grub, obviously alluding to my infamous All Hallows Eve ritual.

"Well," I said, "I can't say I ever decorated my cell before. Besides putting up whatever Halloween cards I get from friends."

"We got this book of origami monsters — witches, demons, dragons. It's pretty cool." Bobby hiked his thumb at his larval companion. "All he's been able to make are the heads, though."

"The scarecrow's fucking impossible," the Grub said, scooting his wireframes up the bridge of his tiny nose.

"I draw the faces, then stitch the loop of string on top. We hang ours along our shelf, like little sombrero dingle-balls."

If they were trying to bribe their way into my Halloween-Night Nachorama, I thought, this was a soft pitch. Neither mentioned candy, chips, or Brett, the mutual acquaintance who no doubt spilled the beans to them about last year's celebration. (Although, anyone else might have. The whole wing witnessed us transporting his half of the feast like a corpse, on a beach-towel improvised stretcher.) Theirs seemed like genuine love for the holiday.

The Grub intimated that he had more decorations coming in the mail. Cardstock window dressing. He offered to share some with me, "Y'know, if you want."

I did want.

3.
Bouncing around to Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party," I scattered olive slices. Above the desk dangled six grotesque little boxy heads on orange thread — a werewolf, a ghost, a reptilian beast, a rawhead zombie, a skull, and a ghoulish scarecrow. From the wall leered a magazine clipping of a Chris Mars painting. A paper cutout jack-o'-lantern seemed to laugh at the obscene size of my culinary monster.

This was the year of the largest nacho spread yet, big enough that one could use it as a crunchy bean-and-cheese-filled pillow. The Grub wriggled expectantly, hungrily watching me put on the finishing touches. In his fingers, the sheet that he and Bobby would use to move their third of this massive undertaking downstairs. Bobby and Doyle chatted about their hopes for tonight's American Horror Story. It did feel like a party.

I drizzled a perfect white zigzag of ranch dressing. Brett arrived.

"It's candy pizza," he told us, passing out everyone's container of his own outrageous invention. "The crust is graham crackers and vanilla wafers."

I inspected it through the plastic. "Peanut butter cups, Butterfinger, peanuts, M&Ms…. Are those jelly beans?" Brett nodded.

"I used Hershey's syrup, too. The white stuff is melted ice cream."

"You're a madman."

A neighbor peeked over everyone's shoulders to see what the fuss was about. "Holy shit," he laughed. "Y'all are goin' crazy with this Halloween thing."

Bobby wielded his menacing eyebrows. "You could join us…"

"Yessssss," I hissed. "We demand only the smallest sacrifice."

The neighbor vamoosed, and we descended on our frightful victuals.

Halloween in the Hoosegow III: Fresh Blood

Rain claws my window as October's final light, shocking crimson, bleeds away. I am too intent on the task at hand to be distracted by Nature's fit, and barely notice when a crash of thunder tears the air outside. Tonight's operation is urgent and nearing its tantalizing end.

Chunks of once-living tissue are piled in the bowl at my elbow. I work my instrument — quick, deft incisions — through the green flesh on my workspace, transferring each sliver to the vessel containing the others, pieces destined to soon be hungrily devoured. My hands are slicked in their briny fluid. The scent is ripe and thick in the close atmosphere of the cell. Each excision makes me salivate a little more.

I turn, retrieving a second pouch, tearing it open and letting its contents, like small discolored eyeballs, roll onto my worktop, then resume cutting olives.

For years, the monstrous, unholy feast of Halloween night has been a rite I observed alone. Certain circumstances separated me from my longtime cohort, Zach, but the ritual's draw was more powerful than solitude, and I pressed on, constructing my cyclopean heaps of nachos — impossible for any mortal man to altogether consume — for myself. It was not always easy. The pendulous burden of so much refried beans, cheese, shredded chicken, picante sauce, olive slices, and ranch dressing laid to rest on a wide plot of tortilla chips was often nigh on too much for my body and soul to bear. Some nights I pushed away from the piles of it, gasping, fingers smeared with evidence of my atrocious hunger, and felt a sulfurous flare from the Abyss belch out of my throat, demonic and fulminant, then resumed my ravenous feasting.

Tonight, though — tonight will be different. Mine will not be the only constitution tested by this ritual of gross overconsumption.

My youthful initiate is named Brett. He came to me wearing innocence on his face, all wholesomeness, but I saw within him an emptiness, a kinship. Beneath Brett's aura of good health and respectability, a voracious beast-man, kept under psychic lock and key, howled and grasped for hot, melty, fatty cheese food product over corn chips. He'd read foul texts on my impious All Hallows Eve exploits. His curiosity about them was not idle.

In the weeks leading to tonight, Brett became my willing acolyte, and under my tutelage subjected himself to the fell rituals: Hersheys bars with Hellraiser, jelly beans with The Shining, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups with It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Brett is as prepared as any man could be. I have shown him the ways. Tonight he will prove himself.

Lightning shatters the gloom as a knock — a barely-there rapping — comes at the steel door. The look in exposes his fear at what he will see. I tell him he will have to stanch that timidity, standing aside so his widening eyes can apprehend this year's creation splayed across the surface where I've been toiling.

A profane word escapes his lips, further language beyond reach. Before such an abomination as I have made, its unspeakable dimensions, its colors beyond description, all utterances are meaningless. This way, dear reader, lies madness.

Brett hands me what he's brought: an icy Pepsi. I crack it open and the insanity begins.

Some Thoughts on Last Week’s On the Case with Paula Zahn

The last couple of weeks have been strange ones. At first I thought it was just Octoberfeast — my annual candy-and-treat binge — coupled with the pre-Halloween lineup of holiday favorites on ABC Family. Last week, though, when I heard that On the Case with Paula Zahn announced their show about Anastasia WitbolsFeugen’s murder, I suddenly had something to point at and go, “Yeah, that’s what’s distracting me.” It’s as if I’d been pre-empting my regular schedule in favor of the absent-mindedness to come.

I had no idea the show was being filmed. You’d think a producer worth his or her salt would make at least a perfunctory effort to include the condemned man’s words, if for no other reason than to proclaim, like a carnival barker, Ladies and gentlemen: evil in the flesh! Thrill and gape, viewers, at the sinister visage of the Soulless Man! The perfect seasonal freak show, seventeen years (nearly to the day) of Anastasia’s grisly death. But they needed no interview, not really. Old photographs of the man as a boy, togged out in all his black-and-silver goth finery, were far more superficially tantalizing.

The outcome was predictable. Or so I’m told. The cable package to which Crossroads subscribes doesn’t include Investigation Discovery, and that might be just as well. A lot of my friends speculated that sitting through all the old talking heads — Anastasia’s emotional wreck of a father, the histrionic prosecutor, the ex-girlfriend whose vengeful lies cost me the rest of my life — more than by the surreal feeling of being talked about on TV, I’d be bothered by the sense of déjà vu harking back to my four-day trial, when the things that I thought most crucial to my defense were silenced by a misguided arbiter. At best, Paula Zahn’s show might’ve made me laugh for all its egregious faults and inaccuracies. (Since an ability to laugh at the badness of a thing is what carries me through the worst.)

Do I want to watch the show? Not especially. Would I, if it came on a different channel? Almost certainly. How might I respond if, hypothetically, I did watch the episode in question? By focusing renewed energy on my fight for justice... but only after another brief candy binge. I’m only human, after all.

Thirteen Halloween Haiku

I.
Spiced apple cider
Moonlit hayride, bonfire
The perfect fall night 

II.
A cold snap brings rain
We rush through its icy sting
Kids trick-or-treating 

III.
Eve of All Hallows
Spirits gambol in the streets
Loosed from within us 

IV.
Knife squeaks stabbing eyes
Scent of flesh and rent innards
Your jack-o’-lantern

V.
Small sweet waxy cones
Scarcely anyone eats them
I love candy corn

VI.
Spider guards the porch
She frightens all the children
But she’s just rubber

VII.
In the moon’s blue glow
I kiss a girl with black lips
That come away red

VIII.
My deathly pallor
Colored costumes clash with mine
I crashed this party

IX.
Fallen leaves molder
They give the breeze all it needs
To cense our season

X.
White streamers billow
Poor pumpkin heads lay there, smashed
Pranksters in the dark

XI.
Cuddle up close, dear
The undead hordes are coming
Horror-movie date

XII.
Hear the fearful shrieks
Boys and girls queue up for Hell
It’s a haunted house

XIII.
Snickers bars are good
So are mini Tootsie Pops
But, please, no wax lips

* * * * *

Haiku is descended from a form of Japanese poetry called renga. Traditionally, haiku are untitled, deal with the subject of nature, and consist of seventeen syllables divided into three lines — five, seven, then five again. The last time I wrote one was as a middle-school class assignment, so I thought it might be fun to trot the form back out today, on a lark.

Using the comments box at the bottom of this page, feel free to share your own Halloween haiku. I’d love to see what someone else does with this theme.

The Return of Halloween in the Hoosegow

Do you feel the chill? There's a faint burning scent on the breeze that sweeps from the north to nip through gaps in your coat. It is the approach of Halloween. I feel it in my marrow, the pull — a merciless desire against which I am powerless. For, on the night of the thirty-first, as the moon creeps up to bathe the world in her pallid light, I am compelled to submit to my ghastly craving... for a horror movie marathon and a one-and-a-half square-foot spread of deluxe nachos.

In accordance with the ancient ritual we set forth a couple of years ago, my hunchbacked companion, Zach (all right, so maybe he's just a little slouchy — it's called artistic license, people), and I consulted the fell grimoire that is the prison's canteen price list to begin, weeks in advance, planning and procuring all necessary elements for our diabolically calorific feeding frenzy. We thought early preparedness would ensure our homage to the nacho gods would be a worthy one. But no more are olives sold by the canteen, nor are illicit onions from the kitchen. Our aboveboard and underhanded supply chains failed us equally. Arguably worse, funds were in limited supply. Still, we amassed what we could: tortilla chips, beans, meat, cheese. Even these barest ingredients would cost us dear future comforts, but the All Hallows Eve ritual must take precedence. We would not be denied our celebration.

On the night of the fifth of October, our seasonal plans were set in motion early by the broadcast of the slick new FX Network supernatural soap opera, American Horror Story, signaling the slow creep onto TV of frightful fare. "And so it begins!" I said, a sinister mwah-ha-ha on my lips, as the show's herky-jerky opening credits ran. Oozing sexuality from its every scene, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink premiere episode was almost too much (and mildly annoying in its repeated somnambulistic exposure of Dylan McDermott's ass); though by the second week of the series my inner critic was pleased. Continued appearances by the redhead maid Moira, as Ben sees her, will assure my pruriently loyal viewership.

"You got a real thing for the girls with colored hair," said Zach, when we first discussed the show.

"No, just saucy old maids," I quipped, convincing absolutely no one.

On the sixteenth commenced the second season of AMC's zombie apocalypse drama, The Walking Dead, which inaugurated the network's "Fear Fest" programming schedule and fated Zach and me to spend the next fifteen days as braindead, hollow-eyed, sleepless trudgers. For we will wait up well later than the witching hour, fixated on our TVs, hungrily hoping for some classic horror films that probably won't even be shown.

Then, a holiday miracle: without notice, one benevolent soul out in the world of the living delivered our Octoberfeast from mere acceptability, by way of an infusion of funds to my inmate account. In the eleventh hour I was able to purchase the picante sauce, jalapeño peppers, and ranch dressing for which our ritual clamors — plus a bite of chocolate for a greedy little dessert. When Zach asked how I was able to afford proper garnish for our garish dish, I summoned my best Vincent Price imitation to mutter, "It came... from the world beyond!"

So shall our screen worship persist, night upon night, until its preordained climax, commemorated by the unholy mass (of smothered chips), on Halloween. Such is the way. The craving will not be assuaged but through our sacred rite. How else might we satiate ourselves, after all — with a glut of food on Thanksgiving? Please.

Halloween in the Hoosegow

[This post, as well as four others from The Pariah's Syntax, was selected by the editors of Meridian, a semi-annual literary journal from the University of Virginia, for publication in their twenty-seventh issue, in May 2011. The other posts to appear in that issue were "On the Scarcity of Toilet Paper" "Only A Fleeting Thing," "In Memory of Monuments," and "Joe." But just because you can read them here doesn't mean that you shouldn't order a copy from Meridian's website, thereby supporting the kind of publication daring enough to print such writings as these.]
 

There are only two things about Halloween I don't like. One is that it only gets celebrated one day each year. The other is that some people think it's acceptable to give out wax lips to trick-or-treaters — it isn't. As to the former, someone in a position of influence needs to institute Halloween as a bimonthly event. I suspect such a practice would work well for everyone. Since it is just an annual thing, though, I'm compelled to milk every minutely spooktacular moment for all it's worth. Even in prison.

Years ago, in the weeks leading up to Halloween, I made a pilgrimage to the local mega-drugstore for industrial-sized bags of generic candy corn. (As if there were such a thing as name-brand candy corn!) It seems mid-autumn is the only season US candle manufacturers see fit to add sugar to their mix and rebrand it as something edible. Yes, I realize the paradox of acknowledging the vast undesirability of candy corn while simultaneously, as I am now, salivating for it. Can anyone supply a hypothesis as to why this is? Could it be something Pavlovian about the familiar tricolor cones, conditioned within us from a young age? Or is it some deep evolutionary cause the makers of that waxy deliciousness willfully exploit? All I know is that I would eat them until my tongue was raw.

Scary movies were another tradition for me. The week before Halloween always found me screening the favorites, both creepy and corny, that I considered synonymous with the Eve of All Hallows, from The Night of the Living Dead to The Nightmare Before Christmas, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, from Universal Studios' masterful Frankenstein to Mel Brooks's mocking Young Frankenstein. My living room was a tomb, bathed in eerie television light, from which the most godawful sounds emerged to haunt the neighbors' dreams... like the songs of Shock Treatment, the 1981 follow-up to Rocky Horror.

On the day — or, rather, the night — itself, there was always a costume for me to don, always an event for me to attend, always a fantastic escape from the quotidian day-to-day, until dawn at last eased itself up from the horizon and drove me back to my lair, like the ghostly Count in Nosferatu.

The rising sun hasn't driven me westward in a long time, but I still make Halloween a special event. There are enough shockingly nonnutritious foodstuffs available from the prison canteen that my compatriot in Halloween fandom and I can splurge every year on milk chocolate and jellybeans. These sweets carry us through the marathons of horror flicks that air on basic cable, which we watch wide-eyed and poorly postured — zombified, if you like — on our bunks, surrounded by empty bags of M&Ms and microwave popcorn.

We don't stop at candy. Between the two us us, we split a couple of full-size bags of tortilla chips. Both get smothered by three pounds of pinto beans, a half-pound of cooked summer sausage, nearly a pound of spicy nacho cheese, liberal applications of picante sauce and ranch dressing, an entire freshly diced onion, and, not to overdo it, a gentle scattering of sliced Spanish olives.

This ghoulish helping of elaborate nacho-feasting is our consolation for missing out on all the apple-bobbing fun you people are having out there without us. When you're so full it hurts, it's hard to feel too awfully upset about life's injustices.

Of course, it is possible that even an enormous portion of spicy junk food won't eliminate the bitterness completely. For these situations we reserve the nuclear option: It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. No melancholy I have yet known can withstand this tag team of simple joys.