Letter #5
Happy Halloween
Dear San Francisco,
I know I said we’d talk about the tech sector’s role in shaping your story since the late 90’s. But I forgot the calendar, and I can’t ignore Halloween. So, today’s column goes to one of A Bridge for the City’s main characters. Following the (pre-Halloween) pic of Castro Street below are excerpted passages from my novel. Join Kelly Denneste in 2019, as the restless bohemian strives to rediscover herself, reminiscing about her first Halloween in San Francisco, soon after she moved to the City before high school in the late 80’s ….
Over a salad and sweet potato fries at Harvey’s, Kelly summoned her fondest memory of San Francisco. She gazed out the window at the sidewalk in front of Cliff’s Variety, where she’d stood on the night the Castro had become her place: October 31, 1989.
My poor parents, she thought, remembering her mother sucking in her breath – And the panic on Dad’s face! – when Kelly appeared in the kitchen at 15, her shiny black Catwoman suit hugging newfound curves and contours, ready for the city’s annual Halloween bash in the Castro. “Happily, our neighbor had mentioned the Castro was San Francisco’s premier gay neighborhood a week earlier – information I shared with your mother the minute you left,” her father would confess years later.
And I was over my head, Kelly admitted to herself. The Castro congregation that clear, chilly night was a distillation of everything Kelly had fallen in love with when she and San Francisco collided, exploding into each other. Here was a place that outstripped tolerating self-expression; it demanded it! And outrageousness – Clothes, behavior, politics, everything! – the more the better! The Halloween crowd in the Castro celebrating everything political, cultural, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender; the creativity and in-your-face sexuality of outfits, banners, and floats; the loners, couples, groups, and families milling around admiring costumes, flirting, teasing, and kissing: Overload for my latter-day Puritan sensibilities. She smiled. Or what remained of them!
Kelly picked at her salad, remembering the intersection of Castro and 19th, closed to traffic, as a sprawling makeshift town square. Revelers had ruled that Halloween night. Energy rippled through the throngs. Bursts of collective laughter and cheering roiled one group and spread to another. Standing outside Cliff’s in the thick of the crowd, Kelly had been transfixed.
Sitting in Harvey’s now, she swayed silently, as she had long ago to the rhythm of house music blasting from a boom-box atop an “Adult Sanrio” float that had rolled to a stop in the jam-packed street before Kelly and her friends. And then, thought Kelly, her eyes closed, Came the only catcall I’ve enjoyed.
“Here, kitty, kitty!”
Kelly recalled staring up at a strapping young man in a skintight white unitard painted with irregular black spots, equipped with a drooping white tail, and topped with a white balaclava adorned with floppy black ears. He’d extended a hand. Wispy whiskers, Kelly remembered, expertly drawn with an eyeliner pencil, Putting my clumsy magic marker whiskers to shame. The leash in his right hand had been clipped to the collar of his partner, a heavyset, hirsute older man, clad in black leather. And down on all fours.
Kelly popped a fry into her mouth and laughed out loud recalling the wave of nausea that had swept her; and how she’d flushed, eyes fixed on the asphalt, and shivered. I wanted to respond. Wanted to be with them. Be part of what they were. But doing it was something else; it was so…. Public! She recalled worrying there was too much of the east coast left in her to fit into San Francisco. My heart was racing. She shifted in her seat at Harvey’s, heat rising in her cheeks, under her arms, and between her legs. Like when I started touching myself at night when I was 13 or 14, before we moved from Massachusetts. And like that Halloween night too, even out in the cold ….
She remembered how the sexy gay Dalmatian on the float had cocked an eyebrow, and said, “Psst, psst, niiiiice kitty, I don’t bite. Do you?”
Adrenaline had electrified Kelly. She’d looked up and exclaimed, “No! But watch out – kitty has claws!” A voice I didn’t know I owned, she thought, From a me I hadn’t met. She’d extended her palms to face the naughty dog, curling her fingers. Then I grabbed his hand and let him pull me up onto the float.
“I hope so,” he’d replied. “With all this going on!” Dropping the leash, he’d traced the shape of an hourglass. His partner had stood, human style, but extended his hands, fingers limp and pointing downward, in the pose of a begging dog.
Touching myself filled a need, Kelly thought, smiling at the server who dropped a check on her table, It was … basic … even then. But flirting with a gay couple had been dizzying. Intoxicating. Transformative. She recalled raising her arms, thrusting her chest out, and swinging her hips back and forth on that Halloween night; letting herself float up, away, far above the Castro and the city of San Francisco; and even further from the Massachusetts suburbs. As she stood and glanced out towards Cliff’s again, Kelly was transported back in time. And maybe back to the me I need to rescue.
OK, next time, on to the tech menace. Today, Happy Halloween. And see you tonight in the Castro ….