My Halloween as Jason Voorhees Part V:
A New Befuddlement
Chris Zasada November 14, 2007

Halloween has once again come and gone, and as the days draw closer to Thanksgiving (which is the sincere and solemn celebration of the coming of Christmas), one small community is trying to pick up to pieces of a Halloween of terror. They can only hide in their closets as memories of a machete-wielding madman coming to their door on Halloween pulsate in their brains and threaten to cause a condition which will require a series of uncomfortable shunts. This lunatic took from them something they never wanted to give him before he trounced on, looking for more victims to satisfy is insane rage. The victims will take little comfort in knowing that the crazed psycho is not in actually an immortal zombie killer, but in reality an audiovisual technician who seeks to victimize innocents for one sole purpose:

Candy.

As many of you who’ve kept of with Pocky Box (the rarest species on the planet) can easily guess, I’m talking about my night trick-or-treating on Halloween. For those of you who are new at this, yes, I am twenty-five years old, I’m engaged to be married, and I work at a state college. I also went trick-or-treating. If you haven’t come to terms with this, read my articles covering my first year of my Halloween tradition, then the next two years, and my last time out in the field.

This will be the fifth year of my traditional trudge through Oregon posing as the immortal zombie killer Jason Voorhees. The idea started as a humble (read: stupid) idea that involved trudging around my old trick-or-treating grounds located in the Lyn Park subdivision in an effort to scare children into wetting their Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers (the Super Dino Space Time Travelin’ Thunder Police Mega Alpha version) costumes beyond salvation and quickly evolved into joining the little candy grubbers at their own game. This tradition is a source of great pride within my family, much of which doesn’t talk to me anymore.

My goal was to complete my Jason costume with a pair of coveralls, but several factors (most of them involving laziness) saw this would not be completed. Still, it looked fine with the proper setting:

I resigned myself to a fun-yet-uneventful Halloween, with candy and scares, but nothing I haven’t done before. Then I pulled into my driveway and saw what was going on at the church across the street:

A few years ago, a congregation from East Toledo decided to take over a failing Baptist church that was conveniently located across the street from my house. This church was known as the Solid Rock Assembly of God, a name that made me nervous because of a devastating experience C had with a church of a similar name. As he said, any church that proclaims itself to be “solid as a rock” is bound to be trouble.

To be honest, this new group is actually quieter than the old one, which used to do tent revivals outside in the summer and could be heard from around the neighborhood. The old church also had some creepy staff members on hand who were probably only three steps from Phelps. This new group seems to be a more cheerful lot, and I never had any problems with them.

Until last year, when they proudly advertised their “Holyween” event. You might have heard of one of these in your own neighborhood. I theorize that the insurgence of religions not Christian in this country have given Christians of all stripes the feeling of being religiously persecuted, so they’ve taken measures to distance themselves from these religions and work on their PR. One of the ways some of them have been doing this is by hosting “safe alternatives” to Halloween which everyone is invited to. It is, of course, implied that “safe alternative” means “non-heathen, Christian-approved alternative,” and it’s a really good way to butter up the non-believers.

Rampant rumors of tampered candy and satanic rituals associated with Halloween (many of which are urban legends sworn upon by the Christians themselves), plus horror stories told to us by evening news casters have convinced parents that letting their kids go trick-or-treating is the equivalent of smearing them with a light coat honey and throwing a few buckets of fire ants at them. This makes these Holyweens look pretty darn attractive, and the church certainly won’t apologize if you end up accepting Jesus while you’re there.

To be honest, I can’t even remember if Solid Rock’s Holyween was all that big last year, or if it even existed, but the trailer parked in the lawn indicated they were hoping it was going to be a real shindig. I knew I needed to check this thing out, but first, I had more important things to worry about: suiting up and getting some candy.

I passed my mother who was leaving for the night, and she told me I was not going out trick-or-treating. Shows what she knows. I started gathering my things and suiting up. It was during this time tragedy struck, causing panic and anger that threatened to ruin the entire night, if not the rest of the year: costume malfunction.

Specifically, my original and official Freddy Krueger mask, which I had been using for the last three years as part of my Jason costume, tore down the back seem as I tried to put it on. This pissed me off more because I ruined an awesome mask with my fat head, but now it would look like Jason was unsuccessfully trying to grow a mullet.

Trick-or-treating just minutes away, I decided to forget about it and get ready. I grabbed my cute plastic pumpkin bucket and decided to stretch a rubber skull mask I had just bought over it for effect, and I must say the effect was unmistakable. It looked exactly like a rubber skull mask stretched over a plastic pumpkin bucket.

I snuck out into the street, machete and masked pumpkin bucket ready for terror. To those of you who haven’t read about my previous Halloween adventures (what the hell are you waiting for?), yes, I carried around a real, metal, death-weapon machete on Halloween night, when children are scampering around, and I was wearing a mask that cut out my peripheral vision while I was stumbling around at night. Did I mention I was getting married?

It may not be obvious by my writing, but I’m actually a shy person. In most social situations, I’d rather not be noticed and regulate myself to the background. This is rather odd, because I don’t have a fear of public speaking, and my job requires me to work with potentially po’ed people on a day-to-day basis, yet I don’t mind. I prefer to limit my interactions with people to one-on-one or with a fourth wall to protect me. Or the anonymity of the Net.

 That’s probably one of the reasons I like Halloween, since it’s a chance for me to assume to role of someone else for a couple of hours and have fun at the expense of maturity and dignity. This is acceptable because it’s Halloween, but mostly because no one knows who I am.

I only bring this up because the area around my house seemed to be pretty busy when it came time to leave. The neighbors (and my cousins, though they may as well be neighbors we never talk to) were getting their kids ready for trick-or-treating, and the Holyween festivities across the street were underway. Plus, it was still daylight, and I really wanted to sort of appear on the streets without anyone knowing where I came from. Instead, the neighbor spotted me, and I swear I heard his annoying wife shrilly laughing at me from a distance. Plus, people from Holyween could have easily spotted where I came out of, so if Jason decided to go out on a murderous rampage this year, there were plenty of witnesses who could tell police where he was shacking up. This is not to mention I’m leaving a rather extensive written record with pictures on display to the public, but I can think of no better place to hide them where no one will find them than on this site.

I made my way to Lyn Park as usual, though I didn’t have the confidence I used to. Part of this was because of the fresh tear in one of my favorite masks, but the other annoyance was the hockey mask, which had somehow become extremely loose over the year and kept falling down my face, stealing what little vision I had left. At its worse, this caused total blindness. At best, I could see some unimportant detail in a person’s landscaping before slamming into another, invisible part of their décor.

Plus, it was still daylight, and it’s a scientific fact that Jason does his best work under the cover of night, or at least in a wooded area. Perhaps it was this fact that inspiration suddenly struck as I was nearing my target, which is across the street from an entrance to Pearson Metro Park. I slipped into the park, probably violating some sort of law on account of my machete, and, making sure no one was around, I committed one of the most heinous Halloween offenses on the books: I took my mask off.

The inspiration I was blessed with was a fix to my torn mask problem. If I used the skull mask to cover the part of my hair that was sticking out, the costume wouldn’t look completely ridiculous and thus be upgraded to mildly elating. After a surprisingly quick change, I emerged from the park a new killer, because now a part of my other identity was again concealed beneath Jason’s (well, technically Freddy’s) terrible visage. Here’s an idea what it looked like:

Better than nothing, and it sort of looks like a tortured soul is popping out. I think I may have done a better job in the field, because I wasn’t completely exhausted and covered in sweat from all of the activities like I was when I snapped this photo of me not doing very well a second time, because I was tired. Yaa.

Jason’s confidence restored, the journey continued on, and once again, today’s children did not fail to disappoint me. Seriously, there were as many kids out there as there are fingers on Jason’s hand, and I’m talking the total at the end of Freddy vs. Jason. As I continued my journey to a few neighboring subdivisions, I found the child count going up, until I reached the third and final subdivision and witnessed a flurry of trick-or-treaters. So it seems the problem is not so much that they don’t make children like they used to, it’s simply, as much as I hate to admit it, Lyn Park and its aging population is not the cool spot to go trick-or-treating anymore. This leads me to conclude that they don’t make children like they used to.

The trick-or-treating itself was fairly uneventful as trick-or-treating as a twenty-five-year-old goes. A number of people either liked the costume or were nervous about it, but only one person actually remembered me from the last year (or at least pointed this out). I suppose this qualifies as a beginning to my goal of having Oregon’s Jason Voorhees be sort of a local legend. If nothing else, this candy-giver can keep track of how many years I show up at their door.

Speaking of age, someone questioned my chronological qualifications for trick-or-treating, just like last year. It might have even been the same person as before. In any case, a woman asked me how old I was, to which I slyly replied “Not too old.” I’m not sure she found this amusing, as she sort of aloofly nodded and commented to the people around her that I had hair on my hands ,which got a good laugh at my expense. So it seems that Jason needs to shave his hands before he goes out on the prowl. Either that or kill this woman on sight.

One thing that was painfully annoying is on two occasions, a passerby referred to me as Michael Meyers. Granted, a new Halloween movie had just come out and it was dark by that time, but this was borderline offensive. I refuse to get into a whiny fanboy argument over this, but suffice it to say Jason could kick Michael’s mentally-fragile butt any day of the week. Seriously, Jason has survived being melted by toxic waste, being blown to pieces, a battle with another supernatural killer, and being burnt up upon reentering a planet’s atmosphere (I’ll concede that last one is only implied and will probably never be explored, which is probably for the best). Meanwhile, Michael Meyers has not so much as lost a body part, and he cries when confronted by a little girl he’s trying to kill. So you can take your plot continuity and shove it, Meyers.

And before you Halloween fanboys jump me, I actually do enjoy the movies, even more than Friday the 13^th flicks. I just think Jason is cooler. It was perhaps this reason and the fact that Jason was feeling a little down over those disrespectful trick-or-treaters’ comments that they survived.

That wasn’t the only identity-related situation that popped up. At one of the last houses I stopped at, a strikingly dull-witted and possibly stoned teenager who was handing out candy actually asked who I was. Any trick-or-treater worth their salt knows you never, under and circumstances, even with police involvement, reveal your secret identity during rounds. This is of the same severity as guarding nuclear secrets, except I’m not willing to sell my secret off. Well, maybe for a house.

I decided to throw the guy off by saying I was Jason. It took him a second for this to sink in, and then he pressed me for who I really was. I repeated that I was Jason, took my candy, and stomped off, almost in awe of how close he came to smoking a two-foot steel blunt.

Now I’m sure you’re all dying to know what happened at Holyween. Disappointingly, turned out not to be very interesting. I dropped off my machete at home, because I’m not sure the church would approve of my bringing it over on their private property with children running about. Completely unarmed, I trudged into the light:

No, that’s not the light of God or the Gateway to Heaven (wouldn’t that be a kick in the crotch if Jason ended up there when they run out of sequels?), but the Power of Rental Lights. For whatever reason, the church decided to rent out some massively powerful, generator-powered lights that lit my family room up to tanning bed levels. I figured their standard, non-blinding parking lot lights would work out fine, but I’m a twenty-five-year-old who was just out trick-or-treating, so what do I know?

I didn’t stay long, but noticed a few attractions. There seemed to be some kind of clothing give-a-way, which I would have normally checked out, but at that point, Jason had been walking for nearly two hours, and wasn’t in the mood pick out some thrifty fashions, despite how cool that image would be. There was also a playroom for kids and a fire for roasting marshmallows, among other things that I didn’t look into.

You may be asking why I didn’t act like more of a jerk. As I said, I’m shy, even with a mask concealing my identity, and it’s not like it would be all that hard to track me down, what with a website and all (though considering the number of hits we get, this may be a moot point). Plus, as much as Christians can be annoying, I wasn’t going to stomp into their turf and ruin the fun of little children just for kicks, especially since this particular group never did anything to me.

Plus, in some ways, this sort of event is a good thing, because it lets parents bring their children to someplace safe so everyone involved can have fun. Yes, I think some of the implications of the name “Holyween” is conceded and I can’t help but think part of the motivation behind it is to steer children away from potentially anti-Christian activities, but I’m not going to bust up a kids’ party in some kind of poorly-conceived protest. I don’t want to make them feel some kind of martyr’s victory, even though I’d be doing the same thing as them.

After returning from Holyween, I took off my costume, and it was at this point I noticed the shirt I was wearing underneath. Keep in mind I picked this shirt out for the day intentionally, but the fatigue caused by my exploits muddled the connection between the shirt and my Halloween costume. Now more than ever, I was glad C had given me this shirt.

I decided it was time to start on new tradition and count how many individual treats I received. The purpose of this is to see if my increasing presence as a trick-or-treater has any affect on the amount of candy received, as a continual presence would indicate that I am older. This experiment would test the theory that people do not like handing candy out to older trick-or-treaters. The obvious variables on this are number of houses visited, time of night, age and gender of givers, whether they were home at the time or just left a bucket of candy for greedy brats to dig into, and whether or not they had sexual intercourse recently and in turn find a machete-wielding zombie trick-or-treater to be attractive.

Plus, I want to document how much candy I got. So without further ado, our total for Halloween of 2007 is:

114 pieces!

That’s one Standard Pumpkin Bucket (SPB) full, which is not my best, but we’ll see where the numbers go next year. I was debating whether or not to record the official number as 112, because someone gave me a Tootsie Roll, which in addition to not being real candy, may, in fact, be anti-candy, and could, if in the proper numbers, take down the score into the negatives. I decided to just go ahead and count it, since rumor has it there are a few twisted individuals out there who hold the insane religious belief that Tootsie Rolls are candy.

Which pretty much sums up the Halloween spirit: there are some strange, horrifying things out there. As if you haven’t guessed that by reading an article about a twenty-five-year-old going trick-or-treating. Happy Halloween!