Ever since Halloween night of 1978, I’ve come to despise the holiday. I look out my windows, see a swarm of youngsters clad in various store-bought costumes, and overhear them chatter about the horrible night -- grossly distorted of course to make it scarier. I turn on the television, and after Linus is done convincing the gang that the Great Pumpkin does indeed exist, I watch a Halloween special based upon my night almost thirty years ago. Not every person has their most embarrassing night compounded and convoluted for all to see, nor can anyone claim, perhaps infamously, that the central character of this macabre tale was based on their own past exploits. I, of course, have this distinction, and it’s one I’m neither proud to have nor have to watch, over and over again. Perhaps I should clarify my story before I enter into a full-fledged rant against the silliness of All Hallows’ Eve.

Back in 1978, I was working full-time in a meat packing plant near the Delaware River. For twelve hours a day, I would slaughter a ticker-tape parade of doomed bovines with my industrial-grade cleaver, cut up the carcasses to get the best cuts of meat, and send it on down the conveyor belt for another minimum wage sap to pack it up and ship it out to families and wealthy financiers. I hated the job, not because I came home every night with animal blood soaking my previously white apron, but rather because it was a dead-end job with no prospects and much repetition. By that time I had worked there for nearly six years and had surrendered to the notion that life was a series of mundane events held together by brief glimpses of excitement, enjoyment, or even ecstasy. Of course, even the good times were just fishing trips at the local creek or wild nights at the local watering hole. It was here, on Halloween night, 1978, that my pursuit of ten cent beers and an escape from the day to day grind led to my canonization in the annals of Halloween lore.

The bar itself, located on the outskirts of the city, felt that discounting cheap beer was the only fitting way to celebrate ghosts and goblins, and so a few of my work buddies and I drove over because we had nothing better to do on a Friday night. I had washed up after another day of being soaked in the excesses of slaughtered animals, but I had forgotten to remove my cleaver from my side pocket. I figured, hell, no one will see it, and I have no desire to steal dime-worth Old Milwaukee’s from some two-bit greasy spoon.

I promised myself that I’d only have a few beers, just enough to get me buzzed, but not enough to get me drunk, but like most human promises it fell by the wayside in light of a social gathering. My table was beginning to look more like a homeless person’s paradise as empty glass bottles littered the wooden bar. Now, I have a tendency to speak a little freely when I’ve had too much to drink, and before midnight I had uttered every curse word known to man, enough to make a Puritan’s head explode. I also love to rattle off a few choice insults at my buddies, whether a fat joke, a declaration of an affair with so and so’s mother, or even some snide remarks at a certain sporting team that someone likes. While I was causing all this uproar I didn’t notice a large, serious-looking man walk in through the front door, letting in the cool breeze of a generally mild Fall night. Already being out of my mind, I thought it would be fun to start harassing this new person at the bar, and my buddies, completely hammered themselves, chided me on, like all good friends do. So I got up from my stool, wobbling a bit, and somehow made my way to the stool next to the man. He turned to me with the coldest stare I’ve ever seen, like pure evil. Of course, not even evil can silence the mouth of a loose-lipped drunkard.

“Hey-a buddy, how’s it goin’ tonight? Ya do any trick-or-treatin’?” I said, as my buddies on the opposite side of the bar laughed wildly.

“How about if you just get back to where you came from, and let me alone, before I do something both you and I will regret,” he murmured, not even turning, too cool to glimpse at this sorry sap.

“Oh, I see, ya think yous too good for me, that it?” I said, with that drunken anger that mixes all too well with spontaneous bursts of laughter.

“Just get outta here,” he mumbled, not even turning, no sign of emotion.

It was at this point, after my fat jokes and accounts of trysts with his mothers failed to rattle him, that I noticed he was wearing a Boston Red Sox cap.

“Oh, the Red Sox, huh, you must be still bawlin’ your eyes out after ole’ Bucky knocked one over the wall to take the pennant away,” I exclaimed, feigning obliviousness.

“Shut up, before I knock your teeth out,” he intoned, standing up and knocking his barstool over. I was in trouble; apparently baseball, not his weight, not his mother, touched a nerve. I can never understand certain people and their love affairs with sports.

“Hey buddy,” I yelled, watching him start to grind his teeth and myself trying to suppress laughter, “why don’t you go suck on Pesky’s Pole, for alls I care!”

It was at this point that I felt the first left hook jolt me below my jaw and send me to the floor. Amidst the persistent laughter from my buddies and the equally painful breaking of various bones in my face, the unnamed Red Sox fan continued to throttle me from all sides, somehow maneuvering me out the door and towards his car. There weren’t any lights to illuminate the bar’s parking lot, so the five minutes of punches and kicks became a terrifying ordeal in pitch darkness.

“You wanna keep talkin’ now, punk, huh? Huh? You got something to say now?” he shouted, continuing to pummel me. I couldn’t utter a single word, and before I knew it, I found myself being tied up by the man and thrust into the backseat of a car, after the man, seeming a bit frantic, began shuffling through the lot.

In the back of the unknown car I waited, all tied up, drunk, bruised, and bewildered. After five or ten minutes the man still didn’t show. As I began to slip into unconsciousness the front door opened suddenly and I glimpsed the silhouette of, of all things, a young woman. As she tossed her purse on the front seat and tuned the radio to play some random disco beat, I tried to gather my faults and understand what was unfolding in the front seat. Who was this woman, the girlfriend of the Red Sox fan? Were they planning to dump me in the river? Where was the guy anyway?

The car hummed on and pulled out of the parking lot, driving towards some unknown location. As I shifted around, trying to hatch some cockamamie escape plan, I remembered the cleaver in my pants pocket. Knowing I had to somehow reach it so that I could break these ropes, I gingerly shifted my weight and reached for the cleaver. By some miracle I got it by the handle, and after some more positioning in my hand I raised the knife to begin cutting the ropes that tied my hands and legs.

It was then that a bright light, apparently from the car behind me, flooded into the backseat, shining so bright I couldn’t see where to cut. It was like the driver knew what I was doing, so then I became afraid: what if it was that crazed man from the bar? Feeling ever more nervous and sensing the woman’s car moving faster and faster, I tried again to cut the ropes, but again the headlights blinded my already light-sensitive eyes. A few more attempts proved futile too as the same manic driver continued to prevent my escape. The car went faster and faster, and my heart beat became equally as rapid. A swirl of light and dark mixed with the colors of the neon lights outside created a fun-house-like effect. I was scared, more so than I have ever been in my entire life. I knew just as soon as the woman stopped the car the man driving behind it would kill me once and for all. And for what: a stupid comment on some hard-luck baseball team made by an inebriated loser in a run-down tavern? Maybe I had walked in on something inadvertently; did I see something while sitting next to him I shouldn’t have? I was dizzy with fear, with frustration of having no control over what was about to happen. As the car pulled over in what appeared to be a gas station outside the city, I sat still, thinking: it’s fitting to die like this on Halloween night.

As I shifted my body so that I could look out the backseat window, I saw the woman running with what appeared to be the gas attendant and another man, gruff, flannel-clad, running towards the group, frantic-like. He had exited out the car, actually a pick-up truck, that I thought was the man from the bar. I guess it wasn’t, nor was it likely this woman was this guy’s girlfriend.

The three moved towards where I was still bound in the backseat and opened the door.

“There, look, there’s a man in the backseat with a knife! He was trying to kill you, so I had to put on my high beams to stop him!” the lumberjack-looking man said, as the young woman, looking faint, screamed.

Still unable to talk and therefore unable to explain, the men shoved me towards the ground, and held me pitted there until the police arrived. I spent the night in a prison cell and the next morning, hung-over and completely exhausted, I managed to give my testimony to the local sheriff, who, after some inquiring, verified the story and released me just in time to pick up some lunch at the corner pizzeria. Apparently my assaulter, due to the unlit parking lot and the similarities between his car and the woman’s, put me by mistake into her unlocked car instead of his. In many ways the woman and her car saved my life. I never saw the woman or the man from the bar again, and from that point on I never left home or work with my cleaver.

Pretty soon afterwards, some desperate authors changed my story up and made me out to be some crazed murderer hiding in the backseat of a young lady’s car, and every Halloween the story is told and re-told, so that millions get the wrong story about what really happened that night. I was the victim, not the girl! I wish they’d get their facts straight, but I suppose I learned my lesson: never mess with Red Sox fans. They’re a vicious bunch.