We Choose Our Monsters at the Racine Zoo

It was just after sunset when we got to the Racine Zoo on Friday. There was a Halloween light display that Asher wanted to see. It was getting cold. Asher wore a coat and pants under his Captain America costume. People admired his outfit, especially the shield he carried. He looked the part of a kindergarten superhero. He didn’t have fancy Marvel boots, so he wore his dinosaur-motif rain boots. Nobody noticed. It was getting dark.

The Racine Zoo is right next to Lake Michigan. It’s not a very big zoo, but the light show was impressive. The place was packed with pumpkins, real and otherwise. Not long after we entered, I heard music playing in the darkness. I expected spooky classical compositions, like Bach’s organ masterpiece “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” or maybe Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” Not so. Hidden loudspeakers were cranking out Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.”

People gathered around a jack-o’-lantern display with three singing pumpkins. They weren’t real; they served as a screen for a projector. The pumpkins sang background vocals along with the late, great Warren Zevon.

We walked through the zoo. There were no animals about, but there were plenty of pumpkins and eerie lamps. A bubble machine spewed baseball-sized bubbles under a burnt-orange light. Asher popped a bubble, and it was filled with smoke or maybe vapors from dry ice. I don’t know. It was fascinating.

There were jack-o’-lanterns that looked like Beetlejuice, Wednesday, or Edward Scissorhands. There were skeletons riding farm tractors. There were huge 3D-like images of zoo animals in red, orange, and black. There was a glowing sea serpent along with luminous sharks. The trees were illuminated with bats and spiders.

It was a good show.

Yesterday, I bought a used Warren Zevon CD called “The Wind.” He recorded it shortly before he died of cancer in 2003. It is the music of an artist who knows he is dying. Zevon was no stranger to the macabre. Try “Excitable Boy” if you doubt me. Some songs on the album are slow and sad, but others rock hard. He even covered Dylan’s ballad “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” As the track fades, Zevon keeps saying, “Open up! Open up!” Nice touch.

They should have played that song while we were at the zoo. Or maybe not. We want frightening monsters, but not the scary things that are real. Vampires and mummies are okay. Cancer is not. Prison time is not. War is not. We don’t go looking for the terrors that wake us with pounding hearts and sweat-soaked sheets. No, we don’t want to be visited by broken relationships or chronic diseases. We don’t want images of masked men from the government kicking in doors and dragging fathers away from their children. No, none of that.

We’ll stick with the werewolves of London.

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Frank (Francis) Pauc is a graduate of West Point, Class of 1980. He completed the Military Intelligence Basic Course at Fort Huachuca and then went to Flight School at Fort Rucker. Frank was stationed with the 3rd Armor Division in West Germany at Fliegerhorst Airfield from December 1981 to January 1985. He flew Hueys and Black Hawks and was next assigned to the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, CA. He got the hell out of the Army in August 1986.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.