When Halloween Was Just a Doodie Call

October 1998
When Halloween Was Just a Doodie Call
By Bob Coskrey

Halloween has changed quite a bit over the years. There are a tremendous variety of sophisticated masks and costumes now as compared to when I was growing up in the 40s and 50s. I always wanted to be either a soldier, or cowboy, a pirate, or a policeman, a trend, if it had continued, that would certainly have gotten me an audition with the “Village People” in the 70s.

Some kids used to just wear a black mask covering their eyes, the kind paradoxically enough, only worn these days by male porn actors—I mean performers—who are of course, involved in a more immediately gratifying form of trick or treat. Let me quickly add that I have never actually seen any of these movies, but I once heard Howard Stern describing them. Also let me clarify that I never listen to Howard Stern either; he just happened to be on my friend’s car radio one morning.

But I should be retro—not digressing. In those days of old, you saw a lot of children dressed up in relatively bland costumes like Disney characters, clowns, witches, skeletons, and so on; nothing like today’s elaborate superhero, politician, movie star or monster masks, and these modern-day monster disguises are really myocardially infarctingly terrifying, they’re so true-to-life.

In fact, I’m surprised I haven’t read newspaper accounts of weak-hearted homeowners collapsing, bug-eyes and chalk-faced in their doorways:

The door opens to a grisly group of Hell Raiser, Freddie Kruger, Alien Creature, and other horror movie spawned latex masks, with a Lyle (“only his mother could”) Lovett, perhaps thrown in for good measure.

The smiling, elderly, white-haired matron responds:

“Well, well, whom do we have he---iiieee!”

Clutching her chest, she crumples slowly to the foyer floor, her large basket of candy tumbling onto the porch and spilling out its teeth-corroding bounty (I’ve often wondered if the ADA is a secret supporter of Halloween).

After a five minute slugfest between the diminutive minions of evil all that remains—the spoils of war—are those revolting orange-pink slugs of Candydom, “Circus Peanuts,” which no one but a few gagging ants try to claim.

A candy corn, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, Hershey’s Kiss, Snickers ammed mouth semi-gratefully yells back from behind a quickly departing Michael Myer’s mask:
“Thanks for the treats and the trick, Grandma!”

Speaking of tricks, I don’t think my wife and I have ever had any really malicious ones played on us. I have seen some broken eggshells in our yard, a truncated garden hose once, and the very campy, innocuous, and downright dopey soaped-up windows occasionally. The most horrible effect of this latter, feckless felony was that it compelled the homeowner to wash his or her windows, with the soap being graciously provided.

I guess the most diabolical trick that we played when I was a kid was the Flaming Bag of Feces; which I am sure is still being done today, though fortunately not to us so far, though, by making this assertion, I may as well have placed an enormous neon arrow over my house saying, “On Halloween, be sure to place a Flaming Bag of Feces here.”

For those unenlightened few, this trick involved three very basic ingredients: 1) A paper bag (brown or white); 2) Matches or a cigarette lighter; and 3) Some dog excrement (it could be another animal, but it has always been a universal axiom that dog poop is always available). The concept of the trick was similarly facile: 1) You put the dog poop in the bag; 2) You place the bag in front of the trickee’s door; 3) You set the bag on fire; 4) You rang the bell; 5) You ran like Hell, not just to a secluded spot but one where you could observe the culmination of your devious endeavor, i.e. the trickee stomping wildly on the smoldering poop-filled bag, while cursing an unseen enemy, screaming once he realized the discomforting dilemma, gingerly taking off his shoe, and lastly peering about paranoically before disappearing into the house.

However, the execution of this malevolent maneuver was certainly not a given. To begin with, and I am doing this for purposes of edification only, the dog poop must be of the correct consistency (a sort of prunes and roughage diet consequence) so that when the witless victim stomps on it, you get a maximum distribution: on the pant leg, wall, and door, if possible. This required dedication and teamwork normally beyond an adolescent’s capacity: Each year, in turn, one kid would supply his dog (or any other dog he had access to, if he did not own one) with the proper repast early Halloween morning, then harvest his stinky crop that night, as close to the zero hour as possible. Sometimes, nature didn’t cooperate, but this team member still had to contribute, and every year, with the regularity of a politician’s lies, he came through. And we never asked questions, we simply admired his dedication and creativity. And in retrospect, I’m glad we didn’t. There are, after all, some things that even the best of friends shouldn’t share.
The execution was also of supreme significance. If the bag was lit too early, you risked the fire being out by the time the trickee opened the do, with your only hope then being the very slim one that this person was such a dork that he/she would just step on the “goodie” bag accidentally.

Once again, teamwork was essential. One kid (the ringer), would ring the bell, then if he could not see in a window, he would press his ear against the wall to listen for approaching footsteps. Once this confirmation was made, he whispered or signaled to the lighter to set the bag afire. This procedure pretty much always worked to perfection unless a wily victim was waiting at the door (which is why we never chose the same victim more than once).

Although I risk rupturing the lofty moral tenets of his esteemed magazine, I must admit, if only for selfish cathartic purposes, that there was an even more heinous hybrid of the Flaming Bag of Feces—glorious yet ghastly, humbling yet horrific, The Diabolical Doodie of Doom Device.

With the mere addition of a regular sized firecracker, the FBF’s effect increased twenty-fold. Distribution was pervasive, and equally as important, the trickee no longer even had to step on the bag, since there was no need to set it ablaze. Timing, however, as comedians say, was of the essence, and the execution was more hazardous, since the ringer and lighter would have to wait till the last anxiety saturated second before scampering away to safety—from the estranged victim, as well as the device itself. In fact, the initial deployment of the DDDD proved nearly to be the last, as my friend Johnny (the lighter) was victimized by a fast fuse and even slower feet. Although I was, at least, rewarded with the satisfying sight the trickee reacting violently to the bespeckled porch (“Come back here, you little bastard!”), Johnny, who fortuitously wore his glasses, had to rinse himself off with a hose before going home, figuring his story about falling into Colonial Lake was more credible than the one about standing too close to the diarrhetic bear at the Hampton Park Zoo.

I’d like to clarify, since impressionable adolescents may be reading this, that we only did FBFs and DDDDs to people who blatantly refused to participate in the rites of Halloween, the ones who turned out their lights and waited furtively in the dark for us to leave or who left their lights on but just would not bother to come to the door. We also did it to anyone who gave us those vile circus peanuts two or more years in a row.

If the youth of today no longer employ these “South Parkian” flavored tricks, I’m surely not advocating their return, I’m just spinning a tale from the good old days.

I had actually planned to do some trick-or-treating myself this year and had ordered a special Bill Clinton costume, but now the National Safety Board has recalled all of them, after determining that the pants-around-the-ankles feature results in a lot of falls. Why I oughta mail those guys a DDDD, except that I wouldn’t want to be known as the Doodie Bomber.