Brazen Hussies ~ Gays

XXX

by Sally Sheklow

(800 words)

As a kid, October was all about Halloween. Autumn adrenaline pulsed through the corridors of Katherine Finchy Elementary. "What are you going to be?" topped the recess chatter charts.

For me, the freedom to become something other than a girl was thrilling, euphoric. I floated through fifth-grade arithmetic and social studies lost in the infinite possibilities of choosing my identity. My mom had offered to get me and my older brother Jack costumes from Woolworths, but those store-bought jobbies were dorky. Froo-froo characters like Snow White and Cinderella did nothing for me. The best off-the-rack costume you could get was a measly bones-in-front-only skeleton.

To me, those acetate one-pieces with their coordinated masks took all the imagination out of it, left no room for theatrics. I wanted to break out, create a whole new persona for myself. Ghost? Vampire? Mummy? No, I needed something more than a make-believe living-dead creature. I wanted to play a real person, an interesting character.

My best friend Debbie Morrison suggested I go as a lesbian. Along with devils, monsters, and Martians, I didn't believe there was any such thing. As far as I knew, a lesbian was a creepy movie character, a shadowy figure leaning against a street lamp, a cigarette dangling from her lips, short hair slicked back, leering at some starlet who happened to find herself on the wrong side of town.

Debbie told me her cousin said lesbians were real. How dumb was that? Lesbians, unicorns, Santa Claus no kid with half a brain believed in any of that stuff. Debbie was going as a flapper that year. At least she picked something that wasn't pure make-believe. She stitched fringe onto a pillowcase for her dress and her mom said she could wear real rouge and lipstick. Large charge. I was too big to fit into a pillowcase. Besides, I'd have to be nuts to walk around with fringe accentuating my already-embarrassing budding figure.

Halloween is for disguise. I wanted to be unrecognizable, free to be out on the streets trick-or-treating without anyone knowing I was me.

The perfect idea hit me sometime around Columbus Day. I'd be a hobo, a happy-go-lucky vagabond, a bum someone free from the constraints of homework, chores, and femininity. For the rest of the month I planned and scavenged to put together the ultimate hobo costume.

As a hobo, I wouldn't have to worry about some idiot boy lifting up my dress. A bum could tromp around in baggy pants and big old comfortable shoes and nobody would remind him to keep his knees together. By Halloween, most of my get up was set, but what about my face? My brother, who didn't even have peach fuzz yet, was going as a pirate (with an authentic prescription eye patch left over from a recent dirt-clod incident). No question, we'd need beardsãour father's department.

Dad was a theatrical guy. During the war before he married Mom, he performed in USO shows for the troops. According to his scrap-books-yellowed photos, he played a pretty convincing Hitler, Stalin, and Groucho. He made his stage mustaches with grease paint, which, unfortunately, we didn't have around the house.

At five thirty on October 31st, when he got home from work, Dad showed us how to blacken a cork over a gas flame. The cork-black worked perfectly. Jack and I elbowed for space in front of the bathroom mirror, charcoaling our chins and taking extra care to make our blackened eyebrows even. By dusk we were just about ready to hit the streets.

While my brother rounded up a couple of old pillow cases for candy sacks, I admired my creation a raggedy pair of Jack's baggy pants hitched up with a clothesline belt, a torn work shirt my dad had tossed into the rag bag, a holey pair of Dad's old tennis shoes and a scotch bottle (filled with realistic-looking Lipton tea) which I'd labeled "XXX".

The image in the mirror showed no signs of girlishness. With my tell-tale curly hair tucked under my dad's old fishing hat, nobody would know it was me. In my beard and heavy eyebrows I looked convincingly male. There was something electrifying rebellious and tabooãabout going out like that.

Jack and I left the house just before dark a pillaging pirate and a tipsy hobo looking for a treat. Our first stop was our next-door neighbor Mrs. Vineberg who said, "Here you go boys," and tossed a couple of bubble gum cigars into our candy sacks. I passed my first real taste of gender freedom. All around our neighborhood for blocks and blocks, I clomped door to door in Dad's big sneakers. Just a free-wheeling hobo under the starry desert sky.

Writer Sally Sheklow wears what she wants in Eugene, Oregon.