Michael Corleone makes fun of the Incredible Hulk
DAVID SILVA
“Stay together, don’t cross the tracks, don’t knock on any strange
doors and don’t eat any candy until I’ve looked at it first. And be
home by 8:30!”
“OK, Mom!”
It was the first time our mother was allowing my brother and me to
go trick-or-treating on our own. We would have readily agreed to
wearing pink bows in our hair in order to get out of the house before
she changed her mind.
This was it -- the night for which we had been preparing ourselves
for weeks. Michael was dressed as a gangster, of course. He was a big
fan of “The Godfather,” and his Halloween costumes were invariably
Mafia-related. My mother put the outfit together by dying his old
Holy Communion suit black, dusting off dad’s old black fedora and
borrowing a black, beaten-up violin case from a neighbor.
Mom was always really supportive of my brother’s mob costumes,
probably because they reminded her of growing up in New York.
“You look great,” she said to Michael after she finished dressing
him up. “Trust me, they’ll be calling the cops when you show it at
the door. You look good, too, Davey.”
“No, he doesn’t,” my brother said. “Dude, you look like a dork.”
And so I did. As usual, I had wanted to be a superhero for
Halloween, so my mother had hauled me down to Thrifty’s to buy me one
of those $5.99 superhero costumes. “Look, Davey!” she had said with
insincere excitement. “You get the shirt, pants, mask AND the cape!
For only six bucks!”
When the big night rolled around, I put on the costume, turned to
my mother and told her she had been ripped off. The fabric had all
the give and durability of a crayon and the rubber band on the mask
broke the moment I tried to pull it over my head.
But worse than the poor quality of the costume was that my mother
had gotten one about two sizes too small for me. It was a costume of
Superman, but by the time I had gotten it on, I looked like the
Incredible Hulk. The sleeves had ripped up to my elbows, the pant
legs had split open all the way to my upper calves. I looked at
myself in the bathroom mirror and groaned.
But I forgot about how goofy I looked the moment Mom handed my
brother and me our trick-or-treat bags.
“OK, repeat the rules back to me,” she said.
“Stay together, don’t cross the tracks, don’t knock on any strange
doors, and don’t eat any candy ‘til you’ve had a chance to look at
it,” Michael and I solemnly intoned.
“And what else?”
“And be home by 8:30.”
“Right,” our mother said. “If you eat any unwrapped candy, you’ll
get poisoned and die. Now go have fun. And be home by 8:30!”
But just before she let us go, she had to break out the Polaroid.
“OK, rub your knuckles together and look mean,” she directed
Michael as she snapped his picture. “OK, you two can go now. Remember
to watch for cars!”
“Aren’t you gonna take a picture of me?” I asked.
“No. Now both of you behave and be home by 8:30!”
The first thing Michael and I did was ditch each other, he for his
friends and me for mine. I managed to round up the Aragon brothers,
who took karate classes and were dressed as ninjas, and the three of
us immediately crossed the tracks at Randolph Street so we could hit
the more expensive homes up by State Street. In our own neighborhood,
all we’d have gotten were Chiclets and candy corn.
“Let’s go to the Clarendon Arms!”
“Yeah!”
In Huntington Park, the Clarendon Arms was this 1900s-era hotel
that was probably the center of societal gravity back in 1900, but
when I was a kid was the town flophouse for drunks, dope fiends and
ex-convicts. The reason why my friends and I thought it would be cool
to trick or treat there was that we were sure we would be the first
-- no other kids would have been that stupid.
We slipped through the back door and up the stairs of the old
hotel and started knocking on doors. Most of the doors we knocked on
went unanswered and at one, someone yelled at us to go away. We were
just about to give it up when we knocked on this one door and it
instantly cracked open, and this man in a dirty t-shirt who looked
like a cross between Giovanni Ribisi and James Woods leaned out with
a big smile on his face. The smile instantly vanished when he saw two
4-foot ninjas and a 5-foot Incredible Hulk standing in the dingy
hallway.
“Trick or treat!”
“Uh ...”
The man looked confused, and glanced back into his room as if for
help.
“Uh, it’s ... uh ... Halloween?”
He checked his wrist and realized he wasn’t wearing a watch.
“Yeah, like, I don’t got any candy or nothing, little dudes ... uh --
I think I got some crackers. I’ll go check.” And he closed the door.
“Dude, this guy’s a freak. Let’s go,” I whispered to Mike, the
older Aragon.
“Nah, man. I wanna see if he really brings back some crackers!”
The door popped back open and the man reached out and dropped some
Saltines in our bags. “Merry Christmas, little dudes!”
My friends and I spent the next two hours after that knocking on
every door we could find in a 1-mile radius. When it was over, I met
up with my brother at our prearranged rendezvous point and we plopped
down to eat as much unwrapped candy as we could before our mother saw
it and threw it away.
We both knew what we were doing wasn’t very bright, but I had a
system. If some unwrapped candy looked particularly suspicious, I’d
first offer a piece to my brother. If Michael wouldn’t eat it, it had
to be poisoned.
Finally, Michael and I came home, sweaty and so hopped up on sugar
it would be hours before we’d be able to fall asleep. Our mother
walked in and gave us a hard look.
“Were you boys good?” she asked. “Did you follow the rules?”
“Yes, we did, Mom,” we replied sincerely. And in our hearts we
truly believed we had.
We were home by 8:30.
* DAVID SILVA, a Burbank resident and former Leader city editor,
is an editor for Times Community News. Reach him at (909) 484-7019,
or by e-mail at david.silva@latimes.com.