WHY I NO LONGER DRESS UP FOR HALLOWEEN

AN EXPLANATION FROM MY FIRST MEMOIR "MISSISSIPPI SISSY"

When I was on book tour for my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy, I would read an excerpt that ended with the scene below at the elementary school Halloween carnival to which I went costumed as a witch. My mother was in the last days of her life dying from esophageal cancer - she would die in November - after my father had been killed the year before in an automobile accident, a father who had been an All-American basketball player in college and drafted by the Knicks. He longed for a life in New York, I think, but my mother was pregnant with me and wanted him back home in Mississippi. He relented and came back to become a high school basketball coach.

It was 1964. I was in third grade. I was eight. I was also a bit crazed with grief and trauma and the effort it took trying to be a good little boy. I first wanted to go costumed as Arlene Francis with a diamond heart pendant around my neck since I worshipped her on the Sunday night game show What’s My Line? in some sort of if-only-I-could-get-to-New-York-too-and-live-with-her fantasy that would solve all the grief and trauma in my little life. I even wanted to be her and insisted when I was in an Arlene mood that my grandmother, who was taking care of me, call me Arlene or I wouldn’t answer. If I couldn’t go as Arlene then I wanted to go as a wicked witch, my favorite character in The Wizard Oz. I remember pitching a hissy fit when I was told at first that little boys didn’t go dressed as witches to Halloween parties either.

But after the terror of the tantrum I threw, my grandmother relented once my mother gave her approval in her morphine-addled state for me to go dressed as not only a witch but more deeply as a woman. It even seemed to add bemusement to my mama’s painfully blissed-out state. Moreover, she had always defended my being a sissy to my already dead daddy and anyone else who dared to mention it to her or to me with disdain in their voices. Her approval of my costume that Halloween was her last act of defiance in accepting her sissy son and my first at daring to be one. Yet what started out as a conflated act of defiance and acceptance became a conflation of a different kind of Halloween horror that night when I arrived in such a costume, one my grandmother finally went all-in with a vengeance to make for me. She sewed a witch’s dress from some crepe wool she had left over in her sewing room from making her own clothes. We bought the best wig we could find at the five-and-dime store. My mother wasn’t using her makeup since she was lying up in the hospital so I used it on my own face. I might have been channeling Margaret Hamilton but I was secretly trying to look more like Arlene Francis.

(Above: Arlene Francis, my fantasy self when I was eight years old.)

I also used the scene in Mississippi Sissy - with a few changes - as a monologue in the stage adaptation I wrote of the memoir for a reading at New York Theatre Workshop. It was delivered by The Writer in the play. It ended the first act. Below is that version.

I wrote:

It was my first Halloween in the small Mississippi town where my grandparents lived and I was nervous wondering what everyone would think of my witch’s costume. I knew enough to know it was a rebellious and troubling choice. I do distinctly remember the crowd parting as my grandmother and grandfather and I made our entrance and the looks of puzzled appreciation on the faces belonging to the other families, sleek with youth, who were there and all still intact, mothers and fathers in their twenties showing off their first go at kids. Suddenly, a disapproval descended upon the crowd as it dawned on them all that it was I who had come dressed so convincingly as a witch. A bit of nervous laughter took root. Then, as they saw how serious I was taking my role, an appalled silence cast itself across them. What kind of creature was this that had settled in their midst?

“That’s not right,” came a whisper - the judgment, once espoused, once passed, encouraging others to judge.

“If that boy’s daddy was still alive - I hear tell his mama’s not long this world neither, lingerin’ like she’s doin’ up at the hospital - he wouldn’t’ve showed up like that. His daddy was a coach. Any man that’s a coach would’ve whupped him good,” came another whisper right at me.

“What a sight,” someone else said.

Another: “We better pray for that young’un.”

Yet this - “What a shame! What a awful shame!” - is the admonition that has stuck with me above all others from that night, a whisper that seemed to be honed among those gathered in the elementary hallways - the Zorros and Casper the Friendly Ghosts and Robin Hoods and Cinderellas and My Favorite Martians even greener than my Wicked Witch - until it was shortened into the one-word condemnation that all little sissies must deal with at some point, the one that reverberates in the echo chambers of our collective memory. “Shame,” came the utterance, “shame,” the “sh” of it like the rustle of that imagined petticoat my imaginary friend Epiphany always longed for when she’d slowly twist her hips back and forth and pretend she had one on, “shame,” that phantom sound now found.

I swallowed hard and sashayed through the crowd as if it were I who had on Epiphany’s make-believe clothes. I threw my bewigged head back in defiance. I made sure my demeanor did not crack. This was who I was. If death - my father’s shocking one the year before, my mother’s encroaching at any moment - was making me, back in that mean- spirited Mississippi year of 1964, a pity-worthy spectacle for fellow Mississippians to focus on and feel less bad about the belligerence they were displaying in all its ugly glory for the rest of the country to behold, then I would take up its mantle and make the spectacle my own. No longer would I be the child for whom overweening sorrow was a parental replacement. No longer would I be a vessel for sympathy so that the sympathizers, through a sadness that was not even theirs, could cleanse themselves of their sinister culture and the sinister politics it bred. With a pride that confounded all who were in my path that night, I decided I’d go ahead and be the sissy that everyone said I was. Let them whisper as I walked through them all. “Shame.” “Shame.” I would really give them something to fret about, to fight against. “Shame.” I might never be a woman. “Shame.” I might never be a man. “Shame.” But I would always be a witch. The world could kill my parents, I reasoned, but I could kill it right back by being otherworldly. I would show them that a sissy could be just as sinister as they all were. I had had enough. “Shame.” I felt like I was going to shit. “Shame.” “Shame.” I shuddered at my power.

My grandmother’s hand grabbed my shoulder. “Want to go inside the haunted house?” she asked, sensing the stir we both were causing when it began to sink in that she had allowed me to come costumed better than any little girl at the school. Who was to blame here, some seemed to be thinking: the boy or the old lady who let him out of the house like that? My grandmother led me to the second-grade classroom where many of the mothers, dressed as ghosts and monsters and witches themselves, had created a scary environment full of fake cobwebs and skeletons. “Want to go on in?” she asked, pushing me forwards so I would be out of sight and maybe - just maybe - the whispers would stop. “Your granddaddy and me’ll wait out here for you.”

I shrugged and headed inside the haunted house. Nothing would be as scary as the crowd we had just made our way through. As soon as I saw what awaited me, though, my arrogance abated. When one of the mothers, dressed like Frankenstein’s bride, her towering green hair-do made from uncooked spaghetti, put my hand in a vat of eyeballs made from Jell-O, I began - uncontrollably - to scream. The other mothers tried to catch me and calm me down as I ran from their grasps, knocking over cardboard coffins and and cauldrons full of dry ice.

As I tried to find my way out of the darkened room, my screams grew even more bloodcurdling. My grandmother came rushing in and started shouting at the costumed mothers, “Call him Arlene! That’ll slow him down! Arlene! Arlene! Arlene!”

I broke one mother’s tackle.

“Arlene!”

Then another’s.

“Arlene!”

One, costumed as a werewolf, grabbed me around the neck but I bit her hairy forearm and freed myself running wildly in circles some more.

When I finally emerged firmly in my grandmother’s grasp, I discovered that all the carnival-goers had gathered around the door to the haunted house to find out what all the screaming was about. Again, the crowd parted as I made my way back through it. They were even more appalled by me now.

My grandfather and grandmother led me to our old Plymouth in the parking lot. I climbed into the backseat. We all rode in silence. It wasn’t until we made it to the country road we lived on outside the city limits of the small town that my grandmother chose to speak. “This whole thing was a bad idea. I don’t know why I let you mama convince me to let you come as a witch. Maybe it was just the morphine talking. She’s not in her right mind, your mama. I ain’t in my right mind neither her not being in hers. Shoot. I barely have a mind left no more. But I tell you this - slow down, Lyle, you’re gonna git us all kilt - I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. I told your mama something like this might happen. This is Mississippi. We don’t stand for no nonsense down here. Sometimes I think she’d’a been better off if she hadn’t been pregnant with you and her and your daddy would’ve just went ahead and moved up yonder to New York City with all them heathens in them high-rises. You’d like it better, too, up yonder, I bet. Wouldn’t you, Arlene? I know your daddy would’ve loved it. He loved to show off - you get that from him - and New York City is full of show-offs as far as I can figure from watching that Ed Sullivan mess. Next year, I tell you what, it’s John Glenn for you. You’ll look right cute in all that aluminum foil we’ll use for a space suit. You’ll see. I’m as good at making a space suit as I am a witch’s dress. Aluminum foil is a whole lot cheaper than that crepe wool you’re wearing. John Glenn it is.”

My grandfather, his breathing always more pronounced through this hairy nostrils when he was upset, said nothing. He only wheezed in disapproval and gripped the steering wheel tighter before bumping up the headlights once we got out on that country road. The eyes of the cows in the pastures we passed flickered, like fireflies pairing off, as they glowered at the sound of our Plymouth whining its way into second, my grandfather pushing harder on the gas pedal. I counted by twos- up to sixteen - the eyes of those cattle when they caught the Plymouth’s light.

Why had the haunted house scared me so? It wasn’t the monsters and the ghosts and the other witches with which I was confronted. I knew all that was fake. What was not fake were those mothers themselves who, unlike my own, were not dying. I know now it was the coven of the living that caused my screams, the rent in my dress. But back then I was just angry at myself for losing control. Somehow I knew the appalled crowd had won a round. I vowed to myself never to lose control again. The rest of the rounds were mine.

I pulled off my wig and threw it on the floor of the car. I would not pout. I wouldn’t. I looked at the wig. The long stare at what is discarded had in that moment begun. My grandfather turned off the headlights as he turned into our gravel drive and into the darkness that refused to discard me, the soft growl of home the sound we had all been waiting for.