Your Weekly Hoodoo Thread - LSU Week

Do y’all smell something? Maybe I’m wrong…no, wait, I definitely smell something. Something akin to the unmistakable odor of swamp gas, oil refineries and corn dogs…ah yes, it’s an aroma I know all too well. Must be LSU Week, friends.

So here we stand a-straddle what may be the pivotal point of the Alabama campaign for number 17, the traditional bare-knuckled brawl between our beloved Crimson Tide and the mush-mouthed heathens from yonder bayou to the west. Sure, those people know good-eatin’, those folk can render a silk purse out of a saw’s ear, culinarily-speaking. Being a denizen of Alabama’s own lower Delta, I have always felt a certain kinship to the displaced Acadians from the Louisiana low country, even if it only extends to our respective palates and dependence on the bays and bayous for our recreation and diet. 

However, despite the cultural similarities, the football fortunes of our two peoples couldn’t be more different. Alabama has a history of excellence rooted in a real-world record of championships won and foes conquered. For the LSU faithful, they exist in a fairy-tale land in which the men in purple and gold will always prevail (until they don’t), and when they do fall, it is due to some nefariousness on account of the officials…or the SEC home offices…or “NICK-SABAN-IZ-THUH-DEBIL.” 

No, these poor Cajun folks from the bayou backwaters of that boot-shaped state are perpetual victims of mediocrity, the jilted former lovers of Our Dark Lord, perennially pining for what once was and never will be again. Saban turned LSU into an Alpha dog, whereas before they were barely a blip on Bama’s radar. They took their beatings quietly before slinking off back to their swamp, a more colorful, slightly more prolific version of Ole Miss’ previous win-once-a-decade rendition. Saban turned them into a machine, and even though Les Miles eventually ran that machine with no oil for days on end at 9500 RPMs before totally burning it up, ODL’s legacy in Baton Rouge has been one that has unrealistically buoyed the expectations of the Tiger faithful for a decade.

But alas, with a championship perfect season on the line, our beloved Crimson Tide must find a way to battle through the fisticuffs that LSU will offer, especially on that godless parcel of ground known as Tiger Stadium (at night, no less…and as we all know, DEAF VALLUH AT NAUGHT IS MAGICOLE!) While LSU may be a shell of its former self, the team (like much of its fanbase) represents a dangerous wounded critter, and cannot be underestimated. Their defense is loaded and ferocious, and their offense, though still one-dimensional, is extremely sound in that solitary dimension. 

Not to mention, those bayou-bred sumbitches have the powerful forces of Hoodoo’s illegitimate cousin Voodoo lurking around beneath that blackwater, powering them to the improbable when duly summoned. But our Loki has not forsaken us low these early months of the football season. He has apparently been satisfied by our grievous offerings of unrepentant debauchery. Therefore, I implore you, make your Hoodoo offerings to Loki this week, as a failure to do so could have disastrous consequences for the Alabama Crimson Tide American Collegiate Tackle Football Team. The gauntlet our boys must run is a dangerous one, and without the favor of our Pigskin Patron, all of their work to date could go for naught. 

Without further ado, I will present for your enjoyment a tale of embarrassment complete with the dark undertones of the recently-passed Hoodoo High Holiday, specifically the Halloween spook season. This is a vignette that has it all: shame, lost love, a fallen hero (literally), treachery and betrayal, maybe even a little comic relief if you’re the particularly loathsome sort who makes light of the suffering of others. Without further adieu, I give you this offering, Loki please have mercy upon my soul…

Now, I’m not afraid to admit to you people my love for All Hallow’s Eve. Some a’ you folks may get your dandies in a bunch for the joy of the Christmas season, with its family get-togethers, gift-giving, and lush pageantry. Some may favor the trappings and trimmings of the traditional Thanksgiving ritual, with its bounty of savorys (I’m talkin’ to you, heavy-lunch), times spent with loved ones, and rivalry football games. 

But as for your narrator, I am all about “the ‘Ween.” Ever since childhood, I’ve been crazy about the holiday because of the dark undercurrents contained therein. Because of my status as a practicing Sith lord, I tend to gravitate towards the evil in the world. It’s just my nature. And Halloween is the pinnacle of the evil season, when the veil between the living and dead is at its thinnest, and normally-reserved women wear the sluttiest costumes imaginable beneath the brilliant guise of celebration.

When we were kids, B-Rad and I were allowed to trick-or-treat in our neighborhood without our mother, who was probably far too trusting despite the fact that I grew up in a kinder, gentler, less-psycho-clown-crazy epoch. Sure, there were the Adam Walsh-type situations of the day, but there was no ISIS, no child kidnapping rings, no drive-by shootings to speak of. All we had to do was make sure no one gave us razor-blade-loaded apples, and we were good to go.

I always enjoyed the aspect of dressing up in costume, partially because of my infatuation with pulp fiction superheroes. And because of my comparatively rough childhood, becoming someone else was a form of immature escapism (if only for a night). I spent weeks prior to the holiday perfecting my outfits: one year I was Snake Eyes from the GI Joe cartoons, another year I was Batman (my mom even made me a cowl complete with ears.)  Some years I’d render a spook costume of a more generic persuasion just for the sake of variety. 

By the time I reached middle school, which incidentally is probably the most reviled era in any boy’s young life, some of my friends were beginning to fall away from the ritual of trick-or-treating, fancying it childish and immature. I’ve never really gotten a solid explanation as to why that is the case, as conning someone into giving you something free is solid practice, no matter how many years one has beneath his belt. Hell, these days it forms my very livelihood as a non-profit communications director…I ask for free stuff all the time (though admittedly, the only costume I am required to wear is a suit and tie.)

Though most of my classmates had stopped trick-or-treating by the time I reached seventh grade, that didn’t mean there weren’t still celebrations of the holiday. Some still had Halloween parties that evolved into closet-bound make-out sessions or marathon spin-the-bottle stand-offs. Those were always fun, but in keeping with the theme of the season, also terrifying. I mean, what is a seventh grader supposed to do when shoved into a closet with the infamous loose-woman of Scarbubba Junior High, ole Hot Britches O’Herlihy…in the darkness…with countless pubescent ears pressed against the door to detect each and every smooching sound? Scary stuff, to say the least.

But while peer mockery and neighborhood coots (the kind who call you out and tell you you’re too old to trick-or-treat when you knock on the door) had shied me away from the childish trappings of Halloween junkets by the time I reached seventh grade, I still celebrated the season. In this particular year, I had decided that it was my duty, as a senior member of the neighborhood posse of heathens and roughnecks, to initiate terror in the hearts of my younger, still trick-or-treat-living juniors. 

To this effect, I became the Wes Craven of Lurkwood Drive, crafting the landscape of nightmares for my fellow classmates and neighbors. I erected tombstones, drove knives through old masks to pin them to trees, draped all types a’ haints and bats and spiders and such in the low-limbs of the water oak trees that barricaded our front yard. I’d gathered a right band of hooligans from amongst my circle of friends to tape a solid 30 minutes of the lot of us making spook noises into a microphone, the kind of silly shit kids that age love to do anyway. That would become the soundtrack for Halloween night, as I’d pop that homemade cassette into the boom box and let the scary sounds spill out over the yard, beckoning in the brave of heart (or numb of mind).

Of course, as is the case with most young men of middle school age, I was a bit of a braggart. While walking track in Coach Teel-hard’s PE class seventh period, I had struck up a conversation with a fetching young chestnut-haired childhood friend who seemed to have something more than a passing interest with me all of the sudden. I’d known her for years, but she seemed unusually interested in the recounting of my Halloween plans and all I had in store for the neighborhood. She laughed at my jokes, provided encouraging smiles…either she was REALLY into Halloween shenanigans, or she was diggin’ on ya boy pretty damn hard.  

At this point, I was lucky to have any young lady trip over me, so awkward was I in social settings and unsure of myself in most imaginable ways. Being a pubescent middle school dude is rough, to be sure…so much insecurity, so much to learn about the ways of the world. I was a big ole strappin’ kid, but I had a one feature which to this day I look back upon with horror: I had a decided fetish for hairspray. White Rain, to be exact. (Not huffing it, you monsters, using it in the proper, traditional application.) 

Not to make light of a serious situation, but do you know how psychiatrists say that when an anorexic or bulimic person looks in the mirror, he or she actually sees a distorted body image? Same was true for me, only that distortion was limited to my hair-parts. The slightest out-of-place hair rendered my coif a clown ‘do in my eyes. I simply couldn’t stand it, even though to most observers, such would have been unnoticeable. Like a network television anchor, I was totally preoccupied with making sure every fletch of hair stayed in its enumerated space upon my head from sun up to sun down. I couldn’t stand for a strand to part ways with its predetermined location, even for a second. In pursuit of this lofty standard, I am pretty sure I single-handed artificially buoyed stock prices for White Rain during my middle school years, using multiple cans of it per week. No telling the chemicals that soaked through my scalp and into my brain-parts (though, such a dynamic would explain a great deal o my decision-making in future years.)

Unfortunately, whether by some twist of cosmic karma or the cruel whim of Fate, your follicularly-retentive narrator had several forces working against him in this regard. 

1.) I was born in Mobile, AL, which by all accounts, may well be the most humid city on the North American Continent. It is well known that Mobile is the Humidity Capital of the Known World. The air down here…well, it’s thick, like syrup. Walk outside in the summer time, and one feels as though he’s been wrapped in a wet woolen blanket and thrown into a pre-heated toaster oven. It is awful. And as you may know, humidity and hair are not close confidants. 

2.) I was born with a thick, coarse knot of hair upon my head, not as stiff as a Brillo pad, but definitely akin to some other softened steel-wool amalgam rendered of my Irish and Indian genetics to be sure. It is as curly as Shirley Temple’s when of length, and as thick and dense as a mid-summer briar patch. One would be better off attempting to style said briar patch than the wiry nap of hair I was cursed with wielding. 

3.) I was born in an age when “product” for men simply wasn’t a thing. This was the late 80’s: the dawning of the age of aerosol mousse, but well before the days of leave-in gel, let alone any of this “bed-head” business the kids today use. There weren’t convenient man-ready relaxers or straightening products that didn’t require one to undergo the emasculating process of entering the beauty salon. When attempting to tame my nap, I was left with only three tools at my disposal: a stiff boar hair brush, my mama’s can of hair mousse, and that damn White Rain.

Now I’d go through my morning ritual of prepping my ‘do for school each day. My prep work was complicated and extensive, like rendering structural concrete (and coincidentally, the finished product was also hard and motionless, much like the aforementioned). I spent an hour in the bathroom every day putting on my helmet hair. I’d get it wet and stroke it down flat with the boar hair brush, then apply a generous coat of that high-tech hair spackle (mousse) my mama lent me. After my hair began to set into a crispy brown Lego-minifigure-styled hairhat, I’d apply the finishing touch by soaking it down with hair spray as if I was spraying down a wasp’s nest with aerosol pesticide. There’d be so much hair spray on my dome that it’d drip off like Soul Glow. The end result was a monstrosity of middle-school mental illness, as I looked absolutely ridiculous but had no clue as to my true appearance, so distorted was my self-view. (I had, however, often wondered why my mom looked at me in the rearview some mornings, mouthing “Oh…honey…” sympathetically. I was in high school before I figured out the error of my coifing ways.)

Regardless of how ridiculous I looked, I had managed to get the attention of this girl, let’s just call her Calla because of the lovely calla lilies her mother had growing in the flower box in their front yard down at the foot of my street. When we were younger, being of similar age, we had played together a bit. Our parents would trade off baby sitting at times to allow for date nights in a two-way street arrangement. Her pops had even taken me along with her to see the Robin William’s rendition of Popeye in the theaters, and we were a bit of an item (as much as six-year-olds can be an item). We had gone to different elementary schools, but were reunited in middle school when her dad was laid off from the local Scott Paper mill, and she had to enroll in public school after six years in a private Christian school.

I had started waiting for her at the corner as she walked to school on fair days, and we’d walk and talk over the course of the mile to our neighborhood middle school. When you’re young and of the age that hormones begin to become major players in your decision-making process, you really have no idea what love is, even though its confusing tug on the heart (and other parts) becomes increasing difficult to render mute. Girls go from being gross, uncool, cooty-carrying vectors who frequent tea parties and doll houses, to beautiful beings with warm, welcoming eyes, glorious curves, and all of the other things that a young man can’t get from his interactions with his buddies. I didn’t know why I had begun to hurry to get dressed each morning, why I double-checked my hair spackle to make sure I didn’t look like Alfalfa, why I always grabbed an extra Capri Sun before slinking out the back door, to wait for Calla down by the corner concrete sign post. But I did it nonetheless, without fail, as loyal as a retriever. 

I had no idea, until a friend told me, that my usual scowl became a smile whenever I talked about Calla. I didn’t even know that I was looking at her across the cafeteria until one of my observant friends noticed…and subsequently made fun of me to the point that I had to deploy a knuckle-based “frogging” on the meaty part of his shoulder. I’d never have admitted it, but my hormones and circumstance were conspiring against me…you see, for the first time ever, I had fallen into that deep, inescapable well we call love.

She was the perfect woman…at least so far as I knew at this tender age. She liked the things I liked, knew about the things I knew about. Sometimes, when we’d walk, she’d talk about music…she, like me, was a huge fan of Whitesnake. In fact, I bought my first Whitesnake cassette just so I could loan it to her, saved my grass-cutting money for two weeks to be able to by the tape from Sound Shop in Bel air Mall. I paid extra for the “special edition” that came with a sweet pin-on button like the Van Halen and Ratt ones I wore on my jeans jacket. I had a plan for the Whitesnake one, though….it wasn’t for me, but rather, was intended as a gift for you-know-who.

One October morning, as we were walking and talking, the topic of the ‘ween came up.

“So what are you gonna be, OWB?”

I started to answer, but she cut me off.

“OH WAIT, I KNOW!” She was grinning a mile wide. “You can be David Coverdale. It’s. So. PERFECT!” 

For those of you too old, or too young, to know who Coverdale was, he was the lead singer of Whitesnake. He had the voice of Robert Plant, a model wife who starred in his videos (you see kids, “videos” were these things we watched in decades past, short stories on film that accompanied the songs thematically and theatrically). He had long rock-star hair, but not the theatrical, femme make-up of other hair metal bands of the day. I liked the idea, but figured I couldn’t pull it off.

“Hahaha, nah, I don’t think I look like Coverdale. Wish I did though.” 

“Bull! You can totally pull it off. You just need a wig…I mean, you’re cute and all, like he is. You should totally do it.”

I could feel my face flush hot with redness.

“Well, um, I don’t know…maybe.”

She clapped a cute close-clap, hands held high in front of her chest. She seemed far more excited about it than I was…after all, I had my eye on a sweet Freddy Krueger mask up at the local K&B.

“Oooooo, I can help? I can tease your hair out…I mean, your wig. I probably even have one you can use. We can rock-star you up. It’ll be great, you can come to my house…pleasepleaseplease?”

Well, that certainly changed things. A trip to her house? YASS. Coverdale it was.

With my costume decided, I moved on to my personal house of horrors that I erected annually in our front yard. The problem with running this type of game in a neighborhood where the population is largely static is that one constantly has to reinvent the horror year to year. The gags that worked the previous year are old and stale the following year…memories are long, after all. So I had to up my game. I focused on a new centerpiece, a reinvented coup-de-grace that would be the buzz of the neighborhood for anyone unfortunate enough to come seeking candy at OWB’s laboratory.

Finally, I settled on my new gag…a hanging corpse. But this wouldn’t just be a static fright…no, that would be far too ordinary. I had bigger plans, plans for a vicious, diabolical sort of scare that would scar young’uns for ages and cause a distinct uptick in the gross revenues at local therapists’ offices.

I’ll take a moment to admit that I am a sick person in some regards. No, really, laugh if you will, but I have problems. They manifested themselves in a variety of ways as a child, but at no point were these derangements more obvious than during the Halloween season, when I’d let the wriggling percolations of my evil mind creep into the public eye. Now for me, terror is a very sensory experience. As such, it is not limited simply to a visual or audio incident. 

You see, I was well familiar with terror. When I was about seven, I chased a ball into the street and was almost plowed by a speeding car barreling into the curve in front of our home. Only the Hand of God kept me safe, as I remembered looking up in time to see the car’s headlights mere meters from me. I remembered the smell of unburnt leaded gas, of the hot rubber skidding into smoke on the pavement when the wheels locked, of the heat-vapors rising in ribbons from the asphalt road. I remember which way the breeze was blowing, the sound of the car’s screeching brakes as it attempted to stop. I could see the startled eyes of the driver’s through the windshield. I was terrified from 0-60 in a mere second, and my mind captured those multi-sensory details in shockingly detailed clarity.

So in my mind, to create true terror in those brave enough to approach my door, I had to hit all the senses. I had the spooky sounds on lock. I had numerous set props in the yard to create a scary setting, to raise the prickles on the backs of necks. But when it came to my main event, I wanted to shock and awe...

I created a dead body by sewing clothes together and stuffing them with wadded newspapers. Nothing too original there, but this is where I got creative. I used Playdough and some Halloween make-up to create a gory, scarred face for my unfortunate inanimate victim…it looked real, like the visage of a water-bloated corpse gnawed by crabs. I dressed the head with frayed corn husks I had harvested previously from the corn field next to my aunt’s house, creating make-shift hair. But this was to be no regular hair, no. It was flammable, as I had planned on terrifying participants in a particularly horrifying way. 

You see, our chimney sat alongside our front porch and door, where trick-or-treaters would pass en route to the candy dish. My plan was to sit an enormous bowl of candy in the rocking chair on the front porch, with a sign that read in red block letters “TAKE ALL YOU LIKE.” It was a ruse in and of itself to draw their attention, move their focus to the candy rather than my diabolical machinations just above the eave line.

I planned to hide behind the chimney with my “victim,” who had been lashed to a really professional-looking noose I had created. When the kids were about to step onto the porch, eyes on the sugary prize, I would light the corn-husk hair on fire, and shove the dangling body off the roof line, where it would hang right in front of them, a startling site, complete with flaming hair.

The finishing touch…I had B-Rad stationed around the edge of the carport with an old chainsaw our backyard neighbor Jack Cannon had given us to tinker with. We had managed to get it running with the help of some ether and a fresh sparkplug, and though it was worthless as a saw without a chain, it was so loud and noisy that it would certainly, when combined with the swinging body, send prospective trick-or-treaters scurrying like roaches with the lights flipped on.

It was a solid plan, even if unapproved by my mother. Surely, she would not have let me shove smoldering bodies off her porch roof…but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

Was it Robert Burns who said “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry?” Wise feller…for a Scotsman. (“That there is some of that foreshadowin’ OWB is always doin’…”)

The day of infamy arrived, and I was fully prepared to deploy my pants-shit-inducing devices to my own delight and the terror of countless neighborhood young’uns on Halloween night. But first, I had a date with destiny…or rather Calla.

I waited for her at the corner that morning, and she immediately began talking about dressing me up. I honestly think she was looking forward to it, an assumption I later found to be true through her actions. Aside from feeling a little like an overgrown Ken doll, I was more than a little flattered by all of the attention she was dishing my way.

“So, why don’t you just come over right after school so I can dress you before it gets dark.” 

I didn’t know exactly why, but the thought of her “dressing me” made me feel funny in my nether regions. And I like-ted it.

“Yeah, okay, what should I bring?”

“Just yourself, silly,” she said with a wink. “I’ll handle the rest.” I was too young to know that she was probably overtly flirting with me. After all, I was still a big dumb lummox when it came to womenfolk.

I told her about what I had planned at the house later on, let her in on my secret so that she could prepare her little sister when she came around to knock on my door. Of course, wouldn’t be a very good look if I terrified the apple of my eye and her little sis…no sir’ee. 

“Oh you are SO MEAN!” She swatted my shoulder. “That is bad, you’re going to terrify those kids!” I could tell by her giggle that she wasn’t overly serious about my evil nature, at least not to the point of being thoroughly put off. This chick got me. 

“You should come by and see the show, I promise not to scare you. It’s all harmless fun, ya know.”

She agreed, and we parted ways at school, with her being a year ahead of me and on a different hall. I was as excited as I’d ever been about the prospect of having a girl visit me at my house, and I had no idea why. What the hell was happening to me? 

As promised, I followed Calla home after school, and she did as we had discussed. Upon arriving in the holy inner sanctum of her bedroom, she popped in the Whitesnake tape I had loaned her, just to set the mood. As “Here I go Again,” blared, she sang into the handle of her hairbrush as if it was a microphone. She had already found an appropriate wig from her personal play stock, and as she crossed the room with it, she teased it up, Coverdale style. 

She positioned it on my head and primped it, pulling swatches of the synthetic hair down over my forehead, her hands grazing my cheeks. In retrospect, it was one of those sweet, sensual experiences that sticks in the mind and shapes future desires, as it was really my first intimate encounter with someone of the opposite sex. I wasn’t sure what was happening, or what I wanted to happen, but I did know that it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. 

That’s when it happened. As she played with the fake hair, our eyes connected, locked in on one another. We were focused, laser-beam intense. I felt the quiver in my diaphragm I’ve come to relate to sheer joy and excitement and a little bit of terror. Without asking, she turned her head slightly and planted a kiss…right on my lips. My first one of any consequence. Then, just as quickly as it happened, it was over. She pulled back a little and smiled sweetly.

“Did that really just happen?” I wondered to myself. But I knew the answer. It HAD happened. And it was awesome.

Then, something else completely unexpected happened…and not in a good way. She broke out what appeared to be a make-up compact.

“I’m just gonna put a little blush here on your cheeks to soften your lines…”

“Uhhh, wut?”

“Just a little, don’t be silly, it’s just for effect…”

Talk about killin’ the mood. I thought things were flowing in a positive direction, and then she pulled out the damn guyliner. I was down with the overtly masculine Coverdale thing, but there was no way I was crossing over into Poison or Crue territory in my physical appearance. My circle of friends constantly questioned the gender preference of those cats, even though we listened to their music, and I wasn’t about to step off into the alligator pit of explaining to a bunch of teenage boys why I was wearing more foundation that a school marm. I wasn’t sure how to gracefully bow out of the situation without offending my sweet hostess, but I damn sure wasn’t going to walk back home looking like Boy George.

“Umm, I gotta go, gotta go get set-up, be dark soon.” I was totally flustered, partially from the after effects of the smooch, and partially because of the whole make-up thing. I scrambled up, stunned, and made for the door.

“But, I was just gonna…” She didn’t want me to go.

I had to change the subject.

“Yeah, I know, it’s just that…gettin’ late…need to…you know, my corpse and all…”

As I was heading out the back door, the Whitesnake wig still on my head, I hollered back. 

“You are coming up to my house tonight, right?”

“Yeah, see you after while.”

I rushed home, anxious to escape the emasculation of receiving the Max Factor treatment from the girl I was crushing on. What did she think I was, some kind of boy toy? Was I the Sean Penn to her Madonna? I couldn’t stand for that, the world was full of enough sexual ambiguity in the mid-80s without my adding to the pot.

I tried to shake it off, occupied my mind by getting my scare factory fired up. I added a few torches to the front yard to cast spooky, fear-inducing flickers that crept like fingers through the mossy boughs of the oak trees. I had everything ready…the final step was to place my corpse and fire-making tools on the roof before the unsuspecting trick-or-treaters arrived for their respective dates with terror.

The sun slipped below the horizon, a golden ladle dipping darkness from deep on the other side of the landscape. The crescent moon crept into the sky, barely breaking the dark with its sliver of silver-white light. I could already hear the faint footfalls on the asphalt up the street, the echo of elementary school students knocking on neighborhood doors followed by choruses of “trick-or-treat.”

I knew the time was at hand, and made sure my supplies were ready. Corpse?...check. Rope?...check. Gasoline? (GASOLINE?!!?)…check. Zippo lighter?...check. 

It. Was. On.

The first group was made up of a couple of the scuzzy kids from over on Eastview, the most underprivileged of streets in our rather underprivileged neighborhood. Among this group were members of a family that I always figured was constructed from the worst of their inbred gene pool. These folks, bless their hearts, appeared to be cobbled together from left-overs, from trimmed ends, from the scraps left when the beautiful people were rendered. I mean, not to be overly critical, but these kids were so fugly, they didn’t need masks to make candy demands. People were willing to dish them sweets just to get them the hell off their lawns.

There was Margerine (I shit you not, the child was literally named Margerine…pronounced Mar-jur-een), a poor girl who B-Rad had given the dubious nickname of “Plainface” due to her largely featureless visage. She looked like the backside of a baseball mitt, no humanoid bumps or ridges to speak of, almost like an almond-eyed gray alien. What her features lacked in terms of distinction were more than compensated by the girl’s raspy voice, however. She sounded like she had been smoking Lucky Strike non-filters for the better part of three decades, even though she wasn’t but 12 years old at the time. You could hear that heathen over a dirt bike engine. She was loud and her gravel-laden voice was something akin to dragging a salad fork over a blackboard, complete with a MOWA Choctaw twang characteristic of the tribe as constituted in northern Mobile County. This girl was as ugly as a mud fence with a gate made of peckers, but you didn’t dare tell ‘er that…’at girl would cut yoooooou. Quick to pull a blade, that Margerine was.

Then there was her older brother Maxster (these are actual names, folks, not falsies), who bore an uncannily strong resemblance to Beaker from the Muppet Show. Sumbitch’s mouth opened the wrong way or something, he was pale as a cave toad save for a scattering of ginger-red freckled on his cheekbones beneath his bug eyes. He didn’t talk too much, that is unless you wanted to talk about wrasslin’. Then, you couldn’t get the feller to shut his hole. Made that mistake once, and after two-and-a-half hours of a word-for-word recounting of the exploits of the Arn Anderson and the Four Horsemen, I had to fake pissin’ myself to break free and get home. 

Finally, there was King Ugly himself, a boar of a human being who had been bestowed with the name Fankley (seriously, folks), by his overly creative parents. Maybe “Fankley” was a family name or something, one of those remnants of the 19^th century plague of Southern illiteracy that just threw random letters together into something that vaguely sounded like it could be a name. I always thought the name fitting, as in “quite fankley, he was the ugliest mffkr I ever did see.” He had high-pink skin and was as hairless as a salamander…if he had any eye brows, they were pert near invisible. Old dude could have easily secured a role in American Horror Story, so bizarre and off-putting was his look. Watching him eat would have been enough to extract secrets from jihadists at Gitmo, a less humane form of waterboarding if you will, and the sight could certainly be considered proof in some circles that God had indeed abandoned humanity. He was just a mess visually (and keep in mind this assessment is coming from a chubby dude with Lego hair.) I swear, if I had owned a dog as ugly as this Fankley sumbitch, I’d have sooner shaved his ass and made him walk backwards than be seen in public with the likes of him.

(This is all very shallow, I know, and truthfully, is peripheral to the tale I’m unravelling. Pardon my long-windedness, as these images are still so vivid in my mind that I can’t help to dump them out on this here Hoodoo ledger.)

So this trio, much too old for trick-or-treating by my neighborhood’s self-imposed standards, approached my front door. They represented the perfect mark. I could test out my mechanism, and wouldn’t have to feel bad that I was scaring a bunch of kindergartners shitless. 

They were almost on my porch when I lit the corn-husk hair on the head of my “stuffed shirt” and kicked ole Malcom (as I was calling my corpse) off the edge of the roof. It worked like a charm. He fell right in front of their faces, a smoking, scarred monstrosity that jolted them with a sudden shock. They screamed, and right on cue, a Jason-masked B-Rad flared around the corner of the house, chainsaw growling wide-ass-open. 

Those poor ugly folk sprinted in terror like the Jamaican 400-meter team. They were greased lightning, they were nitrous-injected human funny (or more appropriately, fugly) cars. Jokers may as well have left cartoonish smoking footprints as they tore out of our yard, dropping their ditty-bags on the way out, so terrified they were of what had transpired. Mission accomplished.

It wasn’t long before I saw Calla, her sister, along her dad winding up around the curve to our house. I waved from my rooftop perch, and they saw me and came over. 

“How is it going?” Calla asked.

“Oh mah gawd, I just got Margerine and them real good…I mean REAL GOOD…they even dropped their candy they were so scared.”

Calla giggled, and her dad even appeared to get a kick out of it. I was midway through explaining the theatrics when I saw another neighborhood party making their way to the door. It was the Laurel and Hardy of our burg, the rotund J-Gun and his slender brother J-Ramy. I knew they’d get a kick out of it, as J-Ramy was scared of a shadow, wouldn’t even play football in the street after dark for fear of having to walk home past Mr. Gardner’s haint house (an abandoned house whose proprietor had long since died, leaving high grass and closed shutters behind).

“Hurry, y’all run around behind the carport with B-Rad and watch this.” I was going to get to put my masterwork on display for the woman of my dreams.

I crouched low with my corpse just above the roofline. I had reloaded with fresh corn husks, and I watched the duo ease towards the porch. As I lit the husks a-fire and was about to toss ole Malcom over the edge, the unthinkable happened.

I guess I had not been paying attention to the location of the Whitesnake wig I was wearing on my head and its rather close proximity to the flaming body only inches away. I first noticed a small flash, then the smell of burning synthetic, followed by the feeling of an unnatural heat on the side of my head. 

Now I ain’t no genius for damn sure, y’all. Don’t have to read many of these here Hoodoo tales to have picked up on that little tidbit of trivia. But my mind was not properly processing the course of this unfamiliar sensation. That said, the heat and light led me to one conclusion.

I…was…on…fire…

I WAS ON FIRE!!!

That damn wig went up like napalm, partially because of its synthetic make-up, and partially because it had probably soaked up the roughly half-gallon of hair spray I had loaded up on my head piece earlier that morning in an effort to impress my woman. 

But now, back to the important detail…I WAS ON FIRE!

Ever the Boy Scout, I had made all kinds of preparations for the night’s events. I had my tinder, I had my accelerant, I had my stage props. What I didn’t have, surprisingly, was a BUCKET OF DAMN WATER. Which, at the moment, would have really come in handy, because…I WAS ON FIRE.

I did the only thing I knew to do…I started screaming and flailing my arms, swatting at my head as if lit up by a hornets’ nest worth of stingers. Keep in mind I had been straddlin’ the uneven gable of the house, a locale which I thought gave me extra stability while deploying ole Malcom over the roof edge. Now, however, that peak worked against me, as I instinctively stood up and began to dart around while patting at the coif of fire stuck to my head like a fully-involved raccoon.

All eyes were on me as I danced like a cat on a hot tin roof…only far less Broadway-ish, and far more flaming lummox-ish. I didn’t know what to do…there was no water, no blanket to smother the flames, so way out. Doing the stop, drop, and roll would have rendered negative consequences on an angled rooftop of asphalt shingles. All forms of help were on the ground, while I was on the roof. I didn’t want to go out like a shish kabob that had fallen through the grill grates, but I knew I didn’t have time to climb down the ladder calmly. 

While I tried to decide what to do, gravity intervened. Well, maybe gravity, maybe my stumblin’ clumsiness. Either way, as I danced the jig of eternal flame while tryin’ to snatch the fiery wig-critter off my dome, I stepped crooked on the uneven gable, rolled my ankle, and took a tumble. All the way off the roof. All the way to the ground. In front of my brother, the neighborhood thugs, and most importantly, my dream girl and her family.

When I first fell, I landed on the roof, on my side, a few feet from the edge. But my momentum prevented me from stopping, even though I tried to dig my claws into the soft shingles. It wasn’t to be. I slid all the way to the edge, knowing full well the fate that awaited me, unable to stop. It was like something you’d see in a Vacation movie. It was agonizing, but I just prayed that what my grandma-ma always told me was true, that God has special mercy for the stupid.

When I got to the edge, I tried for all I was worth to hang on in hopes of slowing my descent. It was an admittedly James Bond, ninja-type option at best, but being such, it was well beyond my grasp at the moment. I ended up making myself look even dumber…I must have looked like a cat trying to stop itself from sliding down the hood of a moving car. 

My fate decided, I took it like a man. A big, screaming, hysterical man. I fell hard on my tailbone and back, thudding like a 50-pound sack of potatoes, right in front of mi amore and her family. It hurt, and I let out a crystal-shattering scream that echoed between the houses, down the street, for all to hear.

B-Rad, always the supportive sibling, had begun to point and laugh before I even ever made it over the edge. After landing, I let loose with a Vesuvian geyser of curse words that would make ole El Diablo himself blush like a school maiden. If F-bombs were weapons of war, then my yard would have been rendered Dresden. Such was the creativity and variety that I implemented in this explosive cuss-nado that I’m sure I made history with many of the utterances that passed over my lips and into the innocent ears of those unfortunate enough to be a party to my verbal eruption. 

As the pain wore off, I became aware of my surroundings. Calla stood about 10 feet away, horrified. Her father was next to her, his hands over his younger daughter’s ears. The look on his face was what one would expect from someone who just watched an 18-wheeler run over a baby stroller. 

J-Gun and J-Ramy were nowhere to be found, they had bolted at the first sign of trouble, not out of fear for my theatrics, but for fear of being tied up in some death or another. I mean, certainly, such would put a damper on Halloween in addition to being difficult to explain to their own mother. 

I again felt my face flushing red, but not from feelings of love or infatuation. No, this was just good old fashioned shame and embarrassment. By that time, my mother had emerged from the house.

“What…in the hell…was that?” She didn’t wait for an answer, considering I was laid out spread eagle in the front yard with a scorched carcass on my head and a still-flaming corpse smoldering away on her lawn. It didn’t really matter what had happened…there really wasn’t a way to slice the story that would make for appealing explanation.

“GET YOUR ASS UP!” She was not happy. Mr. Calla ushered his daughters on up the street, double-time. B-Rad melted into the back yard like a sniper to escape detection from my mother implicating eye.

“WHAT IN THE HELL WERE YOU DOING?”

I didn’t even bother explaining. I just told her I was grounded. No use in swimming against the current.

I waited for Calla the next morning at the corner in hopes of having an opportunity to explain myself. She didn’t show.

I saw her after school that day, but she said she was no longer allowed to walk with me. Her dad had put the kee-bosh on that one for good. 

After that, what could have been never was, sadly. We’d speak to one another, but those dreamy-eyed looked she had previously glued upon me were replaced by the sympathetic, half-hearted fleeting glances of someone who wants to escape the conversation. A lot like the way I looked at Maxster when he’d start in talking about wrasslin’. It was a lost opportunity, a conspiracy of the elements: fire, gravity, and time. It was merely a preparation for lost opportunities to come…certainly not my finest hour. 

But alas, que sera. If I had a dime for every time I set myself on fire, rolled off the roof, and lost a potential love interest…well, Hoodoo for another time, I reckon.

Loki, slake your thirst on my shame. Place your eternal all-powerful favor on my beloved Crimson Tide, and let them roll to victory over those god-forsaken swamp people. Roll Tide.