AMC is showing all the Friday the 13th movies today. I don’t think I’ll ever watch a Friday the 13th movie without thinking about Jeff Martin.
Jeff and I met in 7th grade, which means we had only been friends for a couple of months when he invited me to his Halloween party. I’m not 100% positive, but I think that was the first time I went to his house.
It was a costume party, and I arrived wearing a werewolf mask with a flannel shirt and blue jeans. One good thing about being a werewolf is you can wear pretty much anything with a werewolf mask. Jeff wore the only costume I remember him ever owning: a black Grim Reaper robe with a skull mask that came with red flashing eyes.
I was the only person at the party not from Jeff’s neighborhood. The rest of the dozen or so kids had grown up together on the same block. There were five or six elementary schools in my town but only one middle school, and 7th grade was the year strong cliques formed. By the following Halloween, the kids at that party had gone on to become cheerleaders, football players, popular kids, nerds, and geeks. Over the next few years I became friends with a few of them and most of them never spoke to me again. But that year, at that party, we were all there together having fun — karate masters, monks, cheerleaders, punk rockers, devils, a werewolf, and the Grim Reaper.
The Martins had a hot tub in their den and had dropped a block of dry ice in the water for the party. It bubbled and smoked all night long and was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. In the living room, a volleyball net had been set up and kids — mostly the girls, if I remember — played volleyball using balloons.
When it was time to calm down, the lights were lowered, pillows were tossed on the floor, and one of the Friday the 13th movies was put on. In sixth grade I saw Nightmare on Elm Street at Jason Lee’s house and Children of the Corn at Andy Green’s house, so this was the third scary movie I had ever seen and it scared me to death. I remember some of the kids went outside during the film to play hide and seek outside in the dark and I didn’t want to go.
Morgan is a year younger than I was when I went to that Halloween party; Mason is two years older. It’s weird to think they are making lifelong memories now, when to me it seems like that Halloween party happened last month.
Friday the 13th: Part VII just ended and Part VIII is about to begin. Happy pre-Halloween!