Monsters

On a morning some years ago, my wife and I awakened to the commotion of our toddler sons skulking behind flashlights. The older boy said, “We’re searching for pigs and monsters!”

They come by it naturally. When I was young I absolutely loved monsters. At age nine or ten, my friend M. and I decreed that on one night a year monsters should be permitted to wander unchaperoned in our neighborhood. I think we even wrote a letter to the mayor about it.

“Would that one night a year have been Halloween?” she asked.

I noted that M. wanted it to be on Halloween because it was the only night he could stay up sort of late. But the way I saw it, if you let the real wolfmen run around on Halloween night, how could you tell them apart from a neighborhood kid in a really good wolfman costume?

I simply wanted to portion out our enjoyment of monsters.

Those days, if you wanted the company of monsters, you had to tune in each Saturday night to “Creeper,” which was hosted by the bespectacled Ed Muscare. By day he was Uncle Ed of “41 Treehouse Lane,” where he introduced minor-league puppets and Porky Pig cartoons. On Saturday nights, through the magic of UHF television—a flashlight, shoe polish, a bed sheet, and a jiggly camera—he became Creeper. Somehow in this get-up he was less creepy than Uncle Ed.

Each week, the program recycled chillers like “Frankenstein,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Mummy,” and “Them,” which featured ants so large that even the bravest exterminator might give his two-week notice.

For a short while we were blessed with Mo-Mo, the Missouri Monster. From the look on her face, I knew Mo-Mo meant nothing to my wife, even though she’d spent half her youth in Missouri.

One year in the early 1970s, Mo-Mo was seen all over town. Witnesses said he was hairy, smelly, and fleet of foot (a description that also applied to most of the neighborhood kids). I told a few classmates that I had seen Mo-Mo in the parking lot of Smaks Hamburgers, near 80th & Troost. I also told them the monster could only be repelled by rubber, and they must therefore wear tennis shoes to bed. M.'s parents refused this request, but they did let him drape his sneakers on his bedpost.

I said, “In a way, I miss the good old days when I could obsess about such controllable fears as monsters and bogeymen.”

“Monsters and bogeymen?” she said.

“There is a difference,” I said.

Monsters come in all sizes and shapes, and most smell rotten. They can crawl, fly, swim, scuttle, and skulk faster than any kid. They make creepy noises that are hard to spell, and they hide in closets and under beds. Some monsters can change their appearance just for kicks; one moment they’re slightly odd humans in slightly inappropriate fashions, and the next they’re wolves or bats.

Bogeymen, meanwhile, are freestanding bipeds who are darksome and disfigured and possess great physical strength. They enjoy shadows and dark doorways, but they also think nothing of strolling down your street at midnight or tramping in your town’s millworks after hours. Their goal is to scare you silly and perhaps bang you around, but not eat you. No matter what the experts say, Frankenstein is a bogeyman and not a monster.

She said, “You are so absolutely full of it.”

Then she made for the bedroom, where she plucked her sneakers and hung them on our bedpost.

“But why take chances?” she said.