The Last Dead Person On Earth, Part 1
by Brandon D. Christopher
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In the first half of an appropriately-timed Being 13 Halloween tale, Brandon reminisces about the troubles of making his costume a little more macabre, mulls over the schoolyard currency of candy, and gets the first hint of an approaching adulthood full of women.
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“Make me a dead baseball player,” I whined to my mother. I was sitting in my older brother’s bedroom in full baseball attire, which, to a 12-year-old who didn’t play any sports, consisted of a baseball hat, a striped black and white shirt, and a baseball.
“Why dead?” She asked. “I just spent forty minutes making you a living baseball player!” .
“Spooks get more candy than ball players,” I replied.
“The other kids are going to be here any minute,” she declared, “and I still have to do your little brother.”
“Mom, I’ve only got a few more good years of trick-or-treating in me. Please don’t take this away from me now.”
After she stared at me for a petite eternity, my mom kneeled back down in front of my chair and opened her little $2 Halloween make-up kit and stirred up the white face-paint. She pressed a napkin into the plastic container and then smeared the white paste over my face in aggravated swipes.
Every good Dead Person started with a pale complexion. It was what was referred to as a “given.” It was what you did beyond the white face that determined the severity of being costume-dead: a zombie might have black rings under the eyes and lines across the forehead; a murder victim would have blood trails stemming from the nose or temples; an accident victim would most likely, and if properly done, have the white face but with blood pouring out from both sides of the mouth, because every good, believable accident victim had internal hemorrhaging. I wasn’t quite sure which type of dead baseball player I was going to be yet, but zombie-style was starting to sound real good.
“Most boys your age are just happy being baseball players,” my mom said. “You just have to go and be a dead one, don’t you?”
“The baseball player idea was out of necessity,” I replied. “I’m more composed now.”
Between white, pasty swipes over my eyes, I caught glimpses of my little brother sitting anxiously next to me, making the most of his Halloween make-up postponement by giving me an evil stare. With his prefabricated cowboy shirt on and felt cowboy hat in his lap, Colin gave me a look like he wanted to hang me from the gallows for stealing our mom’s precious time.
“There, now I don’t have time to do the rest,” she said, “I have to do your brother.”
I caught a glimpse of my baseball hat and pale face in the reflection of the glass stereo cabinet. “Mom, I look like a clown! I don’t look dead at all!”
“Goddamnit, here!” She wailed and handed me the small container of black paint. “Rub this under your eyes and a little on your cheekbones, and I’ll finish the rest in a minute!”
“Ha ha,” my little brother exclaimed under his breath.
I had come real close to crossing the line that time, and I knew better than to inquire as how to get the black paint from the plastic tin onto my skin. I casually dug a finger into the paint and blindly wiped it beneath my eyes and down my cheeks, creating a sort of upside-down L shape on each side of my nose. I had heard of cheekbones and could even spell it properly, but ask me where these bones of the cheek were and I'd point to the area under my eyes and about two inches from either side of my nose.
As mom patted brown blush across Colin’s face, giving him the appearance of a saddle-worn cowboy who had been on the range for too long, I patiently waited for my touch-ups while predicting how much candy I was going to take in for the night. I had graduated from that juvenile, plastic, orange jack-o-lantern with a black handle some years back, and I now collected my candy from each neighbor in an old, white pillow case. The pillow case could hold ten times more candy than the other and it was less embarrassing to carry around. Nothing said “novice” like a plastic, orange jack-o-lantern.
Last Halloween when I was just eleven, I came up with the theory that all the candy that was collected while trick-or-treating was a form of currency to those of us who had no real currency to speak of. The big names were the top dollars, like Snickers and Hershey’s and Milky Ways, and the others, like licorice and taffy and those hard caramel candies, well, that was the cheap shit. It took about four Twizzlers to equal one Snickers these days. Chocolate was where the money was at. Chocolate and nougat. Chocolate and nougat were a good, safe investment.
Any time you were given undesirable or homemade crap, like caramel apples or cookies or boxes of raisins, you just threw that on the ground or left it on their porch after they shut the door. Or, if no one was looking and they were near the end of the block, you could throw it at the house and run to the next street. That crap wasn’t even fit to be put inside the candy bag even for just a few minutes to humor the person who gave it to you.
It was the currency of candy, and every person under the age of fourteen knew about it. After the obligatory cramming-your-face-with-candy episode when you first got back home after trick-or-treating, any reasonably-intelligent kid knew to tuck away at least 75% of the goods for the remainder of the week to be used for bartering at school. The Catholic school playground became a black market for different varieties of sweets for a solid week after Halloween, because some neighborhoods had specialties while others kept with the norm, and every kid desired what they did not have; that was just human nature. All the kids had their own particular neighborhoods they worked in, and each of those little neighborhoods had clusters of streets that were they’re own little worlds, with their own miniature wealthy areas, old-person areas, young-family areas, poor areas – it was just a matter of knowing where to concentrate the scoring business. The young-family area was always tops for candy variety, but it never hurt to finish out the night with a stroll through the wealthy area. They sometimes pretended not to be home, but when they were, the goods were with it. If you scored some of that English Cadbury chocolate, you could be looking at three or four times your investment if you found the right kid to trade with. It was all about timing and knowing the supply-and-demand markets on the playground.
After I got my touch-ups in our make-do make-up room, a finely-dressed vampire and a small, dark-skinned girl in a blond wig arrived at my porch. I opened the door and pretended to really be a dead baseball player as I extended a bowl of candy their way.
“What the hell are you?” Marshall asked me through the slur of plastic vampire teeth.
“Uugghhhhhh….candy…..” I moaned and shook the bowl.
“Are you a mime?” Javier asked before he gracelessly itched his chest from under his mother’s bra that he was wearing to create breasts.
“I’m a god damn dead baseball player!” I declared.
“Oh,” both replied.
After inviting them in, my mom grouped us all together and took a Polaroid picture of us next to the fireplace. As soon as my little brother’s friends came over, she huddled them together and took a picture of them as well. After the documentation of her children’s costumes, she poured herself and some of the other kids’ moms glasses of champagne, and they readied themselves for a long night of walking around. It was her turn to be the Halloween host this year.
Marshall grabbed the Polaroid photo and shook it till it self-developed before our eyes, and then we all nostalgically studied our costumes in the flopping square of film like it was ten years after the fact.
“I look like a real girl,” Javier said about himself.
“An ugly girl,” Marshall clarified. “I wouldn’t hump you.”
“Good!” Javier stated.
“I look like a real dead baseball player,” I said.
“Are you standing on something?” Marshall asked. He studied the photo and then studied me. “Are you really this tall?”
I tried to look down at myself but couldn’t tell. “Maybe the camera makes it look that way or something.”
Marshall studied the photo again and then pushed the newly-blond Javier beside me and stepped back several feet. He looked at us side-by-side and then glanced at the photo. He did this repeatedly.
“Jesus Christ, Brandon!” He exclaimed.
“Watch your goddamned mouth!” I heard my dad shout from the other side of the house.
Marshall whispered now. “Shit, Brandon, you look like a grown man! Look at this!”
Marshall returned to Javier and me and showed us the photo, and he pointed to my height difference above himself and Javier, and then he pointed to me, in case I wasn’t aware of which person I was in the photo. I was indeed a solid foot and a half taller than Marshall and at least two feet taller than Javier. I had never before seen such proof of how much I had grown in the past year.
“I never noticed it till now,” Javier said. “Wow!”
“Girls love tall guys,” Marshall informed me. “Between you being this tall and my eyes and smile, I think you and me are going to be getting girlfriends really soon.”
Javier was silent.
“Girls love your Spanish accent, Javier,” I said to him, sharing the praise.
“I don’t have an accent,” he replied. “I was born here in the United States.”
“But you…the way you said that, that had kind-of an accent,” I said.
“My doctor said I have a cleft palette, so it makes me speak a little weird when I’m hungry. It’s not an accent, though.”
“Oh.”
After a brief period of silently staring at the photo and wishing that the entire conversation had never taken place, we said our goodbyes to the parents and younger siblings and started our own Halloween trek across the neighborhood. One wealthy, pompous vampire, one short, dark-skinned girl in a grandma wig, and one extremely tall, dead baseball player with several hours and several miles of the promised land ahead of us.
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A native of Los Angeles, Brandon D. Christopher has survived 41 jobs, 7 cars, 4 days in jail, and completed a 3-hour Learning Annex seminar to become a private investigator. He is the author of several published essays and short stories, and is currently searching for a publisher for his latest novel Dirty Little Altar Boy. He can be reached at BrandonDChristopher@hotmail.com.
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