Halloween

There were pumpkins in the supermarket for weeks before Halloween – so long, in fact, that some on the display had tumbled over: vicious smiles turned to scowls near the potatoes in the vegetable aisle. On the big day I hadn’t thought anything at all until I got out of the subway and walked through the gates of Columbia under a mild sky to see Winnie the Pooh walking towards me, bulbous with a face painted the colour of peanut butter. It was ten to nine in the morning.

So it was a day of little sightings – bank tellers dressed like Dracula for the hell of it, until I got home and my street was a wandering crowd of wild people. There had been talk of a parade but I didn’t know it was going to go right past my flat but there were the barriers, the police on horses, the captain with his megaphone, children looking anxious and a man impaled through a big suitcase. The happy cheeky sex shops were overshadowed by the costumes that came by – lots of generic Goths and president masks and trogs and goblins and Leahs and Hans Solos, a big man in a sumo costume with his baby dressed up as a carrot.

Night fell and we got falafels, fairly gawping at the crowds, and then we climbed up two ladders, across the roof and a big-piped heating system and then another fire-escape running very close to people’s bathrooms and kitchens until we were on the slightly sloping roof and puddles of the next door building’s roof. Six stories up and the view ran round and long under the night sky and the helicopters that stammered and chopped around with their spotlights. Sixth avenue – a boring wide road that runs up Manhattan – ran bright and empty from the towers of the financial district and up to midtown. The Empire State was dressed in white and looked on square, wide and strong. The sides of the avenue were packed with the pinheads of people. They said a million people watched the Halloween parade and from above you could see their little faces and hats and dark coats.

At the front of the procession was a man dancing in stilts, forever tempted by the empty road and he gawked around dancing a little too quickly for the rest of his people – and his people came: on rollerskates and skateboards, in Minis and on slow-moving floats decked out like Las Vegas and the Little Shop of Horrors. They came with spider puppets the size of parachutes, their handlers wriggling the legs in the faces of the crowd, they came with a huge models of dogs, dragons, bats, squids and fruit. Oranges and pumpkins came wobbling along and a man dressed as the moon with his planet-head lit up like a lightbulb. I liked the couples who came in matching costumes: two people dressed all in yellow riding sensible bikes. I liked a bunch of black guys on roller blades with Chinese hats on, racing through the procession and pulling wild stunts and falling over. I liked the children’s marching band with red hats and suits and swizzling sticks. I liked the tap dancers who were getting tired and a group of very prim orchestra types who had found themselves stuck behind a raucous beat-driven eco-crowd who wouldn’t let them get any good American songs out at all. Occasionally the parade would stop and cops would allow people to cross sixth avenue at fourth street. One parader, a big Elvis, got caught up in this process and a cop was trying to stop him continuing. As they argued, the parade pulled away and Elvis was left shaking the white arms of his luscious white outfit, stamping his pushing shoes. Finally the policemen let him go and suddenly the parade was gone, the concrete of Sixth avenue lay open and empty, bound by a thousand excited people. And Elvis ran down. Waving like a president.

(By the way, I went looking for a good photo of the parade and there were a few things, but nothing like this, quite the most scary thing I could find -- are those graves up on that hill?).

Later I went to a party in a crushed bar with more outfits and ended up filling up taxis and going to new places and shaking around and meeting new darling people and god wasn’t it so… we handed out roses and hugged and squinted at street signs on the way home.