When I was a kid, I was usually a bum.
I’m talking about my Halloween costume, of course. I wasn’t a bum every day, though there are those who might dispute that.
My parents didn’t have a lot of money to spend on fancy costumes that would be worn only one day of the year, and a bum outfit was the easiest and cheapest way to go, so that’s the way I went nearly every Halloween.
After all, there were always shabby clothes lying around the house, and with a few more rips and stains, they only looked all the more bum-worthy. Add a bit of burnt cork around the jawline to simulate a week’s growth of beard, and —Presto! Change-o! — I was a bum.
I always envied the kids whose parents went out and bought them a whole outfit from a costume shop, complete with rubber mask. They were the kings and queens of trick-or-treat, because those costumes allowed them to become something entirely different, not just a cork-faced kid wearing last year’s school clothes. When the rubber-headed kids walked down the street, you didn’t know who they were, even if they were the kid next door from you.
One year, Mom came up with a rubber Frankenstein mask for me to wear. I don’t know where it came from, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t buy it at a costume shop. It was probably a hand-me-down from one of the neighbor kids who had a new costume to wear that year, or maybe something that she picked up at a garage sale for a nickel.
It didn’t come with the rest of the costume, but that was OK because it seemed to me that Boris Karloff’s monster wore pretty much the same bum clothes that I wore every Halloween, so that’s what we did. That Halloween I walked down the street proudly, a terrifying bum with a green rubber head and rivets on the neck.
It didn’t take long, though, for me to lose my envy for the kids whose parents bought them a rubber head to wear every Halloween, because I was nearly blind the whole time, tripping over curbs and porch steps. And the head was so hot, my hair dripped sweat down my riveted neck.
Worse than that, I spent hours breathing the same air, and I could smell my lunch the whole time. I think the mask might have belonged to Larry Fiorentino down the block, because it also smelled of oregano.
And so, after that, it was back to the bum.
As Mom was smearing my face with burnt cork the following year, I whined that I was sick of being a bum. I was always a bum.
“Well, how about a hobo?” Mom asked. “You’ve never been a hobo.”
“What’s a hobo?” I asked.
She tied a bindle-sack to a stick and told me to hold it over my shoulder. “Presto! Change-o!” she said. “You’re a hobo!” She told me about the hobos of her youth during the Depression, riding the rails, traveling the country in a grand adventure.
She was right. It was a marvelous transformation.
Suddenly I was an exotic wanderer, not just a bum. After all, I had seen bums in our neighborhood, and they always seemed sad and smelly. But a hobo? A hobo was like a quester in a fairy tale. Odysseus, or Sinbad. Besides, if my trick-or-treat bag got too full, I could always pack more treats in my bindle.
The bindle made all the difference.
In time, though, I grew too old to trick-or-treat, and I looked forward to the day that I would have children of my own to deck out in shabby clothes and burnt cork.
But by the time I was married and we had a daughter and a son, I couldn’t convince any of them of the glory of being a hobo. No, my wife insisted on making all of their costumes by hand, and she indulged their wildest fantasies.
When our son started playing soccer, he insisted on going trick-or-treating dressed as a soccer ball. My wife went to work cutting and sewing fabric, stuffing it with polyester fiber, and figuring out how to inflate a kid into a ball.
When she was finished, the costume was a masterpiece. He was a perfectly round white ball with black patches, his skinny arms and legs sticking out at the sides and bottom, and at the top a smiling blond head beaming with pride.
Unfortunately, it rained that Halloween. The padding inside the costume kept him warm for a while, but before long he started soaking up the water, and his legs grew weary from hauling around the extra weight.
By the time we got home, he was the shape and density of a blight-splotched Idaho potato. If I had gone with him dressed in my raggedy bum costume, people would have thought we were re-enacting the Irish Potato Famine.
He should have been a bum. Or better still, a hobo.
Because the bindle would have made all the difference.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
