I was twelve or so, and I was trick-or-treating with a friend in the ultra-posh part of Forest Hill, on Russell Hill Rd., just above St. Clair. The creepy old dowager in the huge clapboard house at the top of the hill had just thrust two junior-sized packs of raisins into our pillowcases—and then placed two shiny red apples into our expectant hands.

Fully educated with respect to the rape-and-murder perils implicit in unwrapped treats, my friend and I retired to the curb and in a pre-adolescent display of disrespect for authority and a general desire to smash things, we pounded the apples into a ruddy pulp, feet flying. Then, glinting in the streetlight, we saw two straight pins in the sodden remains.

Two pins, presumably pushed straight down into the cores of the treats, designed to mangle our tiny rectums and, at the very least, put us both in hospital.

I can’t remember where this crazy shrew lived, or else I surely would have reported her to the police long ago. But I can now understand her desire to jab each reveller with a steely dagger.

Hallowe’en is a segregated holiday. Totally bereft of its cultural significance, it serves as a night of sugary abandon for the young’uns and of alcoholic derangement for the elders. Walking around in the club district on All Hallow’s Eve is like going clubbing on any other night, except the veneer of civility is peeled even further back. The crude costumes of the mid-20s John & Richmond reveller are a sad reminder of youthful idealism lost, everything of substance thrown away for a nice condo with a stoop swept clear of vagrants and a faux-finished, Caban-furnished suite to bang any number of vacant chicks/dudes (depending on preference) in that you’ve managed to haul past the lobby security guard without them puking in the foyer. Hallowe’en in the T-dot, especially for the mid-20s crowd, has encapsulated everything that’s wrong with the city itself—the snobbishness, the yuppiness and the bullshit, the velvet-roped exclusivity that is strangling the downtown core. I’m not advocating that anyone do something as drastic as to stick pins into yuppie apples, but next year, let’s try to have a civilized Hallowe’en. Have a small party at home with friends. Dress up like The Royal Tenenbaums. Have some Q.T. with friends and family.

In the mood for a more radical solution? I hear those Wiccans know how to do Hallowe’en proper.