| ED NOTE: I feel honored that Mike has given our Metro readers a glimpse into his manuscript. Special for the Metro:
A Devil’s Night true tale excerpted from “Michael, Michael, Michael: Confessions of a Klutz,”
an unpublished manuscript by Mike McCarty
Chapter 2:
More holiday goofs |
As I walked along in the middle of the street in the cool, night air, I had a double reason for ignoring the “you’d better be home when the street lights go on – or else” rule. First, I was a newly minted teenager. Second, this was Devil’s Night in Detroit. |
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Don’t get the wrong idea. In the early ’60s, kids gathered the night before Halloween to soap a few windows and perform a few other harmless pranks. Not like Detroit’s nationally known Devil’s Night “holidays” of the ’90s, when Motor City miscreants graduated from “flaming poop” on the porch to burning buildings, torching abandoned houses and resorting to other industrial-strength mayhem. Anyway, on this night I was strolling in the middle of Sussex Avenue, a block from my house, chatting with a few friends about, um, the usual. Nothing or next to nothing. Oh, maybe we talked logistics. Such as how many more streets we wanted to hit and whether we had enough soap to last us. And when we should ditch our little brothers and their friends. As we talked, a few of the younger kids with us darted up to houses and smeared a bar of soap on picture windows. | 
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Suddenly, we were startled by a storm door banging open, springing an angry homeowner who jumped over his bushes in full stride. The foot chase was on! It was like a hungry tiger pursuing a herd of frightened wildebeests. One by one, bug-eyed kids peeled off and vanished into the night. The snorting man was closing in on the remainder of the herd, which – as I soon found out when I glanced behind – consisted of just me!
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| I resorted to my clumsy instincts and panicked. I veered off into a dark lot between two houses and promptly turned my ankle on the side of a rock or something sticking up out of the ground. Maybe a hand reaching up from a grave? (Hey, consider the holiday and the volume of Saturday afternoon horror double features I saw at the local Atlas Theater over the years.) I fell to the dirt of somebody’s garden, half-crawled to a chain-link fence, climbed up and fell over into the alley, where I turtled up. Not a muscle moved. Hmmmm. Dark clothes, dark night, maybe the guy wouldn’t notice me. Unable to look, I held my breath as I heard the predator come up to the fence, breathing heavily just a few feet from me. I waited, and waited. Finally, I heard footsteps, again. They left the fence and faded away. It worked! |
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I exhaled, picked myself up and limped to find my friends. Then I hobbled home, where my story was received in the usual way: “Michael, Michael, Michael.” And, a day later, I received a leg cast for my broken ankle. That plaster cast should have served notice. Perhaps there is a “klutz” gene that runs in the family. After all, my Uncle Eddie (Dad’s brother) also hurt himself on Halloween or Devil’s Night. As a kid, Eddie threw a stink bomb into a tavern, giggled and was hit by a car as he dashed away. Everybody recovered – the bar patrons from the stench, and Eddie from his bruises. |
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