“You’re sure it’s tonight? Halloween’s a week away.”
Leni opens her door and says, “Sometimes this thing can run on, you know. Everyone will be in costume, honey. You’ll probably take home a prize. Will you stop worrying. Think of the shots you’re going to get.”
“I only have this one roll of film,” Sylvia says, pulling the camera into her lap and checking the meter.
“Then you’d better pick and choose very carefully.”
They start to walk down Dupin toward a pocket of light and noise at the intersection of Aragon. The air is fairly mild. Sylvia looks down at her feet to see the slippers going black from the filthy asphalt. On either side of the street, large and small packs of people are running to get to the block party. They’re dressed up as apes, vampires, gun-fighters, Elvis Presley, Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, and other more subtle icons, too vague to name at a glance. There’s a trio of Diana Rosses in matching pink sequinned gowns doing a passable version of “You Can’t Hurry Love” and even after they move by her, close enough to smell their Chanel, Sylvia still can’t decide if they’re men or women or some combo of the two. She sees a guy simply wrapped in an American flag jogging next to a woman who may or may not be going for a Little Orphan Annie look. She sees a werewolf in a leather jumpsuit, an obesity case in a pseudo-loincloth and with his hair in a topknot looking like a non-Asian sumo wrestler, some young women in yellow hard hats, T-shirts, work boots, chewing on cigars, spitting and catcalling at passing men, doing a lot of exaggerated crotch-grabbing. She hears singing and spots a small band of men completely attired in old Howard Johnson’s-style waitress uniforms, all orange and white with aprons and order pads. Some wear hair nets and all but two hold brown plastic serving trays over their shoulders while the duo with free hands carry aloft a banner that reads Verlin Ave Cross-dressers’ Lodge.
A parade of bikers on Harleys slides past her and she can’t tell whether they’re foregoing costumes or, in fact, they’re faux bikers, daytime accountants or orthodontists who blew a wad on one elaborate night of dress-up. And the same question arises when she sees a group of hookers high-heeling it around the corner of Waldstein.
“How do you tell who’s real and who’s not,” she asks Leni.
“Tonight,” Leni says, “it doesn’t really matter.”
They round Waldstein and come into the hub of the block party. The Canal Zone treats Halloween like some high holy day in a fanatical religion. Sylvia has never been to the festivities before. In the beginning, the Spy used to run a big feature the morning after the madness with a page of great shots, but as the costumes got progressively more lewd and graphic and just over-the-top weird, the paper left the coverage entirely to the Zone’s own free hand-out rags. Now, Sylvia feels like that might have been the right decision. The width of Waldstein Avenue is swelled to bursting with a Mardi Gras scene as directed by Fellini, a shoulder-to-shoulder circus of fire-eaters and tuxedoed stilt-walkers, snake-dancers and gypsy tarot booths, spontaneous crap games and doorway magicians and a tribe of roller-skating women in bridal attire. There are men dressed as women and women dressed as men and at least one accordion-wielding-hermaphrodite. There’s a reggae band playing from the top of the Radcliffe Building, drowning out these slightly annoying Renaissance chamber singers who are all swaddled in dark velvets and feathered hats doing an a capella number about good King John being dead by his own hand.
The whole scene reminds her of the first street carnival her mother took her to, one of those traveling trailer shows of wobbly cart rides and rigged games of chance that move into town for a week or two, then move out in the middle of the night leaving a muddy vacant lot covered with popcorn and powdered sugar and ticket stubs. The Halloween Block Party is much more free-form and wild than that second-rate carnival of her youth, but standing here now in the swirl of it she’s getting that same kind of virgin rush of being outside at night in the cool of the October air, just engulfed in flashing lights and noise, just washed over by hundreds of disparate, clashing sounds, and with no idea of what’s about to happen.
She wishes she could see the whole thing from up on a roof, get an overview that would allow her to estimate the size of the crowd and how far down the street the party extends. She catches herself wishing this and wonders why she’d want that. Why does she have such a need to see the total picture and analyze its meaning? Why can’t she be like everyone currently bumping into her, lost to herself, going with the moment and the surge? And suddenly she wants to thank Leni for bringing her down here.
But she doesn’t know where Leni is. She turns a full circle before she realizes that she’s already lost her driver and guide. And she panics just a little, starts to move through the crowd for the sidewalk, but it’s like fighting an ocean wave whose undertow keeps growing. She’s moving against the flow of the crowd, smacking into a fireman, a mummy, a vaguely biblical character with a braying sheep lodged up on his shoulders, bent around the neck. She turns and tried to move for the opposite sidewalk, jumps out of the way as one of those huge, old-fashioned unicycles comes rolling too fast in her direction, the pedaler honking a red rubber squeeze horn over and over.
How could Leni leave her like this? She searches for a familiar face but she’s pummeled with a nonstop rash of rubber masks and veil-hidden eyes. It’s like a cargo track full of stage makeup exploded moments before she arrived here. People are rouged or pancaked into caricatures, into mutants, into distant relations of what’s recognizably human.
She starts to make her way down Waldstein by turning sideways, ducking, sidestepping. Once she picks up the rhythm, she begins to make more progress. She comes upon a toga-wrapped Romanesque couple and it dawns on her they’re probably going for a Caligula-and-Drasilla act. They’re huddled with three burly men dressed in the old-time full habits of nuns. They’re all standing at the mouth of an alleyway with their necks craned back, focused up at the sky. She pauses long enough to see a tightrope walker with classic balance pole wavering midway between two rooftops, then she hurries on before the aerialist can either regroup and complete the crossing or free-fall into the blue trash Dumpster below him.
Sylvia moves past an organ grinder with a spastic monkey, a sleight-of-hand man manipulating cards and coins above a huge leather satchel, a small squad of unbelievably risqué cheerleaders doing a raunchy pep-routine for a drunken circle of old men.
And she’s just starting to catch the buzz of the night, to go with the communal adrenaline of the street, when she turns a corner and spots the woman she saw on the screen of the drive-in, Mrs. Ellis, the woman whose daughter is missing. Mrs. Ellis is trying to stop people as they run past, to press posters and flyers into the hands of the revelers. But she’s not having much luck. The people who do take a hand-out drop it to the pavement without giving it a look, most likely thinking it’s one more come-on for a club or a concert. But the missing girl’s mother persists, machinelike, as if there was no other option but to stand in the midst of these speeding, carousing celebrants and distribute the photocopied face of a ten-year-old daughter she may never see again.
Sylvia turns away, takes a quick left, comes to the food kiosks, dozens of carts and wagons emitting a wind of slightly diverse but collectively greasy smells and the overall sound of meat sizzling. Oldish, kerchiefed women hunch over butane-fed flames or beds of glowing charcoal, poking at potpourris of sausage, onions, peppers, tomatoes. She spots a compact and swarthy old man in a snow parka concentrating over what looks like a cast-iron black cauldron — that’s the only word for the enormous cooking pot he’s stirring at the corner of Goulden Ave. And his wooden stirring utensil looks like an oar from a canoe. He’s an apparition from some malevolent children’s fable and Sylvia walks up to him and looks inside the kettle and sees a sweet smelling goulash bubbling like mad, as if the contents were about to come alive, metamorphose into some sentient creature of her nightmares and jump into the fray around them looking for children. The old man glances up at her, reaches inside a deep pocket of his parka and offers her a tin mug for dipping. She shakes her head no and starts to move off, then, totally on impulse or instinct, she pivots back toward him, brings her Canon up to her eye, pulls this dark-skinned warlock into an exact focus and clicks off three shots: the face, this now-wonderful, crease-lined, eye-drooping face, captured forever in the vapors rising up from his mystery stew. When she takes the camera down he’s smiling and blowing a kiss at her. She mouths a thank you and moves onto Goulden.