© 2002 Brian Hodges - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay

y earliest memory of Halloween brings with it thoughts of costume envy. I was three the year I went to daycare as Dracula. My mom dressed me all in black with a red cape. And the pièce de résistance: a plastic Dracula mask fastened to my face by a tiny rubber band. I was psyched. I was way scarier than the stupid Bunnies and Pumpkins the other kids were going as. But then my friend Mike showed up.

It may have actually been a picture of Chewbacca on his plastic mask, but when he raised his hands, curled his fingers into claws and said, "Rrrrooooaaaarrrrr!" he was one hundred percent Werewolf. I suddenly realized that Dracula wasn’t all that scary anymore. So I too raised up my hands and gave a roar of my own. If only those fascist daycare people could have just minded their own business. But no. They just had to point out that, "Dracula does not say, ‘Roar.’"

"Well, what does he say?" I asked. The best they could come up with was, "I vant to suck your bloooood." I tried it out, but compared to "Rrrrooooaaaarrrrr!" it was just plain sad.

By midday, the rubber band on my mask had broken, and I didn’t bother fixing it. It had inhibited everything I needed for survival anyway. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t eat. And once the inside had become saturated with vapor, I pretty much couldn’t breathe. Plus, without the mask, I could simply tell everybody that I was a "Monster" – and could make any damn sound I wanted.

Until I discovered grease paint a few years later, the next several Halloweens were spent in much the same way. I’d secure a plastic Skeletor mask to my face and think it was pretty cool for about an hour. But as soon as I saw somebody in a head-to-toe Ewok costume, the claustrophobia would set in and I’d start suffocating. The rest of the night would be spent with my true face exposed to the world.

By fifth grade it didn’t matter. All us boys had started wondering just how cool it was to still be trick-or-treating. Nobody wanted to end up like that kid who got teased for weeks over being the last one to find out about Santa Claus. But then again, we didn’t want to miss out on all that candy either. So we compromised. We walked in our street clothes with our younger siblings under the guise of "babysitting." We laughed at anybody our age who had dressed up, and we never actually said, "Trick or treat." We just held out our bags and marveled at our own cleverness.

By high school, our brothers and sisters had also decided that they were too old for trick-or-treating, so we were out of luck on the candy front. But that was okay. By then, we all had our drivers licenses and money to buy eggs and toilet paper with. Tootsie Rolls couldn’t hold a jack-o-lantern to petty vandalism.

In college, there were always several Halloween parties that you could get into for free if you wore a costume. That was important because we were all broke and needed to save every last dime we had for beer. So, we’d dig through our closets searching for anything that we could improvise a costume with. I owned a red flannel shirt and a striped cap, so I went as a Train Engineer two years in a row. The two most popular costumes for girls were Farmer’s Daughter and Hooker. The former simply put on a set of overalls and tied their hair in pigtails. The latter slipped into fishnets and leather, teased their hair up Jersey-style, and they were good to go. So were their dates.

These last couple years, Halloween has been hit-or-miss for me. I don’t like being a party-pooper, but through all my years of experience, I’ve learned to go simple. Spend five bucks on red grease paint, slather it all over my body, throw on a Hawaiian shirt, and suddenly I’m a Sunburn Victim. Of course, the days of daycare have never quite left me. Inevitably, I always see people whose costumes are way cooler or more flattering than mine. But hey, with all the money I saved on my costume, that’s like six more beers. Pretty soon, I’m blissfully ignoring all the people who tell me that sunburn victims do not say, "Rrrrooooaaaarrrrr!"