The tale’s premise: there exist certain homeless people in Oregon who celebrate Halloween, decorate, dress up, hand out candy to trick or treaters or even trick or treat themselves.
A preposterous premise conjured by a deluded, sentimental writer who counts Halloween as his second least favorite American celebration?
No. The writer of this tale has observed homeless people in Oregon for years decorate themselves, their tents, RVs, sedans, bicycles, boats and dogs for Christmas. He also served a homeless man in an Oregon City street mission who told him he always cooked a turkey at Thanksgiving in a garbage ban buried in a charcoal pit and staged a feast for the residents of his encampment on the banks of the Clackamas River.
So why not Halloween? Many people prefer Halloween to Thanksgiving or Christmas. You know, pagan over Squanto and Santa Claus. And, at Halloween you get to consciously pretend to be someone far more interesting than your real self. Moreover, you don’t have to fake it with the relatives at dinner.
On with the tale.
Morgan lived with two dogs (and occasionally a loser man) in a 32-year-old black Honda Accord that was battered, bruised, duct taped, caulked, tarped, and generally held together with baling wire, bungee cords and the expertise offered by a retired 80-year-old auto mechanic, Hank. He met Morgan in the parking lot of a grocery store when the Honda crapped out yet again. He got it running in 20 minutes, tutored her on solving the reoccurring problem, and became her regular mechanic out of the sheer goodness of his heart and because he was bored watching Westerns on TV and smoking grass all day (Yeah, he still called it grass.) Hank still had something to give and it pleased him to help Morgan. She was about the age of his granddaughter who had disappeared years ago. Hank never stopped believing she would rally back into his life. He figured someone like him might be helping his granddaughter so he wanted to return the favor, even the cosmic score, and perhaps put some extra points on the board.
Hank never asked about Morgan’s homelessness. Some people just can’t go there.
We need to go there.
The Honda could drive approximately a mile before conking out for some reason or another but that was far enough for Morgan. She had established a routine in Empire and was going on a year now in residence.
Morgan parked her domicile on various streets and vacant lots around the Empire District of Coos Bay. She was 27 years old but looked like a teenager, even with a feral countenance that evinced casual methamphetamine use. (Occasionally, she fell overboard and ended up weeding the public flower beds at 7 in the morning. When that happened, she always apologized to the dogs.)
She survived on her Oregon Trail Card, collecting cans and bottles, and running errands for an elderly shut-in named Steve who didn’t drive anymore and had no one to help him. They met when she parked her car in front of his decrepit duplex and they talked about the dogs while sharing a cigarette.
How in the world had had Morgan ended up in Empire living the way she did? We need to know the reasons but they will elude us for this tale.
What matters is that she was still hanging on, caring for two dogs, a tiny black mutt and a speckled Chihuahua.
Was there any hope that Morgan could somehow find a new path?
Yes. This is a tale. Tales must offer hope. That is their prime ingredient and why this writer can’t stop writing them. Maybe they keep him advancing into the story because fiction is the only way he can fathom (somewhat) a tragic failure of government policy-making, collective humanity, and desiccated Christianity.
Halloween approached. Morgan loved Halloween and fashioning weird costumes. She loved candy, especially anything chocolate. She vaguely recalled trick or treat outings as a kid growing up in North Bend. She also recalled being alone.
Morgan stole a pumpkin from the bin outside the grocery store and wedged it up under the back seat and back window. That was the extent of the decorations but displaying that one pumpkin might signify something latent, something buried deep, a return to something happy or normal in childhood that Morgan might later draw upon for motivation.
One never knows what putting up a single decoration for a holiday might do for the person who made the effort or a person who might see it.
It took the writer of this tale most of his adult life to understand that axiom and that’s why he puts up vintage Christmas decorations, and for the first time, was going to display a Jack O Lantern on Halloween AND GIVE OUT CANDY! to anyone who dared to go trick or treating in Empire, a irregularly blighted and sorrowed neighborhood with entire blocks turned spooky and scary by the amiable, avuncular demon known as President Ronald Reagan.
The Halloween forecast called for 42-degrees and stars in the sky. In other words, dry and no Jack O Lanterns with their mildewed grins (that’s a line from Sometimes a Great Notion). In other words, atypical Halloween weather on the Oregon Coast.
Morgan fell asleep in the sedan as darkness descended. The dogs dozed together on the passenger seat.
When she awakened, she saw several trick or treaters pass by. They were in grade school, dressed up as super heroes, and without parental escort, something practically extinct in America anymore, and sadly almost gone from our culture. Let the kids go on their own! Let them develop interior lives! Let them cream some pumpkins on slick streets!
Morgan felt chilled. She exited the Honda, popped the trunk, and rifled through her possessions. In short order she had donned a Bigfoot onsie.
More trick or treaters appeared. They were running with their phones and bags of candy, one tumbled over, jumped back up, laughing.
A suspect great notion walloped Morgan: I’m going trick or treating. I’m taking the dogs. I’m already in costume. Just slip on my red cowboy boots, the glitter-encrusted, Lone Ranger mask, and gold chains! Shit, this is Empire! Residents dress like this all the time! Shit, Empire exudes a perpetual state of Halloween!
She completed the ensemble, rousted the dogs, rigged up tiaras for them, scrounged up a canvas tote bag, and they hit the weird streets.
Where to first?
A dive bar of course! She entered the Silver Dollar Tavern. The joint was almost empty. Death metal blasted through speakers. She approached the bar, locked eyes with a vacant bartender, and said, “Trick or treat!” with panache and a twirling bow.
He wasn’t having any of it. He didn’t look up.
But an old timer sipping something golden-colored in a snifter was certainly having it.
He said, “Treat!” and ordered Morgan a double Drambuie.
She’d never heard of the stuff.
One sip and Morgan was hooked on the dreamy honey liqueur made in Scotland. She drained the rest of snifter in one gulp and felt the glow all the way to her boots. She thanked the old timer. He also bought her a pickled grotesquerie known officially as a Hot Mama sausage. She broke it into three parts and fed herself and the dogs and away they went.
Now where?
Morgan meandered into the neighborhood with the dogs walking on either side of her, unleashed. Some of the most haunted-looking houses weren’t even decorated; they were just being their forlorn, dilapidated and creepy selves. These were recent ruins, and many of them had a half dozen (or more) rusted, rotted RVs, trailers, trucks, boats, buses, ATVs and even forklifts marooned on lawns and yards gone to seed. Yes, it was haunting all right—the boom and bust of rapacious timber capitalism at its finest.
At first Morgan hit every house that displayed decorations, but she soon developed a preference for the simple Jack O Lantern or lone skeleton dangling from a noose. No rotund inflatables or stringy cobwebs for her.
The candy haul proved pedestrian, but is was free! Morgan received plenty of compliments about her costume and she always responded the same way, “Oh, I wear this all the time.” Which was true.
After an hour, the dogs tuckered out. Morgan stashed the Chihuahua in the tote and headed back toward the Honda.
A couple blocks from her domicile, she saw a small house with three monster Jack O Lanterns flickering on the patio. Each pumpkin had one word carved in it. From left to right: ROCK IS DEAD.
She knocked on the front door. Nothing. She knocked again. An older, semi long-haired man holding a husky by the collar opened the door. The man wore an absurd gray sweater with HAPPY HALLOWEEN stenciled in orange across the chest. The husky wore a black dunce cap and greeted Morgan with his signature howl.
The man produced a plastic Jack O Lantern full of Mounds and Almond Joy candy bars. He instantly recognized Morgan as the homeless woman who lived out of a sedan in Empire. He passed by her almost daily on his morning walk with the husky to a Coos Bay beach and wanted to know her story, particularly after observing her performing her meth-fueled landscaping, but they’d never met, never made eye contact.
Now here she was, and obviously coherent, smiling even. Now was the time to go there.
“Take as many as you want,” said the man.
Morgan grabbed a fistful and placed them in her tote.
“Thank you!” she said. She didn’t ask about the ROCK IS DEAD Jack O Lanterns. By this point in her life, in her struggle to survive, she had lost all curiosity about everything except repairing her car.
The man knew this was the time to go there—get the damn story, lay the first block of the foundation. He might not get another chance to help her into housing, as he had done for other homeless people back when he lived in Portland.
“Love the costume,” said the man, “and the dogs.”
Yes, dogs! That’s the entry point into many people’s hearts. He knew this especially to be true for homeless people with dogs.
“Yeah, they’re a lot of fun,” said Morgan. She turned and walked away. The man watched them disappear around his cedar tree.
He hadn’t gone there. He’d blown it.
That’s hardly a satisfactory to a Halloween tale about a young homeless woman in Empire.
But this tale is not about the man, it is about Morgan, and how she got off her ass and went trick or treating on Halloween with her dogs, and moved into the regular world, if only for one night.
Movement portends hope. Movement can sometimes be seen, then acted upon. The man had seen the movement in Morgan, and that might be the beginning.
