On October 30, A. tells me, “No, you don’t understand. The company takes Halloween very seriously. You shoulda seen some of the costumes at last year’s party.”
“No, you don’t understand,” I say. “I win the costume contest. Every year. Doesn’t matter which company. Sega, I swept it, every year. This year, your first prize is mine. I got a secret weapon.”
“Okay,” A. says, “All I’m saying is, just be ready to lose.”
That night, I activate my secret weapon, which is, of course, my wife. “I’m sorry,” she tells me. “I’m putting too much of this blue nail polish on you. You’re all tacky.”
“Of course I’m tacky,” I say. “Do we have eyelash glue?”
Next day is Halloween. I gotta admit, A. was right in some ways; the competition shows up, and game is brought: three dozen competitors at least. And some of the costumes are downright amazing.
But me? Best overall, fifty bucks, and bragging rights for yet another year.
Halloween night at Tommy’s. A handful of network TV stars and gosh-I-love-L.A. kids, at the high end of the snoggable bell curve. Tommy showed me his recently constructed dioramas. There were two polyethylene dinosaurs, towering behind the swimming pool. Three public-domain pirates, not precisely Disneyish, were swinging from ropes and plundering a chest of video game tokens. Tommy T would be tempting five feet if he wore platform heels, and he wasn’t. Me, I was wearing platform heels, and my pimp hat kept sweeping plastic spiders and cotton cobwebs off the ceiling of his hobbit-sized mansion. He did the same marked-deck magic tricks I did when I was nine years old. There may be something universal in musicians’ needs to bombastically trash old rock tunes. At one point, someone broke out the glowsticks. We ended up beating the shit out of the piano and screaming Come Sail Away until my voice went.
