September 16, 2005:
It was a dark and stormy night.
No really, it was, and I was home alone with my sister, eight years my senior. She was playing babysitter, I was playing babysat. It was 1989, and by that point, all my other siblings had moved out of the house. Lord knows where my parents went, but they were going to be until the wee hours. It was just me and my sister, and we weren't very close.
So we're sitting on the couch watching A Halloween Nightmare, a fairly famous "making of" television special that detailed the gory effects of the first bunch of Elm Street flicks. I was super into it. Still a kid, the idea of Freddy Krueger remained frightening to me, but with my sister in the room, even on a dark, stormy night, there wasn't a shiver in my bones. The television special had me seriously amped to go stage my own Hollywood blockbuster using our old 450 pound Panasonic video camera, while my sister got into a progressively more heated argument with her then-boyfriend on our family's magical new cordless phone.
I tried to ignore it. The special had just gotten up to the part where they explained how they made all of those human heads pop out of Freddy's stomach, and even though my sister was getting loud, nothing was going to divert my attention from that. Slowly, though, their phone argument hit a peak, with me now being able to audibly understand every curse word coming out of her boyfriend's mouth, from the phone, across the room. My sister wasn't just arguing now -- she was sobbing hysterically while arguing. It was an absolute scene, and she soon hung up the cordless, marched into her room without saying a word, slammed the door and proceeded to continue the war games from her own private line. See, there's a big difference between a babysitter your mom hires and a babysitter your mom gave birth to. In the former case, the babysitter will make some attempt to keep you occupied. A sibling babysitter's job only goes to the extent of making sure you don't catch fire.
And so began one of the most frightening nights of my life. I'd just invested almost an hour to the scary sights and sounds of one Fred Krueger, and whatever bravery I had in the company of Safe Sista was now completely obliterated. I sunk into the couch with a filthy tigerprint blanket, too scared to turn off the television, too scared to do my patented Indian Anti-Rain Dance to make the storm stop and too scared to use the neighbor's DeLoreon to fast forward to the sanctity of the summer months. A dark, stormy October night spent alone with Freddy Fucking Krueger.
For the first few minutes after Safe Sista departed, I guess I was banking on a speedy return. Surely she knew better than to trust that I was in no way, shape or form about to die from fright. She didn't come back, and within a few minutes, I realized that she wasn't going to come back. While seeing Freddy's face on television wasn't the straw that broke my camel's bladder, it filled my soul with enough dirty witchy stuff to make me fully confident that just beyond the entrance to our living room, a nine foot demon with plain black eyes waited to kill me with a fork.
Interestingly enough, it was the kind of night I crave nowadays. This was the ultimate Halloween season experience -- stormy night, dark house, horror on television, tigerprint blanket. Hearing my sister's voice match the legendary harpy scream for scream through the wall, I knew she wasn't going to be any help. In fact, she was being quite the opposite -- I'd never seen anyone as upset as she was on this night, and it freaked the hell out of me. With too many scary obstacles to overcome, I draped myself in the ol' filthy tigerprint blanket and, as I recall, tried to "will" morning to come by blinking my eyes really hard. Seriously. I just sat there crunching my eye sockets over and over again, somehow thinking this would make the well-lit morning suddenly appear. It didn't, but I still do that stupid eye thing just before taking a penny to a scatch-off Lotto card.
Thinking bad thoughts but not really trembling, I continued watching A Halloween Nightmare. During one of the commercial breaks, there was an ad for Freddy's 900 line. Yes, Freddy Krueger had a 900 line. (Actually, he's had a few of them over the years.) My head exploded. Not really understanding what most of the 900 lines consisted of (paying per minute for what amounted to hearing an audio book), I figured that all who called actually spoke to Freddy Krueger. Course, I knew that Freddy couldn't possibly field all the calls himself, so I revised my theory on the various Santa Claus 900 lines that came out around Christmas. They must've had multiple guys in Freddy costumes waiting at a long table full of black rotary phones.
Though my fear decreased briefly while thinking about how a phone conversation with Freddy Krueger might go, I soon remembered that I was alone in the dark with a fork-wielding demon just beyond the doorway. I couldn't hear Safe Sista yelling anymore; she'd either opted for a quieter assault on everything that was wrong with her boyfriend, or worse, went to bed. If she went to bed, nobody would hear my screams when big bad demon forked my shit up.
The commercial kept repeating and repeating and repeating, because that's how they're effective, and with a cordless phone just barely touching my toes, I caved and called. Granted, I can't remember exactly what Freddy said, just that he said it very, very slowly. Only now do I understand the bastardly capitalistic reason why. During each call, Freddy would tell one of a number of horror tales. The version I heard was unique and didn't draw from some popular legend, but that's not to say that it was interesting. "There were KIDS...at these WOODS...and the kids...WERE A'SCARED! AHHHH HAHAH HAH!" This went on forever, or in what feels like forever when you're plugged into a 900 line, five or six minutes. While I was on the phone, all of this nonsense was purely exhilarating. Calling a 900 line was a naughty thing to do, and I could feel my pubes sprout with every passing second that I hung on for. Besides, it's one thing to face your fears, but it takes a real bad dude to call them on the phone.
Course, when I hung up midway through one of Freddy's little asides, I was now fueled with all of his suggestions of specters near the campfire, ghouls in the school and spiders up my ass. Adding all of that atop all the fears I had before the phone call, and it was to the point that the tigerprint blanket now served as an extra layer of skin, covering every inch of my body, head and tail included. Mummifying myself was all I could do to cope. Eventually, I fell asleep, and by morning, I'm sure I completely ignored the fact that I spent the entire previous night auditioning for the role of Big Fat Crybaby in the new off-Broadway hit, Tears For Queers.
Admittedly, it's not a night I'd be remembering now if X-E reader Eric S. hadn't so graciously donated a VHS copy of the original offense. (Thanks, mang.) Still, it was the kind of night that makes me so envious of who and what I used to be. I wish I could be that affected and that singularly interested in something today. I've lost the tigerprint blanket, and I've lost that, too. Here, buried deep within the fabricated conceit of an article about Freddy Krueger's 900 line, lies one of the biggest reasons I love the Halloween season so much. It's a chance to be what I used to be, however slightly. It's also a chance to eat a lot of peanut butter cups, and that's goddamned awesome.
Click here to download the Freddy Krueger Hotline ad! (WMV format, approximately 1 MB)
- Matt (9/16/05)
One year ago on the Halloween Countdown:
Instant Halloween Sponge Capsules!
Almost two years ago on the Halloween Countdown:
Halloween Blood Capsules!
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