I ain't carved a jack-o-lantern in at least a good 5-6 years, and last weekend we had the rare opportunity to hollow out and carve us some punkins at our friend Marie's birthday party.
Every time I carve punkins, a charming little Halloween memory comes back to me and gives me the warm fuzzies. No, not the one in 6th grade where I was a punk rocker and put Vaseline in my hair hold my a mohawk (FYI: Vaseline really adheres to your follicles once it has been smeared onto them. We had to warsh it out with kerosene per doctor's orders and poof - my hair was back to normal and I got a free day out of school without even having to fake a cold.) I digress.
The memory that I speak of takes us back to 1985. I was in high demand as a babysitter on our block back in the day; mainly with my next door neighbor Jason. Jason and his owners lived in a white rambler with an enormous garage which basically left them with all of about 4 square feet of lawn once it was all built. Every Tuesday I would hang with Jason while his parents bowled, and it was 3 hours of as many blissful shenanigans as I figured I could let us get away with without him yapping any of it to his parents when they got home.
One Tuesday in October, his mum and dad left us 2 huge punkins to convert into jack-o-lanterns. They left to get to their bowling game as Jason and I started scooping out punkin guts into a large silver bowl. Enter: Clyders, the family English Bulldog.
Clyders was creepy, odoriferous, and would "slime" everything his cheeks would come in contact with. He hated basketballs. If Jason ever left them out in the yard, Clyde would run out and attack, pop, and lock his jaws onto them. Even if we left one in our backyard, Clyde would sit at the fence and aggressively run to and fro barking at the fucker as if it were making fun of him.
Clyders and his little happy boy-dog lipstick humped the couch cushions and throw-pillows all of the time, and because of that (and lord knows what else he did to them) they reeked of dried urine. We would often toss the pillows on the floor and point and laugh as he would approach them, sniff out the one he was most attracted to at the time, and engage in a passionate lovemaking session.
Clyde often was a key element in our shenaniganry (we made sure he never got hurt.) As Jason and I sat in the kitchen on the newspaper covered linoleum carving away at our huge punkins, the silver bowl overflowethed with slimy orange seedy innards. Being the incredibly smart and delicate creature of God he always was, Clyde moseyed on up, took one sniff, and parked it in front of the bowl. He started eating, and Jason laughed. Having learned from past ground-level encounters with Clyders, I got up off the floor and sat on a chair in lieu of getting a crusty dog spit stain on my grey corduroys, continuing to watch.
Jason picked a huge, gnarly glob of punkin guts out of the bowl and held it up in the air for Clyders to covet. I still have the visual in my head as if it were yesterday: His arm outstretched and silver ID bracelet shimmering in the light, and Clyde standing and gazing up at the glob of slime, huffing and trying to bounce his fat hammy body up to get a piece of it, never losing eye contact. His front paws even hit the bowl a few times.
Jason lowered his arm and Clyde nabbed the entire glob in one fell swoop. He stood over the newspaper chomping, and his cheeks made the most disgusting intermittent slobbery flapping noise trying to keep the mass contained in his giant basketball-slaying yap. He had that determined look in his eyes to keep it all in, looking at us as if to say No WAY you motherfuckers are getting any of this precious delight back! Jason let one of those raspy 5 second long out of breath exhale laughs, and continued to feed Clyde a great deal more of what was in the bowl.
That night I gathered my babysitting dues and left wondering what would become of Clyde. A cold wave of fear washed over me.. what if Clyde died from a punkin O.D.? Al and Avis would be at our doorstep in a second ready to tell my parents and throw me in jail.
As fate would have it, nothing really happened to him other than shitting like a fire hydrant for the next few days. I remember going back the next week to get all the gory details. Once the driveway was empty and the coast was clear, Jason told me that they couldn't figure out for the life of them what Clyde had eaten that would make him dump so many bushels of Squand out in the yard. They even thought about switching his food on them, but waited it out and forgot about it once his poo was of scooping consistency once again.We had a good laugh over that. And all the while, Clyde was somewhere off in the distance happily making sweet love to his favorite olive green throw pillow.
