valley view vigilance

I remember a Halloween, I am going to guess it as 1979, 7th grade- cruising around the neighborhood with a friend or 3 on our bmx bikes. Do old to trick or treat , too young to do much else, but pretend to be keen. Not long after lurking around, we were attacked by the brother of a girl that we all liked/crushed on. The laconic blonde in ditto jeans and feathered hair, looking good like a stone fox should be. Of course she was nowhere to be found, as she was off getting down with the two local bad boys and another of her mates, h.alloween party girls ont he baseball diamond. Older brothers were trouble then, just like they were almost always, hindsight here in 2020. These freshman footballers were organized , but on foot, so we took an egg or two pedaling away, all dressed up in adolescent angst , whilst they went back to the bushes to plan the next candy raid on the candy carrying younger kids. Somehow somewhere , we made it to my future uncles house, who lived nearby on a little bike shortcut block that was ruled in our age range by a pill popping friendlier bully who was a permanent resident of junior high, and happened to be my future uncle’s next door neighbor. This loon psst us over to his garage as he heard our excitement about the failed freshman footballer raid on our eggless well being. We had the toilet paper, but no eggs. Well as luck would have it, he was not a fan of these fools, and had a freezer full of frozen eggs. He explained that if you aimed for the body, it would hurt like hell, so aim for the head. I think that we all surmised that leg shots might be better for our legal standing, but ya know, adrenaline and bad decisions are as endemic to the1979 southern california teenage experience as farrah Fawcett and a tube sock. So we collected ourselves, jumped into the back of another uncle’s former Datsun pick up truck, and headed out in search of these fucking egg raiding freshmen footballers, these perceived cock blockers, these oedipal wrecks. It didn’t take long, to find the fuckers, they were on the corner we saw them last, divvying up another plastic pumpkins worth of pilfered candy. With Apocalypse Now fresh in the mind and Van Halen subbing for Wagner, ‘runnin’ with the devil’ cranked as loud as the hissy 8 track would take it, attack we did, scared shitless screaming and putting those east whittier little league skills to use bombing the footballers with frozen eggs and the trees with two ply. More kids came running from garages and porches to toss their candy corn and apples at us as we screeched away, high fiving and heading home.