A passing sheriff asked me to join his posse. He must have been entranced by my fringed brown leather duster jacket. It wasn’t the first time, but I had a mission to complete. I told him he’d have to let me brand him first; he decided to take his posse elsewhere.

Maybe it was the JELL-O shots, or maybe it was the contagious fever of the evening, but I found myself walking with a catwoman and a heavy metal chick down Frat Row caterwauling “Pour Some Sugar On Me”.

“Do you have Slayer tickets?” my sister screamed at somebody in a devil costume. Wise choice. If anyone would have Slayer tickets, it would be Satan.

A nagging thought struggled out of the black sink of my drunken skull. There was something I was supposed to be doing ...

I babbled something about, “Why?”

My sister read my mind, or what was left of it. “Because it’s not Halloween if it’s not crazy.”

Words bubbled out of my mouth before I was aware of forming them. “So, isn’t it because you can do anything you want, and you can just say, ‘Ah, you know. It’s Halloween.’ Or is it something else?”

The catwoman had taken her shoes off and was walking in her fishnets. “I usually chalk that up to alcohol, but on the night of Halloween, it’s fine to say ...”

My sister was on a roll. “It’s more accessible. You’re in costume and it makes you feel more liberated because the next day ... you see people and they won’t, you know...”

“They won’t associate your behavior with who you were the night before,” I finished.

“No, probably not. They probably wouldn’t even recognize you, you know,” she said, and began belting out “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”

We passed a very masculine looking guy in a tight, pink shirt plastered with a rainbow logo, and wearing equally tight jeans.

“He’s a gay man,” my sister said.

It took me a second to understand. “You think he’s a gay man?”

“The rainbow is a gay symbol.”

“I know he’s dressed as a gay man, but do you think he’s secretly gay?”

“He’s going as it.”

“He’s obviously going as a gay man, but is he secretly gay? That’s the question. Maybe he is.”

She thought about it. “Obviously, he’s comfortable enough ... to go out ... But it also is kind of mocking someone ...”

“...who’s gay?”

“So he must be very homophobic.”

“But sometimes,” I said, “the most homophobic men are actually, secretly ...”

“Obviously he’s not terribly homophobic or else he’d never wear that costume,” she backtracked.

“Exactly,” I said, not quite sure what I meant by that, but feeling a sense of satisfaction. How many JELL-O shots was that? Five? Eight?

My sister tried to swim out of her logic. “Like, extremely homophobic guys wouldn’t even go near, like, dressing as a woman.”

I was onto this new line of thought. “They don’t want their masculinity to be confused for anything else.”

“Exactly. You know,” my sister said, “as a guy, you gotta go as the Grim Reaper or something tough.”

“No fluffy puppies.”

“Right.”

I followed it up with more “butch” costumes. “Cowboy, cop, earlier this evening a porn star ... But see, these are the same things that the Village People dress up as. This is what I don’t get.”

 

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