Goldberg: Trick or treat

By Tod Goldberg

Justin Glueck was the neighborhood bully and Halloween was his day, or it was until the night in 1982 when my mild-mannered sister Karen took him down with a swift beating from the business end of a Maglite. My only thought upon seeing Gluck supine in front of Craig Ostrander's house was that, finally, I'd get through Halloween without getting a stream of shaving cream into my eyes and ears and that, come to think of it, I might like to steal Glueck's candy, like he'd stolen so many other kids' over the years. So I did, except I tripped over a hedge and ended up dumping Glueck's booty all over the Ostranders' lawn, which was no small recompense in and of itself, let me tell you.

Glueck was an old-school Stephen King-style child sadist who used to enjoy pushing over kindergarteners, stealing lunch money (though his family was actually quite wealthy) and generally causing other people pain. He even had an odd King-like affectation: a perpetual lip sneer that made him look all the more menacing. He trolled my otherwise bucolic neighborhood in Walnut Creek with a pack of like-minded thugs who, while scary in Glueck's presence, were generally not so bad without their ringleader. Jeff Abrahamian and Kevin Steele would occasionally threaten to "kick your ass" for some neighborhood transgression--like looking at them funny--but if there was a game of three flies up going on, they were pretty good sports, never actually tried to hurt the little kids, and, well, acted like humans.

But on Halloween, high off Sweet Tarts, Glueck and his posse were like the Borg and finding them on the street was not a good thing. Year in and year out, we'd plan our exit strategy:

"What should we do if we see Justin Glueck?" I'd ask my friend Todd Harris.

"Run," Todd would say.

"Isn't your older brother friends with him now?"

"No. Justin stabbed him in the leg with a pencil last week."

Rumor had it, additionally, that Glueck was packing a switchblade this Halloween...the rumor coming from Glueck himself, when he showed up at school one day with said blade and flashed it around. Darren Knox heard that Glueck even wiped his ass with the blade, but no secondary confirmation could be obtained. Suffice to say, Halloween 1982 was not the year to run into Glueck, and Todd and I resolved that we'd give the psycho and his friends a wide berth.

Of course, 1982 was also the year Todd and I decided we should probably come correct and doctor up some bottles of shaving cream for our own ill-begotten plans--your basic run-of-the-mill household vandalism--and that '82 would be the year to roll deep with our own crew, except that we didn't really have a crew, so we ended up tagging along with Kirk Hartman, Scott Sorenson, Mark McGregor, Dave Gilvin and others for a wild night of candy-getting. All went well for the first several hours, but, as happens, the group was skewered by indecision ("Let's go fuck up Jennie Bartolero's house!") and bickering ("The house giving out Twix bars is on the other street, I told you before"), and eventually Todd and I found ourselves alone again, naturally, walking up the front steps of the Ostranders' house.

As luck would have it, my sister Linda was not far behind, towing along Elaine Wang and Elaine's little sister Melaine (really...that was her name). Further down the street, my sister Karen, at the time 18, was casually walking with some friends, holding in her hands an 18-inch Mag she'd borrowed from our mother's boyfriend at the time, a man named Billy Applegate.

What we didn't realize, however, was that we were walking into an ambush.

Justin Glueck and his brood erupted from behind a row of juniper bushes and rushed us, knocking Todd and I over, and then filling Elaine and Melaine's faces with shaving cream. Linda screamed as Justin attempted to grab her bag and Karen, not known for her cat-like quickness, was on the scene immediately. When she saw Justin running toward her, she swung the Mag and hit Glueck across the collarbone, dropping him.

"Trick or treat, bitch?" Karen said.

Okay, she didn't say that, but she might as well have. Instead, she stood over him and just shook her head slowly and methodically while I grabbed Glueck's candy.

For the next three years that I lived in Walnut Creek, Justin Glueck made a point to stay away from me, as if it had been me who'd smashed him. In fact, he avoided all the kids from that night. I don't think I ever spoke of the incident to my other friends and perhaps that's why--I had something on him and that was enough.

Years later, I heard that Justin showed up at his 10-year high school reunion and apologized to everyone he could, telling them he was sorry for being such an asshole as a kid, and that he wished he could turn back time, which is no small recompense, either.