by Iris Smyles
My mother, in charge of refreshments, put out Dunkin’ Donuts Limited Edition Halloween Collection, which were covered with orange sprinkles and little candy ghouls. We had a witch piñata, which, at the end of the night we drowned in the pool by way of trial, and prerecorded screaming to welcome guests as they came down the driveway.
The kids arrived in the usual disguises: Dracula, Spider-Man, and Darth Vader stood awkwardly by the grape soda. One year all the boys were ninjas. Another, the girls all dressed as Madonna—a dozen ten-year-olds shouting the lyrics to “Like a Virgin.” Sometimes kids came without costumes 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 were accountants carrying 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 dipping low in the back; they were one of the guys who hung out in the parking lots of nearby Deer Park Avenue drinking beer and looking for a fight on most weekends following high school graduation.
There were a few years, though, when I didn’t throw the party, as I had no one to invite. In middle school I was picked on and, eager to avoid being seen, ate my lunch alone in the library. Like Frankenstein’s monster, I’d flee the crowded cafeteria and take refuge in the wild, deserted stacks. Except on Halloween when at last I could blend in. In a room full of monsters, what was one more?
The new season’s catalogs arrived every spring, giving my parents time to order their stock well in advance and me the requisite months to plan my costume carefully. The catalogs were organized according to age, and I begged my mother to let me choose from the grown-up section. At nine years old, there was nothing I wanted more than to be a Sexy Mermaid. When I imagined myself grown up, I imagined myself in costume.
Was there anything as sophisticated as a Sexy Cavewoman with a bone through her nose and a hot animal pelt covering her privates? Would I ever be a Sexy Witch and have a handsome husband dressed as a Jailbird? Staring at the gently lascivious She-Devils and Harem Girls, I projected my fourth-grade self, my undeveloped figure transformed through the magic of Halloween.
But by the time I hit puberty, I’d lost interest in sexy costumes. Why would I want a coconut bra, when I already had a real one? With time, I graduated from the catalogs, moving on to costumes that required great thinking and planning. As Picasso’s style evolved over the course of his life, giving way to Blue, Rose, and Cubist Periods, so is my costume history defined by distinct epochs.
Historical
With aviator cap, leather jacket, scarf, and high-waisted trousers, I was Amelia Earhart.
Pop
It was easy to become Cameron Frye from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off by wearing a Devil’s jersey, penny loafers, and a bowl-cut wig.
Macabre
With a flesh-colored bodysuit I just happened to have lying around, the contents of my Jug o’ Blood spattered liberally over it, and a wire hanger looped around my neck, I was an aborted fetus.
Literary
As Charles Dickens’s beloved Oliver Twisted, I dressed in period rags and begged, “Please, sir, I want some more anal penetration.”
Then there were the couple costumes: I’ve been the Damsel in Distress, tied to a short stretch of train tracks that I built myself. My then-boyfriend Martin—dressed in black, twirling his sinister mustache—was the Villain. My college roommate May and I were a crime-fighting duo, the Siamese Superheroes; we wore blue tights and red trunks, and shared a cape and one shirt with two neck holes, on the front of which we printed a double S. The year before that, my college boyfriend was Popeye, and his brothers, visiting from Arthur Avenue, were Bluto and Wimpy. I was Olive Oyl and May was Swee’Pea; we put her in pigtails, bought a stroller from the Salvation Army, and filled baby bottles with whiskey. I rolled her around all night, as we passed the baby bottle back and forth.
Group or couple costumes I’ve found are the most fun. How wonderful to imagine we’re all part of the same plot, that all our ill-considered utterances are actually dialogue. Once I was Burt Reynolds from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas—May was Dolly Parton. And then another time, I was Tommy Chong to May’s Cheech Marin.
Sometimes in the last minutes before a masquerade, friends will show up at my apartment, costume-less and desperate, knowing that with all the vintage clothing I’ve collected over the years, the bevy of old dance recital ensembles, and a hodgepodge of wigs and feather boas, my apartment is a better version of the Halloween Shop on Broadway. I can make a last-minute costume for anyone at any given moment and have. Last year, in just a few minutes, I turned Reggie into the Credible Hulk (green all over like the Incredible Hulk, but with smaller muscles so that it’s believable).
This year I put off my costume planning until the last minute. First, I didn’t know if I’d be invited to any parties and being all dressed up with no place to go takes on an even more desperate air when you’re dressed like a bunch of grapes—easy to pull off if you attach some purple balloons to a leotard. And from experience I know that costume choice is a delicate matter, that the wrong costume could even trigger a breakdown:
You’re at a party drunk; it’s a few months after college graduation, and you’re dressed as a giant baby. You repair to the bathroom where you stare at your reflection and then, gripping the sink with both hands, you yell, “A big unemployed baby, that’s what you are! When are you going to grow up?”
I settled on Doctor Who, I’m not sure why.
A lot of people didn’t get my costume right off—sometimes the better costumes don’t look like costumes at all. On the street, on the way to the party, strangers called out, “Annie Hall!” “Oscar Wilde!”
“Doctor Who!” I corrected them. “I’m the Fourth Doctor played by BBC’s Tom Baker from 1974 to 1981.” I pointed to my hat and colorful long scarf, my curly hair, my big nose. “I roam alone through time and space.”
Halloween is an opportunity to exteriorize one’s desires, to explore remote curiosities, and to confront one’s fears. We play at death, at gender-bending, at celebrity . . . at fictional characters and historical figures, weaving the stories that compel us into our own. What touched the lost Amelia Earhart when she met Dr. Frankenstein’s monster at a party, when he confessed next to the stereo, “I have the heart of a madman and the mind of an accountant.” Why did we go home together?
Our regular clothes project what we do—practice law, deliver mail, nurse the sick—while costumes project what we want, think, fear, like (the TV shows we watch every Monday, the books we read before bed, the things that make us laugh or scream). Costumes are a public display of a person’s most private self, which is perhaps why donning one is by some so vehemently refused.
My ex-boyfriend hated dressing up. He didn’t “want to be anything,” he huffed when I asked after his Halloween costumes past. Remembering this should make it easier; obviously he was all wrong for me. But it’s only easier if I believe someone else out there is right.
That’s what I was thinking on the roof and then again later on the dance floor, when I saw my ex-boyfriend walk out the front door, his new girlfriend, in sexy white, two steps ahead. He was dressed as himself; I almost didn’t recognize him.
I’d just finished the “Thriller” pivot where you sort of turn around on one leg with both of them bent, and was doing that terrifying squat walk with my hands pressed into my knees when he turned suddenly and found my eyes right on him. He waved. And before I could catch myself, I waved back.
I stayed to the end of the party—the Klingon had already gone, having had better luck with a Witch of Eastwick—and then decided to walk home alone. The streets were filled with monsters but I wasn’t scared. I had a pocket full of candy, which I ate as I walked.
Who will you be to
night?
—AD FOR VICTORIA’S SECRET
Enter the Wu-Tang
I MET PHATSO IN 1997 at my college dorm’s security desk on my way in from Dialects I. I’d just workshopped a monologue from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to mixed reviews and was trying to decide how I felt about it when I spotted him—short, overweight, and picking something from his teeth with a near-poetic confidence, as if what he were searching for were simply the right word.
He was there to see his friend Donald, who’d introduced us at a party months earlier. Would I mind signing him in?
“Sure!” I said, a little too brightly. I had a crush on Donald.
We walked in silence to Donald’s room.
Phatso knocked.
After a minute, I turned to him. “I guess he’s not here.”
“I like your shirt,” Phatso said, staring at it.
“Thanks. I like yours, too.” I was wearing a wifebeater without a bra. So was he. “I don’t normally dress this way,” I explained. “I’m actually conducting an experiment. See how I have this huge disgusting zit on my chin?” I pointed. “I’m hypothesizing that my not wearing a bra will draw the eye down, making this thin tank top even more effective at masking my blemish than a dab of thick concealer.”
He continued staring at my chest and then redirected his gaze to my face. “You’re right,” he marveled. “I didn’t even see it.” Then he asked for my number.
Phatso loved hip-hop music, being Italian, and employing the phrase “I’m Italian,” though sometimes he’d say, “I’m Sicilian,” to shake things up. The fact that he’d never been to Italy or Sicily, had never met anyone who’d ever been to Italy or Sicily, and could not speak a word of Italian or Sicilian did not enter into it.
He also loved movies, specifically Italian and Sicilian ones, which is why one Saturday night—before going over to his place for one of our standard at-home dates of watching a movie, having sex, smoking pot, followed by my rapt staring as he performed a bizarre vaudevillian puppet show starring his penis and an E.T. doll—I rented a few of my favorite Italian films: Cinema Paradiso, Seven Beauties, La Strada.
But Phatso wasn’t interested in this kind of Italian cinema, he told me, and took off mid-screening to heat up Italian-style Hot Pockets in the microwave just next to his cardboard cutout of Robert De Niro in Casino—Scorsese was his favorite director, he explained.
Among his many ambitions—Phatso wanted to be a comedian, an actor, and screenwriter—he also wanted to direct movies and, instead of going to college, had moved to Manhattan to make it happen ASAP. When I met him, he was ASAPing all over the place. With his two older brothers—fatter versions of Phatso, who together owned and operated a pawnshop back in the Bronx—he’d already written, directed, and starred in his own film. The movie was called Manners and was all about the importance of being polite. People who didn’t say “please” got whacked.
They submitted it to film festivals all over the country and to any and all prominent Sicilians they could think of. When it was accepted to a festival in Manhattan, we all got dressed up for the screening. I wore a white feather shrug, long black gloves repurposed from one of my old dancing-school costumes, and an understated diamond-encrusted evening gown. Phatso wore a fake mustache I helped him glue on, and a Hawaiian shirt, so he looked like my bookie. His brothers wore matching T-shirts that said “Get the Papers.”
With us in the audience that night was almost all of Arthur Avenue, the Bronx neighborhood where Phatso grew up. Phatso’s parents had bused them in, leaving only a few seats for the other filmmakers. After the screening, the thirty of us filled the lobby, chatting boisterously as we waited for the votes to be tallied. We cheered when Manners won the “Audience Choice” award and celebrated with a trip to Little Italy.
It was because of stuff like this, because Phatso didn’t just “talk shit” but had actually gone ahead and made a “dope” movie, because Phatso was “mad talented” and his beat box was “illin’,” because his drawing “skills” were “money” and his cable access show “off the chain,” that Phatso was king among his friends, a pack of toughs from the streets of his hometown.
Throughout the year, members of his Bronx “crew” came into Manhattan to pay tribute, which meant their bringing him a sign they’d swiped from a Costco that read DOLLAR DAYS and sleeping for a few nights on his living room floor. Once, when Phatso’s “crib” was full, I let two of his “homies” crash at my place and in the morning found my coffee table covered in graffiti. Because I couldn’t make out the handwriting, I didn’t know who to blame, so I blamed Phatso.
Viewing this as a teachable moment, Phatso pointed to the scribble and explained that the most illegible “tags” are regarded as the most “pimpin’.”
“Like the handwriting of doctors and teachers,” I said studiously.
Phatso had his hands full with my education. Being a sheltered suburbanite, I was always getting things wrong, proclaiming that I was “up for anything” when I was supposed to be “down,” and saying “peace in” when I entered a room. It was from Phatso that I learned “fat” meant cool if you swapped the “f” for a “ph,” and that creative spelling was a style with which all the rappers were rolling. Looking through his collection of CDs one night, I discovered a rapper named “Ludacris” and another called “Makaveli.” Excited to drop my knowledge, it was then that I christened him “Phatso,” owing to his illin’ brand of obesity. Before that, he’d been called “Joey.” “Come here, Phatso,” I cooed all gangsta-like, before pulling him in close for an “off the heezy” kiss.
One weekend, when we were all on the roof belonging to the bitch of Juice (Juice’s girlfriend had gone to see her parents in Scarsdale and had asked Juice to housesit), and the boys were busy “tagging” her water tower, I got in on the act, too. Grabbing a can of hot pink spray paint, I found a blank wall and drew a heart, then wrote inside of it Iris loves Reagan. Then I “bombed” another wall with pictures of my eponymous flower and the words Repeal the Income Tax! in an elegant script.
Being part of an inner-city gang was pretty exciting and, having finished my graffito, I expressed my enthusiasm by tap-dancing up and down the roof to the rhythm of Phatso’s beat box, while his friends, forming a tight circle around him, one at a time, commenced their dope rhymes.
After a few minutes, I tossed my hat in, too. Time-stepping toward them, I began, “Yo, yo, yo . . .” The other guys always began this way, I noticed. Phatso would be beat-boxing, and then one of them would start in with the yo-yos. It’s like if you’re a hobo trying to hop on a moving train, you can’t just jump on the boxcar straightaway, but have to run with it awhile. “Yo, yo, yo . . .” I went on, running alongside their boxcar, watching the others nod their heads rhythmically, as they waited for my next words.
“‘It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. “By thy long beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me? . . .”’”
It hadn’t been my intention to recite the entire “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” I just got nervous and, seeing the group grow impatient, said the first thing that popped into my mind. I’d hoped to break off into my own direction after a few lines, once I got comfortable in the spotlight, but then it just started sounding so good that I ended up “freestyling” all seven parts.
Back at Phatso’s, Gary, whom everyone called Juice—“because I’m really into fruit juice”—asked me about my rhymes. I stopped spinning. Phatso’s apartment had linoleum floors, which made it excellent for practicing my pirouettes. “I borrowed the bulk of it from Coleridge,” I confessed and, standing still, began reciting once more, “‘“God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends that plague thee thus!—Why look’st thou so?”—With my cross-bow, I shot the ALBATROSS.’ Isn’t it funny how the archaic language makes the speaker sound like he has a lisp?” I asked Juice.
High from the blunt we’d just smoked, I began talking at a frenzied pace, telling him all about ho
w the poem was written, how according to his friend Wordsworth, the idea sprang from a conversation he and Coleridge had while hanging out. “So it’s sort of like freestyling,” I finished.
“How come you have it memorized?” Juice asked.
I jumped in the air and performed a scissor kick. “I went through a phase in high school where I read it every day. I was kind of intense back then,” I said, performing an air split, high kick, a back bend, and shimmy to the ground. “I was also into Byron for a while, but the only one of his I memorized is ‘When We Two Parted,’ and that’s not nearly as tough sounding. You know it?”
Juice shrugged.
I performed another scissor kick, this one with a midair pivot.
“The mariner is cursed to wear the albatross around his neck in penance for having killed it,” I went on, “like Flavor Flav has to wear that clock in penance for having killed time. The other thing is that he is cursed to keep telling his story to anyone who’ll listen, which sucks because it’s so long. Seven parts and something like fifty stanzas. Can you imagine?”
“You were going for a pretty long time,” Juice answered.
I explained about the poem’s poor reception, how the critics of his day panned it for its archaic language, which prompted Coleridge to add “a gloss,” explanatory notes, in a subsequent publication ten or so years later. I went on, surprised by my rather profound grasp of English Romantic poetry. Why didn’t I have this much authority back in AP English? Why was it only clicking for me just now? I could have gone on for another hour had Juice not interrupted me.
“Yo, Phat!” Juice yelled. Phatso was in the kitchen with the others, smoking Marlboros and playing a drawing game called Exquisite Corpse. “Your girl’s buggin’ out again.”