The New York Halloween parade - column

National Review, Nov 24, 1989 by D. Keith Mano

The New York Halloween Parade

HALLOWEEN. It is to the New York holiday season now what Mardi Gras is to Lent: one last hellish bender--anarchic and primordial and lewder than a baboon's red behind. The night when men who have purple foil hair, when punk children with barbed wire strung through their septa--normal New York sub-life, I mean--fade into commonness and retain no shock-value at all. The grotesque has been given license and standing. Predation pressure is felt all around. Frenzy-feeding chthonian things break through--in emblem at least. Dracula, say, or that wild, anamorphic alien being over there, what is either but an avatar of the New York mugger-rapist-crackhead-geek? At last they are revealed for what they have always been: frightful, yet fascinating, and more or less ubiquitous. Big-shot evil will show off tonight: frank about its nature and full, as evil often is, of startling wit.

One brilliant, cockamamie conceit after another: five thousand jokes, fleering insults, assaults on the civil heart parade past me up Sixth Avenue--before more than one hundred thousand, ten deep at curbside, many of them madder than what they watch. It's enough to make me fall for this city again. A human corn flake, dog turd, vending machine, Port-O-San; a Kentucky fried chicken, couch potato, Venetian blind, and, yes, one Sony Walkman walking here: Gumby, Batman, Ronald Reagan, Pee Wee Herman's "mother," and Hitler in a tutu roller skating. Dionysius would be winded by it all. And none of this looks like grade-school shop-class stuff: it is mostly cunning, crafty high-tech shtick. And heads, heads--heads that explode like Etna, rotate carrouselwise, become disembodied, one (good grief) made of green glass auto headlights in which a fantastic hologram is dancing. Ten people are the New York skyline, five are a Chinese take-out dinner, and four are your bathroom (sink, tub, mirror, and--hi there--toilet man). The imaginative wattage produced in this single night would be enough to light Peoria through A.D. 2007.

More than one sort of personification walks Sixth Avenue on Halloween. The aggressive image--Golem, Thor, monster he and she--is, as you might guess, predominant. We like to mimic power. These engage and threaten. In New York social language, they are the equivalent of that boom-box-humping adenoid who inevitably sits beside you on the subway. But self-abasement is popular, too: men dressed as overample women (at least six dozen of those), as infants in diaper and safety pin. These elicit compassion or disgust: they seem morally like the vanquished, mooching homeless who hit you up for change. There are exercises in pure wit alone--one giant eyeball, for instance, led by a Doberman and billed as the SEEING EYE DOG. These represent, to extend my subway parallel, human graffiti. In each case--it is an urban condition--they intrude on personal space by force or surprise and rupture privacy.

And they are--you expected something else?--way left of center. What we have here is a ghoulish liberal fund-raiser. A Dan Quayle impersonation: cardboard-box head, wind-up-toy key, vacant thought balloon. MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION: horrid skeletal Santa Claus with scythe. It isn't without logic. What, after all, are ogre and witch and vampire, that supernatural electorate, but several metaphors for the special-interest outsider--wild to uncover some opening in an establishment otherwise known as reality and then haunt it?

Beneath all of this--imagination and power and self-abasement and political tone--throbs the homosexual heart. We aren't considering an ancient urban tradition here. The Halloween parade was brought forth upon New York City just 16 years ago--in part to provide some secure annual moment when a Greenwich Village cross-dresser could bump and grind free from public censure. The parade has become sexually ecumenical since then. Still, as death was thematic in my childhood Halloween, repressed lust of a clearly homosexual sort has always been topical here--narcissistic, exhibitionist, promiscuous, altogether broad. In fact the parade is an enormous cruise: that quintessentially gay interactive procedure similar to window shopping. AND, Lord above, the parade has an attitude--sardonic, outsider-critical, bright, puerile, stylish--starved for attention as any tantrum-throwing child is. New York Halloween may be about sex and power, but, in plague time, sex can't quite dissociate itself from death. It is eerie and unsettling to watch so many homosexual skeletons dance.

People, anyhow, don't arrive in New York from Kansas or Montana unless they are, at some level, extrovert and vain--if not downright megalomaniacal. This is a city of grandstanders. Even the lower-middle-class working stiff has his gig. Many--waiter, mailman, chef--wore their occupational garb on Sixth Avenue. Get the gist: they work not in uniform, but in costume. Not a 9-to-5 shift, but a performance. And most of them--arrogant bus driver, grouchy token clerk--have been playing trick or treat on us all year long. Afterward I went into a Shoprite supermarket just off 14th Street. There, along the cat-food aisle, wolfmen and eight-eyed insects were shopping. It was an image out of Bunuel. And tomorrow, I knew, these same proto-men and -women, each with some persuasive human face on, would clock my ankle bone with their shopping carts at the check-out counter.