In 2010 and 2011 I managed an independent Halloween store in Minneapolis, for two old friends I had gone to college with years before. It was the depth of the Great Recession, my work as a general contractor 2005-2008 had dried up, work was hard to find. I had never imagined myself working in retail, least of all in a Halloween store, but my friends offered me the job and it didn’t take long for me to say yes. It was a franchise of a Canadian Halloween company called Monster Halloween. They offered me $10/hr, with unlimited hours but no overtime. In a little over two months that first year I made about $12,000.
That first store was on Hennepin Ave in Uptown Minneapolis, the trendiest most hipster neighborhood in the Twin Cities. The building was a former Hollywood Video, the parent company having gone out of business. It was prime real-estate, but no one was buying at the time, so we were able to rent. It was next door to the primary Masonic temple in the area, the Scottish Rite Temple.
My job was to order merchandise, hire staff, schedule staff, prep the building, take the lead on stocking shelves, running the till and cleaning up each night. Staff wore whatever costumes they wanted to. Sometime mid-season I brought my orange afro wig, my Bose sound system and danced on Hennepin, the entire avenue my stage. So many people honked in approval, when I walked back inside one of the partners said, “I want you out there every day.” I was happy to oblige. I heard everything from “We love you orange afro guy!” to, “Good god, get a fucking haircut.” A third of people seemed to love it, a third were curious but confused, another third hated it or couldn’t be bothered.
One of the partners found that Marilyn Monroe statue in an antique store. The jacket I pulled out of a Madd Hatter costume bag. The character Wacky Jacket Jenkins was inspired by a song my ex wrote. We had broken up a few months before. I danced in character at a few of her live shows.
I convinced a local artist to contribute a brass statue of his making, of the goddess Nike, for our ladies Boudoir. He installed it, with dark burgundy velour drapery he had rescued from a defunct theater, and lights. The boudoir was a place for women to try on costumes with other women, and hopefully make it more likely they would purchase a costume. We tried always to have a female employee in the Boudoir, but sometimes there wasn’t and we would occasionally find hidden costume bags someone had pilfered one or more items from. By the end of the season we found something like 75 costume bags with missing items, 100% of which were women’s costumes (not to totally drag on women - there were a lot of flamboyant gay guys in Uptown too.)
Parking is not easy in Uptown. We rented parking spaces from the Mason’s next door, they agreed to let the assembly know not to park in our spaces, but inevitably every night they held a meeting they would take up half or more of the spaces. Three times I went over there to talk to them about it. The third time I demanded to speak to the assembly. The meeting was closed to the public. I was detained by the elders in the lobby. “My name is William Hunter Duncan, you practice Duncan’s Rites, I demand to speak to the assembly!” I kept repeating. I was having fun. They were not amused.
The next day the Chief Master Mason stepped into the Halloween store and in front of both partners told me I was banned from the Scottish Rite Temple for life.
The owner of the parent company sent us a CD of about a dozen “Halloween” songs he expected us to put on repeat every day all day for two months. I said, “No fucking way, not happening,” on repeat. The main man said I was no longer allowed to participate in the conference calls. No problem. I put together about 150 songs, an eclectic mix of not one single classic Halloween song, mostly stuff no one had ever heard, so, different, weird, not necessarily scary except maybe to normies. No one ever heard a proper Halloween song in that store.
Most of our product was crap. Cheap Chinese-made crap. One of the partners had a thing about masks, we had a wall of masks, but most of them were terribly uncomfortable to wear, so we hardly sold any, except for a couple of great ape masks complete with ape gloves, which were relatively comfortable and quite realistic, but also about $200. Most of the costumes were ill-fitting, of the cheapest possible material, and prone to falling apart right out of the bag. It didn’t help that we had to charge $75 per some costumes when giant corporate Spirit Halloween and Halloween Express were selling the same for $45-50, not to mention every big box store having by then got into the business.
I have no problem with adults purchasing military-style long guns, but I did and still do have an issue with marketing them as toys to children. So I bought all the M-16’s, AK-47’s and Uzi’s and used electrical wire to make a monster I called Black Heart.
Running a Halloween store is a grind. I was sleeping in the store most nights, about 4-5 hrs. The last four days up to Halloween I hardly slept at all. The final night I caught two guys just after we closed, trying to sneak onto the roof through the access. I let them, we all stood on the roof and shouted our names into the din.
Grind though it was, I hired amazing young people who were a lot of fun to work with, and it was crazy fun at times too.
Sometime during the fire sale, in the days after Halloween, an older black couple bought our front desk for their North Minneapolis shop. I helped the man deliver the desk and he gave me these shoes, which I took at the time as a sign from the goddess.
The last day open I donned some animal pants, had an employee, Dave Wheeler of Mind Wave Comics, and DaveWonder.com, paint my upper body green and glue on some fall leaves, and I danced barefoot and half naked on Hennepin Avenue as the Green Man with my deer horns, in the middle of the day.
Someone bought the property that winter, some restaurateurs who tore down most of the building, rebuilt and turned it into The Uptown Diner. The next year we went downtown, to the old Minneapolis Floral building.
The building was amazing, but downtown the magic was gone. Washington Avenue was heavier vehicle traffic than Hennepin, but most people were not in the area to shop or go to bars, most people were heading to work or leaving work and not in a great mood, so dancing on the street was a no-go. We had almost no walking traffic where there was a lot of walking traffic in Uptown. It was also late in the Great Recession, things were distinctly not getting better for a lot of people, and the general mood was somber. These three songs were playing repeatedly on The Current; they will always remind me of that store. They tore down this historic building too, a few years after, to make a parking lot.
Later that year The Current named Bon Iver’s self-titled album, album of the year, speaking clearly to the tone of 2011 (Fleet Foxes Helplessness Blues came in third.)
Good times. I have been feeling a bit nostalgic about those days, lately.
Happy Halloween 2023.
These are some of my favorite kinds of things to read -- not Halloween things, but personal stories and experiences!
Love seeing this new aspect of you!