Halloween Grace
Pretend evil to defend goodness
A thug stabs a teenager to death outside the Catholic school on our block.
We stay.
Gunshot to the face kills a handsome weed dealer on our stoop.
We stay.
A junkie O.D.’s in our basement.
We stay.
During rush hour in the summer of ‘89, a man who will never be caught murders our strange, OCD-afflicted upstairs neighbor, shooting him multiple times during rush hour on the 14th street A train platform. We strongly suspect it’s a hit contracted by our landlord, as the neighbor – a mentally ill loner with dozens of cats – is/was living in a rent controlled apartment, paying around $100 a month. (Those four rooms now fetch $4,100 a month.) No one has the wherewithal to seek justice. The detectives are bumbling and overworked. (This is when I learn 1/3 of NYC homicides go unsolved.) An old hippie girlfriend of the neighbor finds homes for his cats, and/or buries the dead ones he’d stashed in his freezer. A year or so later, she’ll send us a card. She’s seen the movie Ghost. She’ll write: would that it were so!
We stay.
2001 is our annus horribilis.
In February, my father-in-law dies after a four-year battle with colon cancer. In April, my mother-in-law unexpectedly follows him. Unrelatedly, within weeks, my wife parts ways with her longtime employer.
Oh, and we get evicted. The aforementioned landlord wins a case against us, claiming he needs the rent-stabilized apartment for his son. (Murdering us would have been more risky, I reckon.) Our lawyer advises us not to appeal. We must find a new home by January 1st, 2002. We are now a trio, our son having been born in January of 1998.
A couple months later, on September 11th, we take turns standing on our tenement rooftop and watch in shock as the Trade Towers fall 4 miles away. One of us tends to our boy in the apartment while the other heads up into a new world. Later that night, I work my usual Truckstop Tuesdays shift at the Beauty Bar, pouring drinks for my shellshocked regulars.
For some Manhattan families, the seismic horror of 9/11 is the last straw. All things considered, perhaps it should be for us. In years to come, people will assume that infamous event is the reason we left our New York City life.
It’s not. We still want to stay.
We perversely cling to New Yorker-hood. You’ve heard of that post-9/11 New York camaraderie-among-strangers? It was real. Eye contact, people holding doors open, a sad, beautiful, intense feeling of connection. Family.
In this charged time, we’re still looking at apartments, living off hope, dwindling savings, and cash from that Beauty Bar shift – the only paying work I retained when I became a stay-at-home dad.
We are in denial. With my broken-hearted wife unexpectedly freelance, and me bringing in only a wad of cash a week, and no “family money,” there is no way we can afford to stay. The days of living cheap and well in New York City are finally coming to an end.
Nevertheless, for weeks, as black plumes rise from the financial district, we cleave to the crucible of punk rock possibility where, over the course of almost two decades, both my wife and I have become our current selves. Through skill, luck, and stubbornness, each of us has experienced some dreams actually coming true. At different times, we’ve both made good money doing what we love. Made it, and spent it.
We’re like compulsive gamblers refusing to leave the crumbling, squalid casino, because once in a while, we’ve hit the jackpot. If that doesn’t root you to a place, what will?
One realized dream we share is our Manhattan parenthood. I love toting our son in a backpack in the russet-tinged light of the East Village. I love the immigrant women baffled by my stay-at-home dadhood. “Where’s the baby’s mama?” the enraged Ukrainian woman yells from her stoop. (And/or the Indian woman, or the Ecuadorian woman.) I love foreseeing our boy coming of age in multicultural neighborhoods, where Farsi, Arabic, and Urdu pepper the air, where Richard Hell, Allen Ginsberg, and Phillip Glass still walk the earth.
Even as eviction looms, we still picture our son becoming a city teen, meeting friends at CBGB, hanging out with his peeps on the tar beach of our roof. We’ve joyously planned for him to experience the wonders of our Manhattan. His bedazzlement will drown out the horrors.
We are not easily dissuaded from these dreams. We are, in fact, professional dreamers.
But our New York City, enabler of low-overhead dreams, is no more.
As autumn of 2001 takes hold, we decide to take a break from the collective grief, and leave the acrid odor still wafting up from Ground Zero. We will spend Halloween in a secluded cabin near Woodstock, foregoing trick-or-treating East Village storefronts and stoops for the famed Woodstock Halloween Parade. Our three-year-old is dressed as a ghost, a sheet pulled over his body, with two eye-holes. Old school.
My wife and I are not in costume. This will never happen again. It’s the pre-smartphone age, so there are no photographs. This also will never happen again.
It is a perfect Catskills October evening, cool and crisp, scent of leaves underfoot, hot apple cider on the breeze. Laughter all through the hamlet. Gleeful screaming. We encounter crowds of parents and children of all ages roaming blocked-off Tinker Street. Hundreds of folks. A parade ensues, then an elder woman dressed as Raggedy Ann stands on a flatbed in front of the Old Dutch Church, barking like a Borscht Belt comedienne into a crappy microphone, passing judgement on the costumes, and handing out candy.
The costumes are mind blowing. Some store-bought, but mostly homemade affairs, some truly artful and museum-worthy. Both mutual admiration and friendly competition are evident.
It all reminds me of delicious All Hallows’ Eve details I’d learned at tiny Enchantments, the occult store near our apartment. I’d spent some time there, having my cards read, my runes read, buying potions and books. The Gnostic Gospels; Holy Blood, Holy Grail; The Bloodline of the Holy Grail; The Gospel of Thomas; The Hero with A Thousand Faces; Myths to Live By. To name a few.
Paper cup of DeRobertis coffee in hand, I always shot the breeze with the witches at the register, and the ones looming in the back room – the “reading room” – behind a curtain tacked to the 19th century doorframe. Tattooed and pierced women – long before this was de rigueur – of varying shapes and sizes, young and middle-aged and weirdly ageless, all looking like lead singers of punk rock or goth bands. Ever-present potpourri of candle wax, B.O. tang, unguents and oils. Sage. Black boots, high tops, kohl-lined eyes, black and/or magenta and/or taillight red haystack hair, or no hair, skinny jeans or long dresses, tapered, spidery fingers, lusty auras. Very talkative.
The Enchantments witches taught me about the mischievous and/or malevolent forces that run amuck in the creeping darkness of mid-Autumn, when omnipresent death of crops, of deciduous tree leaves, weakens the barrier between our world and the spirit realm. The reason people began dressing up at harvest time, on All Hallows’ Eve, was to disguise themselves from these forces.
Trick-or-treating – demanding candy lest havoc be wrought – would come later. But in the beginning, we donned costumes so ill-meaning entities would mistake us for their own kind, and move on. Move on, at last.
Christianity tried to squelch these powerful rites, of course, and failed. Score one for the pagans. (For another pagan victory see: Christmas.)
Anne Beattie said, “People forget years but remember moments.” I remember this:
Woodstock Halloween Parade, 2001, air crackling with communal happiness. My little son, in that homemade ghost outfit, walking fearlessly among strangers disguised as vampires, werewolves, zombies, all manner of pretend evil. He rakes in a ton of candy, which we will be eating well into 2002, one of the last brutal winters I recall.
In my mind, all these costumed revelers, child and adult and every gradient in-between, are joyously keeping the real evil of the world at bay. For a night. In the previous ten months, I’ve become accustomed to dark forces settling on my shoulders like gargoyles on a ledge. You again. Oh, hello, motherfucker.
But now, on the Woodstock Village Green, not so much.
The trees just beyond the sidewalks and rooftops bend low, as in welcome. Woodsmoke. Fresh donuts. Almost-full waxing moon shining down.
This moment of clarity, quite unexpectedly, is the last straw: I see the promise of a new life, featuring a protection from evil that actually works. It bears me up.
Of course the mischievous and malevolent forces won’t stay on the periphery for long. Indeed, heartbreak and loss, betrayal and disappointment, and more dark times await us. Such is life. Apparently. Nevertheless, the Woodstock Halloween Parade radiates a defiant, life-affirming energy. I realize: if we lived here, we could tap into this annually.
In the distortion of memory, I will say I felt our future calling, pulling.
Soon after that Woodstock Halloween, we tearfully depart our beloved, broken New York City for good, and head back to the cabin to begin again. We leave NYC to the moneyed, the young, those not yet bowed by life. We fitfully root ourselves in the glacier-carved Catskills. For a time, we stand a bit straighter.
In the ensuing decades, we will almost always return to Woodstock’s Tinker Street on All Hallow’s Eve. Some years – like this one – we need it more than others. We honor the increasing numbers of beloved dead in our circle. We connect with the dear friends we’ve made, who we’ve grayed alongside, and toast our relative longevity, knocking paper cups of hot apple cider.
We pretend to be evil not just for fun, but in defense of the precious good in our lives. The malevolent forces retreat, and we move forward.
what a memory! so many astounding visions of friends in outragiouos getups. thank you
Wonderful piece!