“Huh? My story? Okay. It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin’ on the porch with my family, singin’ and dancin’ down in Mississippi.”
While I was keeping one of our daughters company on her walk around her neighborhood with the gkids, I recounted a story about the strangest thing I ever received in my many years trick or treating as a kid.
My family lived, for many years, in a small city just north of NYC, White Plains to be exact. And we weren’t well off in any stretch of the imagination. As a matter of fact we were borderline dirt poor, and as such, lived with a little help from ‘public assistance’ as they used to call it, in a housing project of the inner city.
We lived on the seventh floor of a nine story building from the time that I was five until I was about twelve, and for the most part, I didn’t have any problem with it. The buildings were fairly new when we moved in, and except for the usual puddle of urine left in the elevator by some drunk who couldn’t hold it until he got home, it was a pretty nice place to call home.
And Halloween was killer as far as I was concerned. I mean, think about ten apartments times nine floors, with two apartment doors side-by-side. You hit two households at the same stop, and you could clear the floor in about five to ten minutes, if people answered promptly.
And there were five buildings to the whole project, so we used to fill up at least two pillow cases before half the night was over, and we had to get into the car and journey to our aunt’s house on the ‘better’ side of town.
But this was also a time when a lot of loose candy was given insides those printed Halloween bags or tied up inside a napkin secured with a ribbon. Of course even then, parents were worried about open candy touched by others, and so there was a lot of things we had to throw out when we brought our loot home for ‘inspection’.
So as I was telling my daughter about my youthful Halloween experiences, a memory about the stangest thing ever placed in my bag occurred to me, at one of those double apartment doors in the projects. An elderly lady who answered the door one night was all aplogetic for not having enough candy to get her through the night. But of course that phrase didn’t normally upset us since it meant that we would usually get a few pennies thrown into the sack, and that was OK by us since in those days, a few pennies went a long, long way.
But not this time. In fact, we weren’t quite sure what the lady put into our bags until we were a few doors away and a stench like some of that urine from the elevator started following my friends and I around the hallways. And it became stranger to us how, when we opened our bags at each successive stop to receive more candy, the smell got stronger. As a matter of fact, one guy who had reached over to give us his loot mentioned that we had something ‘ripe’ inside our bag.
We immediately stopped our rounds to dig through our bags to see if the odor was coming from our precious candy haul, and unfortunately, and indeed, it was. Reaching down to locate where it was coming from, my friend Daryl came up with a gloppy, messy, dripping mass of waxed paper that reeked like nobody’s business. When he laid it on the floor and began to unwrap it, we recognized that it had come from the old lady, and there within the wet mess was a stuffed cabbage, sauce and all. Yuk and hell’s bells, it was farking gross.
We each quickly located our own personalized stuffed Halloween cabbage and through it down the incinerator shaft door that was nearby. Even over the smell of the hot stinky incinerator air, we could still smell the stiffed cabbages going down to meet their final cooking.
Of course we also had to dispose of all that candy that got “contaminated” with stuffed cabbage juice, and boy were we pissed at the volume of things we just weren’t willing to keep after that jusice penetrated the wrappers. It was such a heartbreak to throw away whole Hershey bars, not the ‘fun’ size bars, they didn’t exist back then. When you got candy bars, you got the full size, big ones or nothing. Oh, the agony of having to toss away so much good loot.
We vowed to pick up the speed after that to make up for the lost goods, and split of our group into two groups of two, instead of all four of us knocking on a double set of doors. One pair would knock at one set, the other pair at the next set. When all four doors were responding, we would quick dodge over to the other set before the people could go back inside. This method worked so well, we employed it in subsequent years to increase our Halloween productivity levels.
All thanks to stuffed cabbage for Halloween.
