It was the October of 1990. My 11yr old imagination was whet once again by Basil Poledouris and his Russian contingent just like it was a few years back with Murphy and the Barbarian. As Halloween approached it occurred to me that my costume was of utmost, if not life threatening, importance. I was 11. I couldn’t be expected to cram my face into one of those plastic cutouts, don a tiger-print garbage bag and beg for sweets. That’s little kid stuff. An 11yr old needs a costume, not an accessory. Getting stuck with a ‘Scary Larry’ mask and a plastic knife wouldn’t cut it.
TMNT was mad on the scene and everyone I knew was going to be a turtle for candy day. Every day one of my friends had the epiphany, like a thunderclap, that I absolutely NEEDED to be Donatello due to the similarities he and I shared by way of nomenclature. I, however, had other plans.
Coming off of Max Headroom I was a huge Amanda Pays fan. As an adult I can say, ‘I am a huge [female] fan.’ and you think, ‘He must enjoy [female]‘s work.’. This is not true of an 11yr old boy. If an 11yr old boy is a huge fan of anyone with a vagina it is likely because it has begun. He’s deadlocked on the boobs. Don’t kid yourself.
Anyway, I was a huge Amanda Pays fan and she was starring in the new ‘The Flash‘ TV show. The show was crap, but I remember eating it up because whenever the dumbass guy in the suit would bite it Amanda Pays was coming to the rescue. I was obsessed with the idea that if I had that suit, I too could get Amanda Pays to fall madly in love with me (instead she went after RoboCop in Leviathan.) Which is kind of a jacked up logic, seeing as her character in the show actually made the suit itself but I was 11 and it was that or green greasepaint and a broom handle.
My mother, always a willing accomplice to one’s need to follow one’s dreams, began work on the suit immediately; never knowing that her quest to make her son the ultimate Halloween costume was intended to end in whatever it is an 11yr old suspects he would be doing alone with the object of his new found appreciation for the feminine figure. There was much sewing and stitching and chalking and gluing that had to be done. A lot more than you’d imagine a red uni-tard with an emblem would require, but I was stalwart in the fact that it absolutely MUST look EXACTLY like the one on the show.
In the show the guy has a communicator in one of his lightning bolt earpieces. He uses this to communicate with – you guessed it – AMANDA FUCKING PAYS. I required this capability also. When faced with the harsh reality that neither the cash nor technology existed for this feature I was devastated. My mother countered this with a simple solution: She reminded me that such a device would be completely pointless, as we could communicate telepathically. That this skill, though latent but unused in most humans, was amplified by the special fabric out of which she fashioned the suit. So if I needed anything, I could just think it and she’d be there. At this point technology trumped boobies and having a psychic Flash suit was essential.
Weeks later the suit is done. I have tried it on and begged to wear it to school. I have checked myself out in the mirror and, when left alone, tried to see if I could break the sound barrier and/or contact Amanda Pays. The board was set. This was going to be the best Halloween ever.
Then it happened.
My middle-school representatives would provide an account of my progress for the recent semester 4 times a year. A progress report – on a card. A ‘Report Card‘, if you will. This ‘Report Card‘ was sent out at exactly the right times each year to absolutely screw my world. Once in the spring to keep me from the warming of the world, once in the winter to absolutely ruin Christmas, once in the summer because I have a birthday in the summer and who wants me to enjoy my birthday and finally, once in the fall. I would have taken two in the summer if I could have just gone ‘Report Card‘ free in the fall. The fall was my time. The fall was Halloween time. The fall was, for every year since 1st grade, ruined by those devils of education. Those who would seek to destroy my irreverence and mold me into an upstanding fine young gentleman in the name of the betterment of our society.
This fall was different only in that I had what could easily be considered the greatest Halloween costume of all time. It was red, it had lightning bolts, it had Styrofoam earpieces and god damnit I could use it to communicate telepathically with my mother.
My mother was furious. Not only by the impact of the ‘Report Card‘, but by the fact that I had been assuring her for months that everything was great. All ‘A’s. Maybe a B. At 11, a kid doesn’t exactly plan for the future when asked a question like, ‘How are things at school?’ When you ask a kid that you are giving him 2 options: get out of that uncomfortable situation as fast as humanly possible or take one in the chops. No kid wants one in the chops. Hell, I don’t think I could adequately deal with 1/2 of one in the chops back then.
At this point you are probably thinking that Halloween was called off. That the suit was tossed out and that I was locked in my room, with my 13inch TV and Atari 2600 and stack of cassette tapes for the evening. At this point you would be dead wrong. My mother enacted a fate upon me that would forever change my life. Of all of the things she has ever done or said to me the gravity of this situation will resonate most purely:
Halloween night, my favorite night of the year, I was to dress in my fantastic Flash suit, fill a pillow case with candy and stand at the door. When a trick-or-treater would come to the door it was my job to take a piece of candy out of my pillow case and place it into his/hers.
I cried like a little bitch and gave away what seemed like billions of pieces of candy, all the while thinking ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you’ in the hopes that my telepathic suit would somehow amplify it and scar my mother for life.
Little did I know at the time, it may have actually worked.
Speaking to my mother years later I found that while I was having my little personal crisis downstairs by the screen-door, she was upstairs balling just as much. Not because her son got terrible grades (he aced every test they could shove at him and had his IQ marked by the school district) but because she had to ruin his favorite day in the name of discipline. An act all parents seem to loathe equally.
No Amanda Pays. No supersonic speed. No pillow case full of candy at the end of the night. No use for the brilliant costume I would grow out of by next year. NO AMANDA PAYS.
Greatest mom ever, though. I’ll take it.
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