All Hallow's Eve--Or, The Night I Threw-Down With Michael Jackson's Ghost

Looking back on the evening that unites the living and the dead—beat it grandma—there were a few “red flags” shall we say. It was an evening full of ghouls, sharks and a dead 1980s pop star and it goes a little something like this:

To begin with, I had prepared for this night by purchasing several bags of 99 cent candies back in the south before I moved my fat ass three thousand miles up to the Arctic Circle to become a replacement art professor in the one community college where igloo construction is not only an elective, it’s a major. Unfortunately, lost in the trauma of our rickety plane-ride up to the land of unending darkness, my cat, Ms. Richard Hatch, needed the sugary-goodness to recover from her post-traumatic-fat-disorder. A skinny bitch she is not.

This left me with a freezer full of tuna and no Halloween candy. Not wanting to pay fifty dollars for the same candy I had already bought for a total of $6.99 in the south, I chose to go la-cheapo and serve popcorn.

“Popcorn?!” hollers Sherman over the phone. Sherman, the polar bear I bed-down with, is spending Halloween two villages over. He is not a fan of All Hallo’s Eve. This isn’t particularly original on his part. I doubt Frankenstein’s Monster was a fan either. They are of a similar stature. However, I was lonely and scared of the trick-or-treaters, and so I had demanded that Sherman spend the evening on the phone with me anyway.

"You are ridiculous," Sherman continues, rather judgementally.

"Tell me something I don't know," I snicker into the phone. I fully own my ridiculous nature. This is a good thing, as it rears its head at least once every four hours. For instance, I had also demanded that they play The Dixie Chicks’ Not Ready to Make Nice on the local FM radio even though they normally don’t take requests.

Needless to say, I was fucked, and not in the good way, when I realized I had consumed what had been just enough popcorn to feed the pack of Michael Jackson impersonators who were moon-walking by my window with real tricks up their sleeves.

“Shit! I’m going to have to resort to my stash!” I lament to Sherman.

“Not the fudge-os,” he moans in a smug manner. I may be a bleach-blonde but no one can pull off smug subtly. Not even over the phone. “Keep track!” he chuckles.

"Keep track of what?"

 "All the children who refuse your bullshit candy," he laughs. "As long as they don't light our igloo on fire, I support them." Sherman has a helluva better rapport with these kids than I do, but then, he doesn't have to teach them to mix oil-based paints. Trust me, it's tough. "Refusing!" he continues, "Like you are trying to get them to take a test or something."

“How do I score the kid who grabs six fudge-os, screams at me in Inuktitut and runs off,” I bitch.

“Let’s be honest, you had that coming,” Sherman chuckles. “Fudgeo’s! Pull your shit together!”

“Yeah,” I agree. “I’d have bitched-me out in Inuktitut too. Well, if I knew Inuktitut. Fuck it. I would have learned Inuktitut just to bitch-me out for that.”

“No, you’re really not that motivated,” Sherman replies. He’s right, but there is no reason to state the obvious. “By the way, did you know they caught a shark here?”

“What do you mean they caught a shark?” I scream. “It’s not Hawaii. You aren’t playing Survivor. Now, that’s ridiculous! Plus, I think I went in that Bay.”

“You were swimming in the Bay?” Giselle, my former babysitter-slash-street hustler, asks. I had been so worried after the Michael Jackson incident that I Skyped her into the evening’s events. “Isn’t it kind of cold?”

“Keep up G-bird. I didn’t say I went swimming. I went wading. I was looking for lichen.”

“Okay. That makes more sense,” she laughs. “You are a fat ass.”

“True story,” I agree.

“This conversation is getting taxing,” yawns Sherman. “Tell me about your day.”

“Welllllllll,” I begin obnoxiously. I, like most people, feel I have something of great value to say when, most of the time, I definitely do not. But today I actually do. “I walked outside for recess duty. As has been previously discussed, recess duty is not my favourite time of the week. PS-that kid urinated again.”

“Wait a second,” Giselle interrupts. “Why do you have recess duty at a community college?”

Sherman is right, this is a taxing conversation. I choose to ignore her in the hopes she will go away, just like I had done with Michael earlier in the evening. He had moon-walked off into the night. Giselle probably won’t get the hint though. She has only rarely been confused for being smarter than a fourth grader; although, she does have a medal to substantiate this claim.

“Whatever," I continue. "So, Brenda, the secretary office administrator, walks out behind me and goes, Scott, you look like a girl as she whips out a cigarette from the secret compartment in her parka.”

“What a slut,” says Giselle. “And I should know.” Damn, I knew I kept her around for a reason. But Brenda isn’t a slut. She’s a covert anorexic. I only learned what a covert anorexic is when my aunt informed me that she is also one. “We’re anorexics who don’t pull it off very well,” Dallas told me. “The intention’s there. We just can’t pull the trigger.”

Kind of like the Barak Obama of the eating world.

To Brenda’s credit though, she had definitely pulled a few triggers in her day. She is not the kind of woman you would want to row-sham-bow with, is what I’m getting at. She’ll kick you in the balls, and then she’ll do it again, just because she can. Basically, she is my god. Not wanting to confront her now, I conceded graciously.

"Thanks Brenda," I chose to reply instead. "I really needed that right now."

This was followed by an awkward silence during which Brenda probably thought about resorting to her finishing move several times, but ultimately did not.

"I was only joking," she says, confused by this, probably new, sensation of regret that has swept across her like a twenty-four-hour flu you want to dine-and-ditch as soon as possible.

"You should do stand-up," I respond. "I think I should go deal with that kid who's peeing over there. Later, B."

"You're a cold mess," laughs Sherman. "I'm going to bed. Good luck."

And that’s about the point in the night that Michael Jackson moon-walked back across the tundra and cut the power-line to my igloo for not getting a god damned Fudge-o cookie.

Seeing Michael Jackson in the most unlikely of places got me thinking about belief. It is kind of astounding what we choose to believe in, what we reject and how critical we are of everybody else's choices.

Joseph Smith created Mormonism in the 19^th century, and Ron Hubbard created Scientology in the 20^th century, but somebody created everything else too. We just don’t keep good enough records to remember that. Some equally creative buddy thought up Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and even my personal favourite, Jainism. Not to mention the three thousand other options. Whether any one is better, or worse, depends entirely on the point in history you are looking at and the personal-lens with which you are looking. Each one yields corruption. Each one spites the others. Each one allows for the mistreatment and discrimination of its non-followers (the non-believers).

So, no matter what you believe in—god; gods; witches; my mother’s cooking; nothing at all—I don’t think that says much about you. No merits are won, or lost, with what you believe. The telling truth of who you are and what you represent is in what you allow to exist in other people. To not just tolerate a different point of view, but to actually believe that it holds as much potential for truth and connection and hope as anything that resonates your own spiritual truth.

That would be noble. That would make you something—someone—worth believing in. Regardless of the mask that you wear on your own face.

The revelation was kind of like a Halloween miracle. Plus, I really enjoy Michael Jackson's moonwalk.

Oh, and by “something like this” I mean that is exactly how Halloween went down this year.