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Halloween Can Be A Real Drag

If You’re Not Sure Who You Are

The first thing be did was get drunk—not deliberately, though. He was so excited that he thought he’d better have a drink to settle down—to keep from getting manic. He didn’t want to get manic; he knew that when he got hyperactive, he often screwed things up. [Often?]

The cocktail did relax him, so much so that he saw no harm in having another, and another, and another. To his credit, he didn’t gulp them down—he sipped, while listening to his favorite flute trio, the one by Baron Karl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber, whose name he announced aloud every time he started the tape over, which was five times.

The flute spoke to him. It told him that Moira would dance by the pool when he got home.

The cello told him that Claude would hold him in his arms.

The piano said: “It’s Halloween, dope, get dressed and go

Benjamin ran upstairs and took a cold shower, hoping it would sober him up a little. It didn’t, but it did make him peppy.

He stood naked in front of the full-length mirror that was mounted on the back of the closet door. He tried to envision the clothes he should wear. Nothing.

He tore the house apart. He emptied the hall and bedroom closets, his chest of drawers, several boxes and two suitcases full of old clothes that had been stored under the staircase. He laid everything out in the bedroom. Then got dressed one article at a time:

There was one pair of the Calvin Klein underpants Moira had given him when they became roommates. He put them on. They were a little stretched out of shape, and the pouch was on the yellow side, but they felt good: they felt like “home.”

Next, he put on the oldest and most faded pair of jeans he could find. They were the same jeans he was wearing the time he got his knees wet in the tearoom. They had been washed no less than a dozen times, with bleach, and this was the first time he’d worn them since that fateful night. The stains may have bleached away, but the memory had not. And, even though he had changed to wearing his penis to the right, he moved it to the left because that’s where he used to wear it and the crotch was more worn on that side.

Then he found a red, thermal, long sleeved undershirt and put that on. The bottom half of the set was long gone to who-knows-where. Dean Carmichael, who had directed Thom, gave the long underwear to Benjamin because he kept complaining how cold the theater was during rehearsals. It was small on him, but so snug and so warm, as though Dean were hugging him.

On top of that, he put a white dress shirt he had borrowed from Claude and never returned. He had needed the shirt for the opening of his play, The Depositor, because he’d tie-dyed all of his good shirts the week before, He couldn’t remember exactly why he did that, but it had something to do with an argument with Konrad. He rolled the sleeves up beyond his elbows.

He fished Emily’s red tennis shoes out from under his bed and put them on, sans socks because the shoes were tight even barefooted.

The shoes made him think of the rest of the costume he wore during those strange weeks with “The Family.” He didn’t need the shorts, so he just gave them a quick sniff and tossed them aside. He did wear the ragged, sleeveless sweat shirt though, and tucked it in, so the waist of his jeans would still be visible.

Over all that, he wore a vest from a green corduroy three-piece suit. He stole the vest from his faculty advisor at UCLA, Edward. He stole the vest from Edward because he thought the three-piece suit made Edward look too stuffy, and because he thought the vest, with just a T-shirt, made himself look good. Edward still looked stuffy, even without the vest; Benjamin looked strange no matter what he wore—so, in that sense, the vest was redundant.

To accessorize, he went to his special box, his memento box. He kept the box hidden under a tablecloth-covered, octagonal, occasional table in the corner of the bedroom.

He slid the box out very gently.

He lifted the box to the bed very carefully.

He open the box very slowly, one flap at a time.

He removed three things: a bottle, a small gift box and a cap.

The bottle contained Vanilla, homemade Vanilla, a gift from his friend and co-author, Barbara “Sue” Watson, He could smell it, and her, before he even opened the bottle. The cap popped when he twisted it off, sending an explosion of sweet-and-warm to his nostrils. Sixteen years old: that’s Vintage Vanilla! He poured some on his hands, then rubbed it into his beard and onto his neck, then recapped the bottle and returned it to the box.

The small gift box was a tie box. The label on the end was stamped “Mauve,” meaning the tie inside was purple. It was a gift from his childhood boyfriend—Christmas, when they were in seventh grade. His dad had tied it for him that day, and he wore it to a point-of-annoyance until that summer—never untying it, just loosening it and slipping it off over his head, It still had that original knot in it when Benjamin took it out of the box thirty years later. He held it to his cheek for a moment with his eyes closed, trying to see the boy’s face. The face would not appear. He slipped the tie over his head and let it hang loosely.

The cap was his dad’s. It was the painter’s cap with the Camel cigarettes logo on the front, which Bill used to wear fishing all the time. Bill lost the cap on the pier the day he died, and Benjamin saved it as sort of a souvenir. He put the cap on his head, turning it to the side and pulling it down a little, because that’s the way Bill always wore it.

He put on his little round tinted glasses because he thought he’d like to see what was going on around him.

He stood in front of the mirror, staring at the image he had created, at the memory ghosts clinging to him, He smiled as they each seemed to give him a little squeeze—a familial hug to wish him a good time tonight.

Benjamin was sure this night was going to be very special: the old “tonight is the first night of the rest of your life” sort of thing.

He was absolutely right—even if it didn’t happen exactly the way he thought it was going to.

Some people cross-dress all day, every day. Others change clothes when they get home from work. Some only dress up on weekends. Others only a couple times a year, or just once a year. Some have the urge once in a lifetime. Put all these together, and it’s called Halloween.

Cross-dressing is not exclusively a homosexual recreation: so-called bisexuals and heterosexuals do it as well—evidence, perhaps, of human androgyny. Homosexuals, however, are less clandestine about it and are thus able to extract a full measure of fun out of the masquerade. It is natural, then, that those who want the most enjoyment out of their drag would converge on an area rich in homosexuality, and it’s called West Hollywood.

To say that everyone goes out in drag on Halloween would be an exaggeration, of course. But a lot do, and they are the Main Attraction. There was a time when only hard-core Drag Queens had the moxie, or hubris, to appear publicly in a dress; and even they, to avoid arrest, had to park as close as possible and run into a bar before anyone from “normal” society saw them. Now, it’s a street fair of grand proportions.

Thousands of boys-as-girls and girls-as-boys display their imaginative costumes for the whole world to see (Shirley, the TV people are here!) as they strut their stuff in a seemingly endless sidewalk parade; thousands more come just to line the sidewalks and street, watching; the bars, cafes, sidewalks and streets are jammed with people from dusk until damn-near dawn.

The more industrious and dedicated dressers go as someone—and the gay community has its favorites: The Joans Crawford, Collins and Rivers are very popular, as are Linda Evans, Marilyn Monroe and Tina Turner, and so on. The trick, if you go as someone, is never to be asked who you’re dressed as: either the person asking is stupid, or you failed; either of which is a downer.

The question is repeated ad nauseam throughout the evening:

“Who are you supposed to be?”

“Who’re you dressed as?”

“Who are you?”

People asked Benjamin the question.

“Nobody,” Benjamin would say.

Or he’d say, “I don’t know.”

And they’d say, “Oh,” then walk away.

Well, that got boring, so Benjamin decided to lie when anybody asked him the question. He told them he was dressed as a character from a new play he was working on. Some thought that was interesting, but most thought it was just as boring as his “Nobody” and “I don’t know” answers.

So, he began to select from the pieces of his costume, telling one person he was Moira Beltova, the famous dancer; to another he was Emily Doyle, the famous school secretary; to another he was Claude Sarkisian-Jones, the famous Baigneur, not bothering to mention that it means bathroom attendant; and so on—a different article of clothing, a different name, in each different bar, until he ran out of costume pieces. Then he went back to “I don’t know.”

Which is when he gave up on the bars and went out to the sidewalk to watch the parade, hoping nobody outside would want to know who he was dressed as.

A long line of very hairy Playboy Bunnies danced by—doing the Bunny Hop—with one arm on the hip in front, and one arm in the air holding a tray of glued-on cocktail glasses. He suppressed a strong urge to join them, deciding instead to lean on a parking meter to steady his fairly-drunken legs.

A lion walked by, followed by a mouse. A fat man in a diaper winked at Benjamin. A bird flew past. A Joan Crawford threatened him with a coat hanger. A man peered at him from inside a giant milk carton. Joan Collins and Linda Evans bitched at him. Three muscular and hairy guys stomped along in their black leather boots, g-strings and studded halters, causing Benjamin to shiver—partially from the fact that it was chilly out there and these guys were almost naked, and partially from the thought of what they were probably going to do to each other later. In the street, a dozen or so “women” were stopping cars and jumping on fenders to ride for a block or so. A Joan Rivers fell off the hood of a limo and landed on her ass, sending a wave of “Oh!” through the crowd. She was back on her feet in less than a minute, mouthing at another car, and gloating over the laughter and applause from her audience.

“I know who you are,” someone said to Benjamin.

Benjamin turned to the man, who was dressed as a used car salesman.

“You’re Benjamin MacDowell,” the man said.

Benjamin didn’t speak.

“I saw your picture in the paper last summer, something to do with your play being cancelled or something, and you had a nervous breakdown or something.”

Benjamin said nothing.

“I never saw any of your plays,” the man went on, “but I heard of ‘em. You’ve done really well, huh?”

Benjamin just stared.

“I’ve done all right, too. Not like you, I mean with your picture in the paper and all that, but I make good money—insurance—enough for a nice house out in the valley. The wife gets what she wants and the kids are in private schools. She’s around somewhere, my wife, I mean. Hey, remember Pete? He and his old lady are with us, back in the restaurant. They didn’t have the cigarettes I smoke, so I had to come down here, and that’s when I saw you.”

The man paused as though that required a response.

“Who are you?” Benjamin asked.

“Jesus, I’m sorry. Of course you wouldn’t recognize me. Stupid, huh? See, I know who you really are. You’re Willy, aren’t you? Willy Roberts, my little brother’s weird friend I beat up that time. It’s me, Ralph, Ralph MacDowell, Benjamin’s brother!”

Benjamin, or Willy, or whoever the hell he really was, was dazed—his synapses gassed themselves into a frenzy. Lightning struck in his head, sending electrical charges at a million miles per hour through the ganglia, reconnecting long-lost memories into a painful image.

And the image that dominated was not one of reality; it wasn’t one of the fond memories of those years; it was, rather, the image of a dream—a nightmare:

He was thirteen, and his name was Willy. Benjamin was dead. In the dream, Ralph came to Willy’s bed to make love to him. They were naked, and they touched each other. But then Ralph said he didn’t fuck boys anymore, now that he was eighteen, and that Willy would have to become a girl. They both looked at Willy’s boy parts, then stared with fascination as they began to fade away to nothing. Willy got hysterical and started screaming that he didn’t mean it, that he didn’t really want to be a girl, that he wanted his stuff back. He pounded on Ralph’s chest with his fists as Ralph fell on him and thrust furiously, trying to force his penis into the pubic hair.

He was trembling.

“Hey man, are you okay?” the adult Ralph asked.

The adult Willy, who called himself Benjamin, did not answer.

The line of Playboy Bunnies, with trays held high, hopped through the crowd, inviting people to join them. Willy-Benjamin didn’t actually join the dance—he didn’t put his hands on the hip in front of him and hop like the others—but he did follow them. Without saying goodbye to Ralph, he just stepped in behind the last Bunny and followed them down the street.

“Willy! Benjamin!” Ralph yelled. “Don’t go man! I’m not gonna beat you up or nothin’!”

But Ralph’s voice, as well as Willy-Benjamin’s mind, was lost in a chorus of “Hop! Hop! Hop!”

[End of Act Two]

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