I see you shiver in antici...

pation

Driving home on a golden fall afternoon,

I turn onto our dirt road and see the burly bald neighbor working in his yard, shirt off, tatts bared. He’s adjusting a new killer clown in his Halloween installation, an elaborate scene he started erecting mid-August.

First came a 12-foot-high sinewy skeleton with a demon head and flashing red eyes, arms outstretched like a T-Rex.  Then a manger scene in a wood-slatted shed—ghouls and monsters and a skeleton baby posed in a vaguely Christian arrangement. Then a dozen plastic tombstones, a zombie busting up out of the earth, a pirate ghost cackling to the motion detector.

Now the leering clown in prison stripes, arms strung up in chains.

I don’t wave as I pass.

We’re not on waving terms. Last Thanksgiving, he went ballistic over a mail dispute and warned us to stay away because he’s “fully loaded” and has cameras everywhere.

Back home, I let the dog out and walk down to the front garden to pick cherry tomatoes and a butternut squash for dinner. Through the goldenrod, out of the corner of my eye, I see him tending to his clown.

He’s styling its green-wigged hair in an attentive, focused way, and I recognize what he’s doing as a creative act. One of his skeletons is giving the finger, a big fat F-You to the world as the darkness lengthens and the cold comes on, the crickets and katydids chirruping their last songs.

I’m out in my garden and he’s out in his—except after dark his comes alive, a carnival funhouse of glowing bones and eyes, flashing purple and orange lights strung from the roofline, minor key horror electronica mixed with cyclical cackling and screaming.

Who am I to say what is art and what is trash?

What is tasteful and what is tacky? I’ve already written a poem about this guy and the culture war unfolding on the corner. The dilapidated apartment building is home to a revolving cast of tenants; over the past 19 years we’ve seen the cops show up for rumored drug busts and domestic violence calls, blue lights strobing the neighborhood.

Now I wish I could walk over and ask him for a tour of the installation, up close and personal. I want this more than a visit to MASS MOCA, though I don’t dare stroll down on my own and inspect the scene from the road, because of the surveillance cameras.

I carry my colander of tomatoes and a young, pale squash discreetly back to the house.

Every day something new blooms in his garden:

A cloaked witch tending a cauldron. A clothesline of swaying ghosts. A limp clown dangling from a hangman’s noose. A shadowy reaper with a scythe. A skeleton holding up a manacled, severed foot.

He fences it all off with police tape: CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS. He plants a row of spotlights in the grass.

People who love Halloween decor are a different breed than those who love Christmas best. Is it some expression of death-practice, legitimized once a year? Some deep yet playful shadow-work? Or a kind of social liberation and rebellion?

As the veil between the worlds grows thin again,

I’m not stringing the porch with cobwebs or planning my costume. I’m thinking about Rocky Horror—that brief window in 8^th grade when I’d go with a clutch of Nerd Herd friends to the late late show at Images Cinema.

Matt and Matt and Dave and Les and I would dress up in black (not bold enough for full RHPS regalia), me in an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, a body-wave from The Clip Shop, my signature fringed suede booties.

I can’t remember whose idea it was to start going but we quickly learned to bring toilet paper and shout back to the screen along with the audience. The sheer delight of being a freak out in public, hooting and hissing and throwing stuff in the dark, savoring the camp of a haunted castle inhabited by a magnificent master seducer who isn’t afraid of his desires.

Shocked, liberated, secretly aroused, I couldn’t take my eyes off Tim Curry’s fishnet strut and lipsticked mouth. Now I understand I felt safe in my queerness. I was a little bit Janet with her big doe-eyes and a lot Magenta the witchy French maid, moaning and dancing with Columbia in her sequin shorts, her slick short hair. Their unnamed relationship bloomed in my imagination.

I don’t want to go back to 1987 but I want that sense of discovery again.

When’s the next midnight show? Want to do the Time Warp with me this season?

Tricks & Treats

I’ll be back with micro-reviews next issue but for now…

• Feminist journalist Liz Plank’s tactic of flirt canvassing

• Jessica Valenti’s vital new book Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and The Truths We Use to Win

• The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon: immersive, sexy, unputdownable

• Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s devastatingly gorgeous poetry collection I Don’t Want to Be Understood

Thanks for getting into Girl Trouble with me. Let me know your Halloween dreams and plans.

xo Diana

P.S. Mercedes from Glee (Amber Riley) slays in the role of Dr. Frank N. Furter belting “Sweet Transvestite” 🔥

P.P.S. Dark Beds still heating up the autumn in print and audiobook 🖤