A Halloween Miracle

Some people say I make too much of Halloween when I ask them on November 3 or 4 about the costume they are planning for next year. But for me, Halloween is more than just a secular holiday in which to don a costume and get drunk. It’s my heritage, my religion. Some families go heavy on Christmas, others Chanukah. In my family, it was Halloween that we ritualistically observed without fail. I’m not a pagan. But I was raised in an atmosphere of confetti and silly string, of witch’s noses and Lone Ranger masks. When I was a kid, my parents owned and operated a party store. It was called “The Party Store,” and on weekends while other children went to church or to temple, I would be brought into the shop to wander about the novelty aisle, and instead of clasping my hands in prayer, I clasped them in Chinese finger cuffs.

The novelty aisle was filled with all kinds of oddities: spider rings, finger puppets, red capsules that exploded in your mouth for a bloody effect, wax lips, rubber pencils, tiny pills that expanded into planets or dinosaurs when plunged in water, fake mustaches, bubble gum that could be squeezed from a tube, and chattering teeth on little feet. After I’d inspected nearly every article and chose a few items, I’d make myself useful with the price gun—a very exciting device. My mom would set the price and direct me toward a group of Miss Piggy paper plates or Super Bowl-themed cups, and I’d disappear into the aisles happily, prancing around the shop, decked out in my new vampire dentures and fairy-wings as I worked.

I loved visits to the store and always returned home with treasures. Once, upon arriving home and racing up the stairs with a bag of tricks to my bedroom for immediate play, I accidentally spilled the whole bottle of Disappearing Ink onto the rug. I sat frozen, looking back and forth from the huge stain in the shape of a giant’s kidney that I’d created at the foot of my bed, to my bedroom door, praying my parents wouldn’t walk in and see what I’d done. I began to panic, rubbing a tissue over the blue mass to no avail, as I remembered too freshly my last run-in with trouble. (My mom had caught me hammering the wood floor in my bedroom only a week earlier—I’d been trying to render a self-portrait out of dents, but got only as far as a few blows where my eyes should have been, before hearing the noise, my mom came upstairs and got me by the hair.) Frightened by the prospect, I had somehow forgotten it was disappearing ink, or else seeing the deep blue of it, I simply couldn’t believe in the bottle’s dubious promise. Reason would not allow it! The relief that washed over me when after five minutes the whole stain vanished without a trace was unforgettable. It was a miracle, I thought still kneeling beside the bed, surrounded by useless crumpled tissues—my first lesson in faith.

The accumulated toys from each visit coupled with the various free samples that suppliers would send my parents, and the house became littered with fantastical oddities. For most of my childhood, you couldn’t sit down in our house without activating a whoopi cushion, accidentally resting your hand on fake slime, or have your glance momentarily arrested by the sight of a rubber snake coiled in a corner next to a pile of fake shit.

My parents traveled a great deal too—we went as a family to Greece every summer, and also visited Egypt, Turkey, and various exotic places the world over—so that our house was additionally decorated with museum copies of clay urns picturing human acrobatics involving a bull, statues of naked men throwing discuses or at least thinking about it. The result was that a mini reproduction of an Obelisk or a statuette of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen covered in fake spider webs might sit next to a multi-eyed finger puppet lying on its side, giving the overall impression to visitors that we lived in a much weirder version of Disney World’s “Haunted Manor.” My parents, brothers and I were so inured to it all, however, that our eyes passed right over the giant plastic rat guarding the foyer without our even noticing it before a frightened Jehovah’s Witness pointed it out with a scream.

When neighborhood kids came over to play Nintendo it was normal that during a game of Super Mario Brothers, at some point, he or she might cry out like Don Birnam at the end of The Lost Weekend when, crazy from the alcohol and the onset of DT’s, he begins hallucinating that a bat is clawing its way through the wall—except that in our house, the bat was really there, just plastic and tied decoratively to a light fixture.

Every year from elementary school all through high school I threw a big Halloween party. A few of my friends would always come over beforehand to help with the decorations, thinking it would be fun. But my father took party decorations very seriously. He assigned each of my friends particular duties. Partying, after all, was his business. Running the team of merriment like a drill sergeant, my father gave mini-lessons on how to tie a balloon most effectively, instructed each kid on how to spread fake cobwebs so that they didn’t just look like globs of cotton, and he became quickly impatient when his helpers lacked what he and I thought was common sense.

Poor Jason Sakolsky from down the street. He’d been elected to work with my dad on streamers in my junior year of high school, and dad quickly lost his patience with him. “Iris!” my father called across the room where I was arranging the hair on a severed head. “Show your friend how to do streamers. This is ridiculous!” he said, motioning to the streamer Jason had just hung without twisting it. I came over right away and showed him the correct technique amidst my father’s mission driven huffing. Oblivious to poor Jason, who, holding the streamers impotently, was on the verge of tears, my father went on, “Flat streamers look like toilet paper, which mock the room where we want to decorate it!”

My mom would handle the refreshments by putting out some of the Dunkin’ Donuts limited edition Halloween collection, which had orange sprinkles and little candy ghouls on them. Mine was the only party in high school that did not revolve around alcohol—it was the decorations that were important, the costumes, the ritual. We had a witch piñata and scary sounds of maniacal screaming welcoming you as you came down the driveway! “It’s not that kind of party,” I’d say during my junior year when guests arrived with alcohol, in the same way I clarified to boys I dated then, “I’m not that kind of girl.”

Most guests arrived in the usual costumes: Dracula, Spiderman, Darth Vader, etc. One year all the boys were ninjas. Sometimes kids came without costume and then bore the penalty of my painting their face however I liked. Others, especially later on as high school fed their insecurities, donned prescient but slight costumes—they simply dressed like accountants and carried a pocket full of pens from their dad’s firm, they sprayed their hair pink and wore chain link belts and called themselves hookers or else drizzled pretty sparkles on their faces and said they didn’t know who they were, they were nurses all in white, they were plumbers with their pants rising low in the back, they were one of the guys that hung out in the parking lots of nearby Deer Park Ave. drinking beer and looking for fights on most weekends following high school graduation.

By the end of high school, a hundred kids filled up the basement and backyard. My family didn’t fuck around when it came to parties, and especially when it came to Halloween. It was their art. And for me, as they had raised me atheist, it was the closest thing I had to religion. I knew nothing of the Bible or any of its more popular sequels, but I had memorized the contents of Artstone, Rubies, and various other costume supply catalogs that sat on my nightstand for quick bedtime perusal.

The newest catalogs would begin appearing in the spring so that my parents could order their stock well in advance, and I could begin planning my costumes months before. I’d pore over the catalogs, which featured both children’s and adults’ costumes. I would beg my mom to let me choose from the adult section. When I was nine I wanted more than anything to be a “sexy mermaid.” To me, it was the height of glamour and sophistication to dress as sexy cave woman with a bone through your nose and a hot animal pelt covering your privates, or to be a sexy witch and to have a husband dressed like an adult-baby or a jailbird. The way other girls wanted to dress up in their mother’s heels, I begged my mother for a woman’s costume. In the gently lascivious look of a woman modeling the “She-devil” or “Harem Girl,” costume, I projected my fourth grade self, imagining my undeveloped figure suddenly transformed by the magic of Halloween into the shape of a sexy pirate or sexy unicorn—I assumed breasts would come with the costume.

Whereas most women begin dressing like Halloween sluts in their early 20s, I’d graduated from that school of costume before I’d even hit puberty, moving onto more edgy costumes that could not be bought from a catalogue, but required great thinking and planning. Like Picasso, who matured from the representational into cubism, my costume history consists of a variety of periods. I’ve been the “Damsel in Distress” from silent films, tied to a short stretch of train tracks that I built myself and walked around in next to my soon to be ex-boyfriend dressed in all black and twirling his sinister mustaches as “the villain.” I was one half of the crime-fighting duo, the Siamese Superheroes, a two-person costume that I donned with my college roommate May. We wore blue tights and red trunks like Superman, and one shirt with two neck holes, on the front of which was printed a double S instead of Superman’s measly one. We joked all night that Superman was our uncle, and enjoyed the challenge of getting seriously drunk without knocking each other over.

These days, in the last minutes before we are due at a costume party, friends will show up at my apartment desperate. Having neglected to pick out an ensemble, they are in dire need of my expertise. Luckily, between the bizarre vintage clothing I have collected over the years, the bevy of old dance recital costumes, the wigs (for trips to Atlantic City), and a hodgepodge of costume odds and ends that I never throw out just in case I might need a gorilla suit, my apartment is a better version of the Halloween Shop on Broadway. I can make a last minute costume for anybody at any given moment.

Indeed, in many such last minutes I have fashioned: historical figures such as Amelia Earhart (Aviator cap, leather jacket, scarf, high-wasted trousers); characters nostalgic of expired pop culture—Judith Light from TV’s Who’s the Boss? (gaudy shoulder padded dress, blond wig with teased bangs, and the kind of eye-shadow Angela Bower would wear to a business meeting in 1985); or edging tastelessly toward the macabre—an aborted fetus (a flesh-colored body suit I just happened to have lying around, the contents of my Jug o’ Blood spattered liberally all over it, and a wire hanger looped around the neck); or the perverse—Charles Dickens' beloved “Oliver Twisted!” (Dressed in period rags and made up with a dirty street urchin-like face, Oliver Twisted would beg, “Please sir, can I have some more anal penetration?”); or the realistic—“The Credible Hulk” (green all over like The Incredible Hulk, but with smaller muscles so that it’s believable). And if nothing else, I’ll dip into my make up chest and transform him or her into a ghoul or Rhett Butler with just a sweep of my eyeliner pencil across the upper lip.

I haven’t finalized what I am going to be for Halloween this year. I have a few ideas up my sleeve, but I am waiting to see what my mood is on the actual day. There is nothing worse then being dressed up like Cameron Frye from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when you are actually in a Ferris or Mr. Rooney mood, I’ve found. For the psychologically weak, the wrong costume can trigger sorrowful feelings that might lead to a minor psychological breakdown and/or quarter-life crisis. As when finding yourself drunk at a party and dressed like a giant baby, you stare at your reflection in the bathroom mirror and gripping the sink with both hands scream, “A big unemployed baby, that’s what you are! When are you going to grow up?”

Yes. Costume choice is a delicate matter. On the table for me this year is a return to the “sexy” school of costume that I abandoned all those years ago in grade school. For a few years running now, I’ve dressed as men: Doctor Who, Burt Reynolds’ character from The Best Little Whore House in Texas—my friend May was Dolly Parton, and Tommy Chong to May’s Cheech Marin—Up in Smoke being a favorite movie of ours in college. These costumes, however, while thrilling in their own right, are not so effective in gathering the attention of the male gaze, which, as I am currently single, I find myself looking to harvest.

But dressing as a sexy nurse or sexy jailbird doesn’t appeal to me either. That would be a definitive step backward for me, a step down from the Halloween heights to which I’ve risen. And though I would like to meet an eligible bachelor this holiday season, I am not willing to go so far as compromising my integrity. Thus, I might dress as a sexy Groucho Marx perhaps—a long time favorite, or a sexy Sigmund Freud, or better, a Sexy Jesus (crown of thorns, fake beard, crucifix pasties, and a loin cloth) in order to show off my figure. Is it too much to hope that at a Halloween party this year I might meet the man of my dreams, that at the drinks table we’ll be reaching for the whiskey at the same time and accidentally bump hands, and then looking up, surprised, a sexy Jesus will lock eyes with a tall dark and handsome Mary Magdalene?