For those of you who are, like me, total candy freaks, the entire holiday calendar is ruled by one central event: Halloween (a/k/a Night of the Living Freak). As we all know, Halloween can be traced back to All Hallows' Eve, an ancient religious festival during which priests raced around the streets of Dublin throwing snack-size Snickers bars at impoverished children.

This is what I love about Halloween. It has, from a freak perspective, purity of intent. There's no dallying about with God or that contrived brand of devotion that's in place to assuage the guilt that accompanies our other seasonal pageants of gluttony. It goes straight to the product. In fact, there's something quite liberating about a holiday that encourages children to take candy from strangers.

Today, of course, our paranoia about child safety has reached this fabulous zenith (as a result, once again, of our unacknowledged guilt over emotionally neglecting our children) whereby kids are allowed to trick-or-treat only with their parents, and each piece of received candy is promptly and assiduously inspected with a metal detector and/or chemical-toxicity kit.

I watch the kids tromping about my neighborhood with their hawk-eyed parents, and I feel sorry for the poor little schmendricks. They hit maybe 10 houses an hour, because the parents make each stop a little event, with thank-yous and much time spent admiring costumes and discussing the truly atrocious crimes that might befall children at any moment in these woeful days of ruination.

But back in the good old days, the blithe, porno-soaked, latch-key '70s, the idea of tromping around the neighborhood with a parent in tow was unthinkable -- like jacking off with your mom in the room. And yes, we heard plenty of urban myths about creepy old dudes sinking razors into caramel apples. But that only added a kind of risky allure to the endeavor. (As Bobby Stankey used to say: don't bite down if the blade is facing outward, dickweed.)

I actually enjoyed the prospect of visiting iffy-looking houses and apartment complexes, because the people there (if they remembered to buy candy at all) had no sense of proportion. They led lives of mystery amid their mysterious smells, and we could peek inside their homes, at the strange artwork and the absence of furniture, and occasionally some guy would open the door in his underwear and throw quarters at us. This is how we learned about the world.

For the true candy freak, Halloween was all about game-planning. You couldn't just wander around, because you had a three-hour window and every minute counted; and, more important than that, you had this remarkable concept known as Freak Amnesty, which meant that, on this one evening, you were allowed to gather and consume as much candy as you could without parental objection.

Come 6:30, I knew exactly where I was headed: up Wilkie Way toward Charleston, north onto Alma and back around to Meadow, with detours onto the densely packed streets surrounding Ventura, then to the skeezy apartments on James. The little stuff -- side streets and cul-de-sacs around home -- could be picked up on the way back. I stayed away from fancy costumes, as these provoked discussion, and discussion was not what you wanted. You wanted a quick exchange. One year, I wrapped a bed sheet around me and went as . . . what? A Roman. A mummy. Origami. It was never quite clear.

Another year, I wore a bandanna and wax lips.

What are you?

Uh . . . (brief, awkward pause) . . . a pirate.

Where's your parrot?

It died.

I raced from house to house, sore-shouldered and gasping, past those miserable factions who focused on the trick portion of the event with much exercised chucking of eggs and smashing of pumpkins, to the brightly lit doorsteps, where a basket of candy would be laid before me, as if I were a prince and this my tribute. I proceeded in this manner until nine or 10, with special emphasis on that final hour, when the crowds thinned out and the benefactors, having invariably overstocked and fretting the surplus, grew exorbitant.

Now: I'm a great lover of visual art, and I will happily discuss the color and texture of van Gogh's Starry Night, or the way in which the eye is led into Goya's The Third of May, and even though I don't really know what I'm talking about, I can get myself awfully worked up, just as a fine sentence or paragraph (say, the opening salvo of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King) can send me into shivery rapture. But I can think of nothing on earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night, which, for me, was 10 to 15 pounds of candy, a riot of brightly colored wrappers and hopeful fonts, snub-nosed chocolate bars and SweeTarts, the seductive rattle of Jujyfruits and Good & Plenty and lollipop sticks all akimbo, the foil ends of mini Lifesavers packs twinkling like dimes, and the thick sugary perfume rising up from my densely packed pillowcase.

And more so, the pleasure of pouring out the contents onto the rug in the TV room, of cataloguing the take according to a strict Freak Hierarchy, calling for all chocolate products to be immediately quarantined, sorted, and closely guarded, with higher-quality fruit chews and caramels next, then hard candies, and last of all anything organic (the dreaded raisins). A brief period of barter with my brothers might ensue. For the most part, I simply lay amid my trove and occasionally massed the candy into a pile that I could then sort of dive into, à la Scrooge McDuck and his gold ducats.

Again: I realize that I was sick.

For me, the final crisis arose at about age 14, when it occurred to me that I was at least a foot taller than the other trick-or-treaters, and that my elaborately polite pleas for candy were now being viewed as a kind of extortion. I stopped the next year.

Steve Almond's new collection of short stories is called My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove, 2002). He can be reached at sbalmond@earthlink.net. If you're nice, he might even share his candy with you.

Issue Date: October 25 - 31, 2002