COLUMN: Hiding out for Halloween
I’m a chicken. I admit it; I’m a big fat chicken. This is not an easy thing for a man to say, let alone put it out there for anyone that might stumble onto this article.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I do all the scary man things around the house a guy is supposed to do. I kill all the spiders. I chase the raccoons out of the yard. And I even get down in the crawl space under my house every once in awhile; where someday I know I’m going to have an Indiana Jones-like experience where I happen upon some buried treasure under there, guarded by millions of snakes, spiders and praying mantises that crawl into my hair and down my shirt.
And for those of you who are still thinking about it, yes, I am white trash enough that I have to chase raccoons out of my backyard occasionally.
What I’m truly a pansy about is the Halloween, scary kind of stuff. I’m talking about the psycho with a hatchet who has broken into your house and will not die even if you shoot him 46 times, start him on fire and repeatedly run him over with your car.
When I was a kid, I was watching Siskel and Ebert’s “At the Movies” on television. I was just minding my own business, letting the television suck my brain cells dry and lull me into that comfortable numbness only TV can. This particular episode, the two movie critics were doing a Halloween special and were showing clips of their picks of the best and worst of Halloween thrillers.
Well, they showed a clip of the movie “Halloween” with Jamie Lee Curtis, where Michael Myers is coming after her and she runs into a closet to try to get away from him. For anyone who might have seen this movie, it is not exactly “Fraggle Rock” and I probably peed my pants at least three times as I was running away from the television.
After that, going outside after dark and by myself was always on a dead-sprint basis and my mother still wonders to this day what the hammer and wooden stake I used to keep under my pillow were for.
I found out as a pre-teen that even though my body had already begun developing many of the wolf-man-like qualities of the body hair and a large snout I have today, I was still a big baby when it came to scary stuff. I discovered this when I visited a local haunted house.
I thought I’d be fine, there were four of us and really what could happen? Let’s just say that when a guy dressed up in a hockey mask came out under a strobe light with a running chain saw chasing after me, I think first my stomach tried to get away by climbing up my esophagus, then my life flashed before my eyes (with a really cool strobe effect) and then I think I yelled out something really intelligent like, “Hey – don’t you – Aahh!”
But times are different now; I’m an adult, a man. I have a wife and children to protect against anything that runs the risk of harming them or at least that is what my wife thought until one night we borrowed the first of the “Scream” movies and popped it into the old video player.
Literally within minutes of this movie starting, my wife found her champion, her testosterone-filled hunk of manliness, in the next room clinging to one of the legs of the kitchen table with a Glow Worm in one hand, a Swiss Army knife in the other and some John Denver playing on the stereo (because really, what evil thing could stay around while “Rocky Mountain High” is on?).
So, as Halloween approaches and many of you head out to haunted forests and dark corn mazes, don’t bother coming by to pick me up. I’ll be spending Old Hallow’s Eve in a well-lit, very secure part of my house listening to the likes of tunes titled “Sunshine On My Shoulders,” “Back Home Again,” and “Thank God I’m A Country Boy” as I view every Julie Andrews movie ever made and watch re-runs of “Growing Pains.”
Bryce Casselman’s column appears in The Statesman every other Monday. Comments can be sent to yanobi@hotmail.com