“It’s a suggestion. That’s all.”
I spent the next day exhausting every last ounce of creative energy trying to come up with a decent costume idea. The last time I had dressed up for Halloween was years earlier, when I was Popeye and my wife was Olive Oyl. I wore a red striped shirt and took a hollowed-out coffee can and wrote “SPINACH” on it. Then I drank beer out of the can and smoked weed out of the corncob pipe I bought from a nearby bodega. I could taste little coffee grounds in the beer. I ended up booting into the toilet at 2:00 A.M. that night. It was a really solid Halloween. Thus, I endeavored to come up with a similarly acceptable costume.
Meanwhile, my wife went to the art store and bought all the yellow poster board she could find. She cut out the sides and the grille and the windshield of the bus, and pasted black construction paper cutouts onto the sides for windows. Then she showed it to me.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“It’s amazing,” I said.
“No, it’s not. The taillights need work.” There’s nothing that wives enjoy more than asking you your opinion and then immediately ignoring it.
She pasted on two red taillights, and I’ll be damned if the thing didn’t resemble a working school bus. If I had tried to do something similar, the child would have gone out into the street with an empty Asics box strapped to her head. This was the sort of thing only a mother could pull off. Once they’ve borne children, mothers can construct virtually any costume using scissors, felt, Elmer’s glue, and a leftover pen spring. They’re like the Special Forces of crafts.
The neighborhood we live in has no sidewalks, so weeks earlier my wife had purchased a big yellow plastic SLOW sign in the shape of a crossing guard that was thirty-two inches high, all in the name of slowing down passing motorists. She felt compelled to buy it after two teenagers in a van went tearing down the street while my kid was playing outside. I mouthed at the kids to slow down (I even made the classic “STOP” move with my hands, raising both palms like I was a palace guard halting an intruder). In return, one of the little fuckers leaned out of the window and extended a double bird, and then they both screamed, “FUCK YOU!” Then they hit the gas even harder, banked around the curve at the end of the street, and screamed, “FUCK YOU!” a second time. I turned crimson with Old Man Rage, vowing to throw rocks at the car if I ever saw it again. Not only was I pissed that they’d told me to go fuck myself, but I was also doubly angry that I had evolved into the kind of middle-aged dipshit who yells at kids to slow down. That should’ve been ME tearing down the street with a joint in one hand listening to “Rocket Queen.” I wanted to buy a shotgun and sit out on my stoop every night until they came speeding by again. My wife bought the SLOW guy sign instead.
At a loss for a decent costume, I noticed the SLOW guy wore a red cap. Then I remembered I had a yellow T-shirt. So, the day of Halloween, I scrawled “SLOW” in black marker across the front of it, and then I bought a three-dollar plain red cap from the drugstore. When fully assembled, the “costume” didn’t make me look like the SLOW guy. It made me look like a slow guy. The hat should have had a propeller on top. I became terribly concerned that wearing the costume made it look like I was making fun of special-needs children, especially when paired with a child walking around dressed as a shortened school bus.
But it was too late to change anything. Trick-or-treating time was getting closer and this was all I had. I was stuck with being the SLOW guy. No way was I going back to CVS to buy more crap. My wife threw on her costume (she was Lady Gaga, because you can put yourself in virtually any ugly outfit and declare your costume to be a Lady Gaga costume) and we were set to go. Then I realized that, while scrambling to accidentally dress myself as a retarded child, I had forgotten about the bags and bags of candy my wife had bought at the grocery store and then stashed out of my reach.
“Hey, what do we do about giving out candy?” I asked. “We’re not gonna be here.”
My wife grabbed a metal bowl from under the sink. “We can use this,” she said.
“Do we need a sign?”
“Probably.”
I raced to make a sign for trick-or-treaters, instructing them to take just two pieces of candy (my wife turned down my idea of adding “WE WILL BE WATCHING YOU” to the end of the message). Then I tore open the bags, dumped in the candy, and ate three peanut butter cups in the span of half a second.
“I see you!” said my wife.
“I’m a man, dammit! I’ll eat candy if I want to.”
“You have chocolate on your SLOW shirt.”