2008-11-01 - 12:12 a.m.
Well, Halloween has come once again, and I suppose I could have shlepped on out to the Carnival in West Hollywood to see the milling hoards – but I just could not bring myself to do so. Ever since the Halloween a few years ago when I found myself trapped on the number 4 bus somewhere in Beverly Hills, in impregnable bumper to bumper traffic, for three hours, I have been wary of crossing Sepulveda on the weekend of October 31. Mind you, part of me is sorry that I didn’t go: This is not only Halloween, but it is a Halloween Friday: There’s no telling how big it’s going to be out there. This will be the Halloween of Halloweens.
So many people! Who wants all that pushing and shoving? All that leering and jeering? And all of them dancing and whirling about in unintentional celebration of the passage of Proposition 8, which will deprive us of rights and turn us into the second class citizens.
It’s not as though Halloween is anything more than a silly opportunity to parade about in little jokey costumes. If we could see the real demons and monsters that lurk inside peoples’ souls – now that would be Halloween indeed. Wouldn’t that be something? American Halloween is so pussy. We’re all so afraid of being offended or even slightly disturbed. Scare us – but if you try to be scarier than something that might scare a child, well, off to prison with you!
If you really wanted to do something scary, you’d open a haunted house on a John Wayne Gacy theme. And you’d have actors amongst the people walking in with you, and the actors would be plucked out of the crowd, dragged up to the stage and mock-tortured – like it could be anyone, picked randomly. Actually, I reviewed a play earlier this year in which the director did something very like that: At one point in the show, an “audience member” was plucked out of the audience and forced into the “play,” during which she was supposedly eaten by a gigantic dragon, while the audience looked on and gasped. You see, that was fun.
I remember once reading this fantastic book about the Grand Guignol, which was this 19th century Paris theater that specialized in horror plays. The theater was the progenitor of what we’d probably call “splatter” plays: The murders depicted on the stage were gory, horrific, and ultra-realistic. I loved the Grand Guignol! The book the texts of several of the plays: One detailed the story of a prostitute in a brothel who was told to be on the look out for an escaped maniac. The maniac then showed up as one of her customers and threatened to slice her to pieces – although she was saved at the last moment by the cops and the brothel Madame.
Another play was a dramatization of the deeply perverse French novel The Chinese Torture Garden. In one scene, a faithless servant literally had strips of her skin rippled off her back by her mistress, a ghoulish sadist and maniac. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone built one in Los Angeles and put on horror plays? I think it would do so well. After all, what is SAW and HOSTEL but the cinematic versions of Grand Guignol?
What truly scares you? On this occasion of Halloween, I feel safe in asking you this, dear blog-a-licious blog, even though I know you won’t answer. I know what scares me – abandonment. Being left absolutely alone. Yes, yes, I am alone mostly anyway – but I think one reason why I don’t actually “date” or have working relationships is that I fear the abandonment that comes with the end of them. I hate the idea of what would happen.
Another thing that scares me is the idea that I might be doing something innocuous – sitting here having a coffee, or watching a play, or reading a nice book – and, at the same moment, someone I love might be dying horribly, calling my name and pleading for help. That bothers me. The idea that someone I know might be struggling desperately and unsuccessfully to survive, while I am somewhere else, oblivious, and not even knowing about it until much later – well, that I find rather terrifying. Oh, and silverfish. I don’t like silverfish, now that I think about it. They have too many legs.
