Kids grow up too fast.
Sometimes they don’t even like it their own selves.
My youngest daughter Gladiola is 18, but she don’t want to face the rest of her life without trick or treating on Halloween.
These days she goes trick-or-treating with her Aunt Gloriosa’s kids. She wears a ghost costume and sort of squats down to walk the kids to the door and holds out her bag right along with them. She does pretty good.
She and I live in the French Quarter in an apartment in the back of my gentleman friend Lust’s bar.
Usually, when trick-or-treating with the kids is over, she takes her bag of loot and comes home to the Quarter to ogle the more sophisticated version of Halloween until I make her stash her candy and go to bed.
Last Halloween, she planned to do her usual walk with Gloriosa and the kids, but afterward, she had a date. She was careful not to let me know, but she was meeting one of her college boyfriends to go bar hopping — even though she was not legally old enough.
I drive up to Folsom early in the evening, like I always do, to see my older daughter Gumdrop’s kids in their costumes. I decide to give them a little scare this year, and I walk in wearing a full-face lizard mask that somebody forgot at the bar last year. But they just look at me and say, “Oh hi, Grandma!”
Hmph. Somebody tipped them off.
I hope.
I take pictures of them looking adorable in their sweet little Frankenstein costumes; tell them to be sure to brush tonight or their teeth will rot out of their little heads, and turn around for the long drive home.
I finally get to the Quarter and park, and I’m walking to the Sloth Lounge. On the way, I pass the Oops Bar with a line outside— there’s lines outside of a lot of bars on Halloween Night — and a bouncer in a pumpkin mask is checking drivers licenses to be sure everybody is of legal age. All of a sudden, he pulls it up and yells, “Modine!” I realize it is Vance Veizer, a guy I know from back when I lived in Chalmette. He says, “Help me out a minute. I got an urgent call of nature here—would you stand in for me? For a couple minutes? Please?”
So I put on my lizard mask and stand in the doorway and start checking licenses while he runs off to the bathroom.
Most people are legitimate customers, over 21, and then up walks this evil clown and his girlfriend, Miss Piggy, both in full face masks.
Miss Piggy hands me an old, battered license with the date smeared that says —my eyeballs almost pop out—Gargoyle Gunch. Now I personally gave birth to Gargoyle Gunch 22 years ago. But this ain’t Gargoyle Gunch. I stare. This is his baby sister, my daughter Gladiola.
“Your idiot of a brother lent you his old license?” I yell through the mask.
It takes a couple seconds. Then she squeaks, “Ma?”
“And YOU don’t get in either,” I tell the boyfriend. “I should have you arrested for misleading a child.” Actually he’s probably a child himself.
I get out my phone. “I am going to report you both to the French Quarter Bouncer Network.” (Which of course I made up.)
They scurry away.
Somebody in line says, “Geez. Don’t piss off the lizard lady.”
Later I found out them two did what I figured they would once their bar-hopping excursion was derailed — sneaked into our apartment behind the Sloth Lounge and watched scary movies on TV.
When I got home later, the boyfriend had slunk off; Gladiola was asleep in her footie pajamas, and there were candy wrappers and almost-empty glasses of chocolate milk on the coffee table.
I got to face facts. In a couple years, Gladiola will be old enough to legally use her own license to get into bars.
But for now, she better remember that the bouncer she encounters might turn out to be her mother.
