It is always hard to tell when Halloween begins on the Avenue no matter how apparent in its ghastly glamour it might be once begun.
It could be said that Halloween is everyday Monroe, only more so.
Was that girl on line at Rite Aid, one-thirty yesterday afternoon, the one with the multiple piercings, the black make-up and purple and green hair, the one in the baby doll skirt - was she the first on street for trick or treat or merely expressing her individuality in the accustomed Monrovian manner?
The children's Halloween of costumes and candy corn keeps, largely, to the residential neighborhoods, the friendly back places behind the Big Street. There is a children's hour through the early evening darkness when young gangs and families travel treating about from jack-o'-lantern porch to grave stoned front lawn. Careening, they cross one another's pathes on street corners that are without traffic lights. Intersections with streetlights half lost in maple and oak leaves not neon and flourescent lite by 7/Elevens and bars; where the pavements are strewn with scraps of dead leaf not used condoms and the broken glass of slipped bottles of Steel Reserve.
The Avenue's Adult Only fest doesn't truly begin until ten and the gangs hop bars clad and unclad in not so much costumes and creations.
Between eleven and eleven-thirty the crowd at Oxford's Pub backed up out on to the street. The line formed to the right of the door and extended in disorderly fashion to, at times, Lola's and nearly to the corner. Lobster Girl hung a butter bar purse from a bright red claw and smoked a cigarette; Wonder Woman's shave left a five o'clock shadow along 'her' jaw line. Death came to Oxford's in various guises - black robed as a seven foot montster with glaring skull face and huge hanging gnarly talons; a skeletal Death in jester's cap and bells and black and red motley roared up on the side walk on his hog. Appropriately, therefore, there came, too, the Resurrection and the Life - Sweet Jesus in whitest flowing robes and basketball shoes, arrived a crown of thorns pressed down on his head.
Halloween on Monroe is a live action Simpsons marathon, a review of a century of pop culture references and icons. Flappers with boas and feathered tiaras, hipless and fringe festooned short black dresses and pin-striped and fedora-ed Wise Guys with plastic Tommy guns meet on the street with Robert Redford wanna be Seventies swingers and Haight-Asbury and Woodstock Flower Children. Bernie, the Dead Guy, with cool guy mustache and darkness over his fixed and absent expression, permanently laid back comes down the street propelled ahead with a dandling walk. He (excuse the expression) passes the Labowski, getting out of cab in blond wig, bathrobe and hauling a bowling bag.
Jack Sparrow pirates and Yacht Girls in white caps and blue blazers; Cavemen and half naked Hula Dudes in grass skirts and cocoanut brassieres; a guy in black and brown striped box is a stack of Jenga blocks gets in the back of the line and a girl comes along as a Rubek cube.
When the bars turned everyone out, something like a parade started down toward Mark's Texas Hots. Tommy Lee in top hat led to a banjo, kazoo and washboard march. Up ahead were the flashing lights of cruisers on the scene of one car crumpling accident at Averill while behind the parade the sudden smash of a second collison turned heads to see that some one, pulling out of Exxon, had driven straight into the passenger side of a passing carload of costumed partiers.
Saturday afternoon, a French Maid strolled down Monroe along side her friend who wore a Minnie Mouse polka dot bow in her hair still.
The Avenue has returned to the merely common place strange of Everyday Monroe.
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