Fear As A Tonic For Madness
Somewhere deep within some of us there are things we mustn’t speak of. Notions, perhaps we might call them. Others: they insist on fresher terms, sharper clips of popping language because, well, why not?
What are the words, you ask? Oh, I could never say, I’m afraid. Not at least the words others might apply to themselves. I mean, if there is one thing the last few years ought to have taught us it has to be the fact that words matter. Terms and phrases mean something now, in ways they didn’t before. People have taken to the streets of language in ways once reserved for storming actual villages and farms, surrounding them with burning torches and mob energy and the thunderous rise of sharpened pitchforks/ in unison /at dawn.
But what I can tell you is what my own inner dialogue reveals. I have, after all, been talking to myself nearly all of my life, going back nearly five decades at this point. And through all of that I have obviously earned insights into how I see myself, especially when it comes to the potential for, how might we put it… darkness?
Were my sadnesses and blues to effervesce, alchemize, become a something grander than the sum of its parts, what would I look like? How would I materialize? Where would you find me? And on that note, why would you even look for me to begin with?
Do you ever ponder these things? Especially in this season, as Halloween looms?
I do. Not for any single takeaway, I suspect, but more because I long to connect with an underbelly of sorts. Yes, yes, yes, I am nothing special. And yes, of course, my magic powers, my ability to do anything out of the norm, anything possibly deemed witchy or spooky or magic or whatever/ I possess nothing of the sort. I cannot fly and my strength is minimal. The full moon makes me irritable and suspicious, yet I have never found myself alone in the forest with hot blood in my teeth or anything like that.
My dreams are all quirky/ some are delightful/ others weird. Never do they take me towards a darker path. I haven’t killed many people in the middle of my sleep. A few? Well, who knows? But nothing I would write home about, honestly. More often than not I see myself dressed as E.T. and the wind is blowing harsh from the north as my brother dressed as Michael Jackson and my Mom dressed as a pirate both walk just ahead of me, dead leaves swirling wild up about their bodies in sudden rising gusts, the sweet scent of the cool evening like a spiced wafer jammed up into my face like a clay pigeon shot into my mouth.
So where do I enter into this whole Halloween question as someone who has found great worth in loving the auras of it all yet seems, quite simply, to lack any and all supernatural powers. I ooze no real horror but that of an average anxious middle aged dad. People don’t run from me when I come around the corner. In fact, I almost run into this one same Amish dude almost every day after I come out of the post office and he only ever flinches a little bit and says, “Helloooo” in his thick Dutch way, as the piss runs down my leg because: you guessed it: I jump in absolute fear every time we nearly collide even though it happens all the time.
Where is my darkness then?
Where does it hide? Where does it lurk? I must have it, no? We all do, I’m sure of it. For me, I believe it might be down in my blue sad bones, a slash of shadow from behind my ribs/ a silvery flit of blade from the shade ‘round my spine.
Am I evil?
How do we answer that? How do I answer that? I don’t feel evil, but sometimes I suspect that no one who is evil, or scary, or overwhelmingly characterized by making other people, mere mortals if you will, shit the pants off of their flabby legs, even realizes that they are who they are. Maybe there is madness attached to cruelty. It could be that there are other types of madness too, better kinds maybe, kinds that allow us to imagine ourselves as indescribably horrific/ macabre/ monstrous, even/ and yet we never come close to living it out. To acting it out in real time.
Well, hopefully not.
Some do, it’s true. Many either choose/ or are chosen by/ a powerful alternate to so-called civility. And I must admit: we do find such folks uniquely attractive in our own twisted ways, now, don’t we? Our serial killer fixation is this year’s vampire fetish/ this era’s witch hunt across the land. It’s just that we are lazy and drunk instead of crazy and drunk like people used to be. So we let the Netflix guide our sinister fantasies as we snack our lives away to the song of someone else’s utter insanity.
Meanwhile, out in the yard, there are ghosts floating above your gas grill. They are dripping waxy piss down on your Subaru under the cover of night. It isn’t tree sap, you pigheaded fool. Everywhere you look these days, Halloween, she’s calling you. In the swift clouds passing over the moon, in the shine of the stars on the river ‘neath the bridge. There is something watching us from a distance.
Can you feel it yet at all?
If you can, I understand you.
But if you can’t, we grow apart.
E.T. Walking By The Tap Room Many Moons Ago
In 1982, I was 11 years old, a chunky below-average infielder with sweat-hog breath. If you had tracked me down, you could have probably caught me with a flash of runty fast food pickle skin crowbar’d between my two front buck teeth like some kind of post-apocalyptic seaweed flag flying off the crumbling White House.
I was not cool in the ways of many suburban Philly early ’80s middle schoolers. Something was missing, I guess. I never had any kind of ballsy Howard Jones haircut; I didn’t shine on the court or out on any field; no one wanted to fight me or kiss me or steal my kicks; teachers likely saw me as just another in a long line of modern peasants with tavern ham skin and little to no personality or soul.
I was not on anyone’s list. The world hadn’t even noticed I’d been born yet. Cars probably would have went right through me out in the street if I’d tried that. So when Halloween rolled around that year, the year that a small alien stole the hearts of all Americans, rich and poor, black and white, I didn’t even make the choice. The choice, as it sometimes happens, chose me.
I was E.T.
Fat E.T.
And I was a stone cold American classic, now that I think about it. But back then? Oh, hell no. I was one of probably 300 E.T.’s roaming the street-lit local blocks where we lived our lives. I didn’t see my own stars shining, man. Kids like I was, they just didn’t have that kind of assured self-confidence.
Being E.T., I figured, was a way of fitting in. It’s kind of like people in rural counties with their Fuck Biden stickers, you know? You just really wear that thing so other people who look and smell like you (beef jerky energy drink sweaty palm) will not notice you as anything but an ally along this long hard road called life.
By E.T.-ing myself, I joined a voluntary collective of kids with lazy eyes and kids with noses that never stopped pumping milky snot and kids with lite mustaches and kids with fists of iron and kids with bad shit happening at home and kids with dancing hearts and sparky minds and insatiable appetites for love and beauty and magic. And kids who would punch you in your boy tits just for walking by them in the hall/ alone/ just the two of you/ one gleaming October afternoon.
You want that one?, my mom asked me. She was always good about it, always willing to let me get whatever costume felt right to me that year. Of course, I never tried to be a Wonder Woman or anything like that, but she probably wouldn’t have cared at all. It was Halloween in the ’80s. Death and infinite destruction were not quite in the air just yet.
Plastic mask, cheap vinyl one-piece body suit: these were the costumes of the time, these cheap Chinese fuckers you got at Kmart while your Mom was trying to be patient with your choosy ass (but really she was jonesing for a cig or a nip or a bowl of piping-hot scalloped potatoes).
The E.T. mask, when I slid it on that first time in the aisle of store-bought costumes, it smelled intensely plastic, and somewhat chemical. It was that sweet ripe tang of the brand new Halloween mask and it was something divine and glorious. The rubber band stapled to the inside of each cheek of whatever face you were going with, it was a single strand of magic in this world. I still imagine it even now: the flimsy loose thread tightening around my feathered haircut, it’s strength digging ever so gently into my rear scalp, pulling on my hair, begging me to adjust or die, but still.
Oh, the power that could come with breathing in your own vaporish sweat. The Vaderish sound of your own voice echoing off of the inside of E.T.’s cheapness/ a hollow carpet bombing of vibrations and bumps and hot breathy collisions as you struggled to keep the mask from flapping out and back on your face from your weird sucks of gasping for oxygen.
Later, on Halloween itself, out on the night street, my heavy candy bag in my fist, I would finally discover, if only for a fleeting moment or two, how it felt to become a space man under a dense canopy of monkey ball trees. The musky heat of my face matted to the Asian plastic/ the rapid fire shots of flappy huffing sounds/ the synthesizers papping lip zits with the backside of every fake face/ the euphoric agitation singularly born up out of that mask congealing with my one true skin/ it all joined forces as I marched with a gang of outlaws and misfits/ with old fashion witches and sheet ghosts moving silently/spiritually/ alongside GI Joes and Michael Jacksons/ three E.T.’s in a row, perhaps/ four maybe/ everyone walking carefully over the enormous tree roots breaking up through the sidewalk like pythons/ in the most rock/roll procession to ever wander down any moonlit Maple Street anywhere in this vast land, so dark and savage, stoned out of its middle school mind on its own bloated magnificence.
A billion E.T.’s coming out of the shadows.
A trillion young kids slipping into the light, towards a life that they never saw coming.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
