The Halloween Heart
On the first Halloween after I moved to Southern California, I bought enough miniature Snickers bars to fill a pickup truck. The house I’d rented was on a block with kids, and as a single woman, I wanted to establish credibility.
I carved two big pumpkins and hosed off the porch. The moth-spattered porch light got a fresh bulb. When night fell, I sat down in my living room, poured a glass of wine and waited for the doorbell. It never rang. For months, little Snickers haunted my thighs.
Much later, I learned that my neighborhood, with its warrens of working-class apartments, was not especially popular with the Halloween crowd. The kids I’d seen running past my driveway had piled into vans and beat-up station wagons that night and, in true Southern California tradition, commuted to better pickings on homier blocks.
This was my first lesson in Halloween, L.A.-style, which is actually a variation on the L.A. style of holidays in general: If you weren’t raised here, the Los Angeles version of whatever holiday you grew up with will disappoint unless you re-imagine your tradition from scratch, from the heart up.
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Maybe this is the way it is for any outsider in any city, but the facts of urban life feel especially poignant in L.A. on Halloween. Halloween is such a rural ritual, and there isn’t much left of what used to be the American countryside, in part I think because television has done such a good job of teaching even people in the boondocks how to act like they’re from L.A.
I grew up in that American countryside, in rural Pennsylvania, and this is what it used to be like on Halloween: Night would fall, so cold you could see your sister’s breath. Under your costume, you wore long underwear. Outside, the air would smell like smoke and apples and rotten leaves. The corn would have all been harvested, and you’d have to step carefully as you cut across the fields, because the dried cornstalks poked from the ground like spikes.
There were no sidewalks. Against the moon, the silhouette of bare birches and red oak trees made you think of the Headless Horseman and Ichabod Crane. You’d find your way in the dark to people’s doorsteps, and if they were old people, sometimes they’d make you come inside and sing for your candy or orange or popcorn ball.
Through the moist eyeholes of your little mask, everything looked weird--the knickknacks in the living rooms, the dirty dishes in the kitchens. You’d sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Kum Ba Yah” and get the heck outta there, dragging the littlest kids by their woolen sweater sleeves.
We had an undertaker--maybe he is still living back there--whose name was (no kidding) Mr. Strange. He’d joke that when he died, he was going to put an unmarked black tombstone on his grave, so that people could be right when they happened by and remarked, “Isn’t that strange?”
One Halloween, we knocked on his door, and it was opened by a weeping, 3-foot-tall man in a business suit. He glared at us, eye to eye, and then pointed to some mourners and a casket inside. “Shhh!” the tiny man said, and we bolted for our lives out through a cornfield, our minds reeling with Munchkins and funerals and Mr. Strange.
They don’t show Halloweens like that on television, and I wonder whether there are any children who are sheltered or backward enough anymore to be spooked at the mere existence of unfamiliar short people or morticians with odd names. Here in L.A. Nation, there’s not much room for the simply spooky because real life is so fraught with fear. In the city, every day is Halloween.
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Last Halloween, I was in a hurry to get home from work in time to take the kids trick-or-treating, so I took surface streets. Heading out of downtown Los Angeles, I passed a group of small children in little costumes, marching hand in hand past boarded-up buildings and bail bondsmen’s offices and vacant lots.
They were so little and so brave, there in the dark among the broken bottles, and I thought, “What could be scarier than to live here every day?” With all my heart, I hoped that someone was waiting at home for them with a beat-up station wagon, waiting to spirit them off for one night to a street that was homier and less haunting, a place where every house had a porch light and a jack-o’-lantern and little Snickers bars.
A place where even a city childhood could be, if not innocent, then at least lasting enough that there was still time for the merely surprising and vaguely bizarre. A place where a night like Halloween could be re-imagined as a gift for a nation of children who see so very much so very soon, a night that could be offered like a bowl of candy, from the heart up.
Shawn Hubler’s email address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com
