I always liked Halloween. As children, Maks, Igor, and I had raised hell around the city, getting into mayhem of one type or another. My favorite act of mischief was to don a mask and go to the Irish sections of the South Side to bust pumpkins with baseball bats. Back then, the Irish were the only people who put them out. It had something to do with carving potatoes to ward off evil spirits back in Ireland or whatever. I didn’t look too deeply into their reasons for having pumpkins, I just liked that I had the opportunity to smash them to smithereens. It was an epic release to squash the squashes. I loved watching the flesh and seeds splay across the stoops, making a sloppy mess. When the homeowners switched their lights on due to the ruckus, we would run like lightning, laughing all the way to the next block.

Sometimes, when we were feeling particularly cocky, we would position ourselves in the middle of the street and prepare to play a delinquent game of baseball. Squaring up on a manhole cover, I would wait for Maks or Ig to pitch me the pumpkin. The weight of the squash guaranteed it wouldn’t go far, but that didn’t stop us from running after each other, trying to lob the mush for an out.

Halloween as I got older was decidedly less destructive but that didn’t mean I liked the holiday any less. Cal and I had made a habit of spending Halloween day in Bughouse square, a tradition established over the years when we had nothing better to do than hang around and look at people in crazy costumes. I was glad we’d decided to go to the Square even though we didn’t know if anyone else would show. They did. As we lounged in the grass, listening to orators and watching the two-legged parade, things felt sort of normal.

Over the past several months, there had been increased incidents of men being hauled to the fruitcake factories for wearing women’s clothes. The umbrella term of “indecency” was utilized with more frequency to punish pansies for being different, and the number of arrests in the community continued to climb by the day. It seemed, however, that on Halloween, Chicago had dipped back into the “anything goes” mantra that the city had flourished under with the flappers. My guess was that the coppers were too busy with mischief-makers to worry about queens in corsets. It was convenient to pretend they were in costume, at least for a day.