Seems like Halloween rolls around and my life spirals out of
control. It must be the rolling round orange pumpkin takes all my inhibitions
for the year and pops them and pumpkin juice gets everywhere. Seeds, pulp, goo.
My specialty seems to be terrible relationships, or maybe
not terrible, just passionate, undirected, explosive, loving, well intentioned,
alive.
One year I had to take a tv in to get fixed right after
Halloween because it broke. The TV guy said what happened when I dropped it
off. He had to put something on the fixit paper. I said you’ll never believe
it. He said try me. He’d heard it all. I said a pumpkin melted on it.
His pen hovered over the page. He hadn’t heard that one.
My boyfriend at the time and I had a tumultuous thing
because he was organized and had a walkie talkie and was used to ordering
things up and around, and I was kind of relieved to be ordered up and around,
and liked it for awhile until I had my own ideas that couldn’t be ordered or around
anymore, and then I went off with someone else. It had been close to Halloween,
and we had a fight, and a week or so after Halloween I was back in his apartment
in West Hollywood, a little nook of somewhat straight on super gay Harper
street, and we’re back together for the moment and he comes out of the tiny
strip of kitchen with this frozen pumpkin, steaming in the regular-degreed air.
When our fight had happened, we had carved a pumpkin, but I
had missed Halloween, so he had put the pumpkin in the freezer to save it, just
in case we worked things out, sweetly, so we wouldn’t actually miss Halloween.
And now here was the pumpkin like the undead (not unlike our relationship, derailing
into over) – the idea of the pumpkin was so sweet – he saved it for us, it was
still possible, but the reality of the pumpkin was it was freezing, and had
icicles, and it smelled weird and it was like preserving something dead. When
he carried it out to me, I thought Ohhhh, in that sweet way, and the closer it
got, the more scared I felt because it was a cold pumpkin, it was like an old
body part, and Halloween was over.
You can’t freeze and then retry the relationship.
We did anyway, of course, because people do, because he had
hope, and since he had a walkie talkie and seemed to know what he was doing all
the time, and his apartment was cute, and I was 22, and I loved him, in the
best version of love I had at the time, I had hope, so we put a candle in the
pumpkin, put it on the tv, ate some candy (trick or treat), laughed and rolled
around in the bed, watched a movie probably or went out with our little group
of friends, and then went to bed.
The next day I woke up and the pumpkin had deflated, mashed
down like a melted orange clown mask, disgusting, old, lumpy, and runny, right
into and through the tv. He had to go to work on some show called China Beach
where he sat in a lonely road all day and stopped cars from going when they
were shooting, for 14 hours. Copy that. Hold traffic. Copy that. Release
traffic. So he said can you take in the tv.
As he removed what was left of the pumpkin, in chunks, into the trash.
Can you drop it off to get fixed.
I told all this to the fixit guy.
That is a new one, he said.
I never watched another movie on that tv. I don’t know if he
ever got it back. The pumpkin was stronger than the tv could handle, even when
it was off.
Probably some other girlfriend picked it up. I think her
name was Heather. I think they were sitting on the road together, with the
walkie talkies. Sitting in their
beginning, while I was in the middle of cleaning up the ending.
Then there was the famous Halloween 26 years ago when I fell
in love with my friends. That’s been documented, explored, ruined, resurrected,
and never quite lost. We didn’t mean for
that to happen either, it was a love match gone awry, and then I married one of
them. Then I spent the next 26 years wondering how I could make that happen
again . Trying to fill in the holes that relationship left, trying valiantly,
like I’m a farm peasant trying to be Joan of Arc but no queen is knighting me. Then
I’m not actually an heroic saint, turns out, just actually a farm boy with only
voices in only my head.
And then this Halloween, and I’m demanding more from my
life, I’m exploded open again. I’m searching around for how to gather the rest
of me, all of me, and unite my one person, using the people that know me, my
best audience from over the years. I have my tall leggy ex boyfriend who will
play any physical game with me – Frisbee,
darts, surfing, bagel eating, writing, moviemaking but there is not the level I
am looking for, it is one level and it’s satisfying, and maybe we’ll have a
career. And then there’s the other old boyfriend, the poet nudging me – don't worry, it's just soul, listen to it talking to you. I listen to
the poetry, that voice, and that is a strong force – have you listened to ee
cummings? There’s not much else you can do, when you listen to ee cummings,
except unfold yourself and offer yourself to God, to nature, to beauty. ee’s
poems are recipes, but all of it is made by me, all of it is scripted, produced
and acted in by me. And these are just the people I could remember best. And of course, none of it matters
because aren’t I pretty much gay anyway?
I know where this is heading because I’m the producer. I’m
trying like hell to run away from my life in increments, because the kids are
running away, like they’re supposed to do. I’m trying what I always did, which
was GET OUT FIRST, before the pain comes. There isn’t any sure way to outrun
pain, there’s only different ways to be hit by it. If I disrupt my family
because I need more, then my family suffers. I wrote to my friend, from one of
the Halloweens, I said I feel like I’ve
been stuffing my life into all these holes and it keeps pouring out like sorry
wrong number.
In reality, I have this thick and serious life, and
everything is so important that it scares me.
Also I know I have more to me, and I know my time is ticking away, and I
want to do it all, and I want to be able to afford it. I want ALL the love, and
I want ALL the power, and I want ALL the beauty. I’m trying to slam on the
brakes of my life, and accelerate at the same time. Good for writing, not good
for all the good people surrounding me.
Halloween opened me up 26 years ago, and I have never
recovered. Or maybe that’s what I’m here to do, which is write about why. Feel
it all, and tell people what happened.
The point is, it doesn’t matter who you love, or how many
ways you try, or if the great pumpkin flattens you, or melts, or tricks you
into staying up all night with your two friends and feeling tangled with them
forever. It’s just Halloween, and we are
all just kids dressing up and wandering in the dark, with some kind parents
doing their best guiding us a little bit up the road. Sometimes the parents
have whiskey in their coffee. Sometimes they can’t make the trip cause they’re
too fat or they have diabetic feet. Sometimes there’s a massive leak at the
house and someone has to stay and fix it instead of getting candy. Sometimes
you get to walk in the dark in the clump of kids and community you created,
walking those same three streets, getting to hold the neighbor’s dog, scooping
out the candy in handfuls, the one weird night a year where everyone on the
street cares about the same world series game because we’re in it, and
everyone’s dressed the way they aren’t normally, or the way they want to be,
and sometimes it’s scary, but it’s all just for fun, and if it isn’t exactly
the way you planned it, you might as well love it.
No matter what you do, or who you are, it will always roll
around again next year.
