Impersonal Attractions (15 page)

But there were too many people, too much dope, too much booze. The outlanders included groups of young toughs who thought the ball’s title guaranteed that all the women present were hookers or wanted to be. Women were molested in corridors and ladies’ rooms. The escalating ugliness reached a peak at about midnight as Annie and Sam pushed through an upstairs hall trying to find their way out.

They were holding hands, Annie in her Boy Scout uniform, Sam dressed as a Brownie, when suddenly they were stuck.

In front of them was a Hooker’s Helper, a supplementary security guard in a red T-shirt who looked like his colors usually read “Hell’s Angels.” He was talking with a small gang of young toughs. They had surrounded a terrified young blonde and were giving her a bad time. The spokesman of the group stepped up in a nose-to-nose confrontation with the Helper. Words became shouts, fist-shaking escalated to the crack of a flashlight against an arm bone, and then a switchblade glinted in the overhead light.

Sam and Annie were on the inside of the circle of fascinated spectators that had quickly formed. They were trying to get out. The ringside action was threatening to spill over onto their bodies.

Sam had seen enough blood in her career to know that this was going to get very ugly very fast. Annie, like most people, had almost always had the cushion of a 19-inch color TV screen between her and real blood and guts. An occasional fight between kids when she was teaching had been stopped quickly with a loud, “Okay, let’s break it up here.” Most kids just wanted to get in a few licks to prove their manhood and were grateful to back away.

This, however, was hardball.

The flash of the knife made Annie feel sick to her stomach. Before she and Sam could push their way out the knife had found a home in the Helper’s belly. A darker red quickly began to flood onto his crimson T-shirt.

Annie felt the corridor start spinning. Waves of nausea were crashing, threatening to overflow. Her mouth tasted yellow.

Finally they broke loose from the crowd and escaped into the street. They ran through the great open space that is the Civic Plaza, ringed by white-marbled, mansard-roofed public buildings.

That night the plaza was quiet, dark, cold, still—its emptiness a welcome surcease from the claustrophobic madness. It was a couple of years yet until Dan White would murder George Moscone and Harvey Milk in cold blood in one of those cool, white buildings, and protestors would turn the plaza into a burning stage.

*

That had done it for them. The next few Halloweens they had stayed home, but seeing the evening through Quynh’s eyes this year made them brave again. When she was a child Annie had loved Halloween best of all. Roaming the streets of Atlanta in a bed sheet, being fed hot chocolate, bobbing for apples, surveying her haul when she got back home was better than Christmas and Hanukkah.

So, after they had left Quynh and Hudson stuffed and groggy with sugar, they decided to give the Castro Street celebration a chance. Five minutes. If they didn’t like it, they could always go home.

The gay community had long since claimed the holiday as well as the city for their own. It was dress-up time for even the most staid and closeted drag queens. And as the center of homosexual activity had moved from Polk Street to Castro, so had the main Halloween promenade route. Two blocks from the epicenter at Castro and Market, almost right in front of Hoyt’s building, they found a parking spot. Perhaps it was a good omen.

Quynh had insisted that Annie take her cat mask and Sam was wearing the face of Frankenstein. They double-checked that Agatha was all locked up and, before they knew it, they were swept away by the crowd.

“Yowhee,” Sam shouted. “This is great.”

Teetering beside them on the sidewalk were two men in tall, pink, rubbery contraptions that ended just above their heads. Their bodies were garbed in pink leotards and tights. Gold rings encircled their chests.

“They’re dicks,” Sam cried.

“Samantha, hush!”

“No, look. That’s what they are. Penises—with cock rings.”

The two pink phalli bobbed at them and disappeared into the crush.

Next was a flurry of drag queens with excessive bosoms, wobbly high heels, and yards of lace and brocade. With their broad shoulders they resembled Eastern European matrons on their way to a garage sale, but they were obviously giddy on their illusions.

As Annie and Sam turned the corner onto Castro Street, they gasped at the size of the crowd. Both sidewalks were jammed, the mob undulating like snakes. The center of the street was open to traffic by order of the police.

Scores of street marshals recruited from the gay community wore white T-shirts with red lettering proclaiming THERE IS
NO
STREET PARTY
.
They politely encouraged people to stay on the sidewalks and keep cool. Real cops were in their regular dark blues, though a few here and there sported Groucho glasses and big smiles. So far, so good. Everything was under control.

Halfway up the block, an open convertible cruised slowly. Perched in the back seat was a pretty young red-haired man, blue-eyed, lithe of body, wearing a shimmering, golden, woman’s bathing suit and high heels. Atop his curls was a rhinestone tiara. He waved majestically to the cheering crowed. His lifelong dream of being homecoming queen had come true.

A man in head-to-toe Frankenstein garb bumped into Sam and they became embroiled in a good-natured argument about who was the real Frankenstein. He won hands down, and Sam defaulted by removing her mask. As she leaned over to give him a congratulatory kiss, he grabbed her and lifted her high above the crowd. Sam screamed in perfect imitation of Elsa Lanchester. Annie wished she’d brought her camera.

She could have tucked it into her bag along with her cat mask. Its eye holes had been fine for Quynh, but she found she couldn’t see very well through it and she didn’t want to miss a thing.

Now, both bare-faced, they waded on toward Eighteenth Street. From somewhere in the crowd, a voice yelled, “Samantha, Samantha, over here.”

They both turned. But there were too many faces.

“Over here, Samantha. I love you!”

“What the hell,” Sam sputtered. Then Annie grabbed her arm and turned her around.

“Look,” she pointed to the middle of the street. “There.”

“Oh, my God, it’s Jack Sharder.”

“Who?”

“Sharder. The White Knight.”

Annie finally focused on the white sports car he was driving. The Porsche.

He had stopped his car in traffic and was getting out, brandishing a large bouquet of flowers. However, a very large policeman was pushing him back in.

“Where do you think you’re going, buddy? This isn’t a parking lot.”

“Samantha!” he cried again, tossing the bouquet toward her as if she were a bridesmaid.

“Oh, Jesus,” Sam said. “I don’t believe this.”

“Yaaaaaa!” the crowd yelled, and a man in a long purple robe and full makeup caught the bouquet, which he turned and gallantly presented to Sam.

“No, thank you, Princess,” she said. “They’re all yours.”

The policeman was insisting and the Porsche scooted off with Sharder, half-turned, blowing good-bye kisses.

“You think he carries flowers with him all the time, on the off chance he’s going to run into you?”

“That, or more likely he’s tailing me.”

“Not so funny.”

“No, not funny at all.” Sam was not smiling.

But it was hard to stay somber in the carnival atmosphere. They were pushed along into the middle of a drag-queen beauty contest in front of the Castro Theater. Most of the participants were overdressed, blowsy, camping it up for the crowd. Then onto the imaginary runway stepped a gorgeous brunette, sylphlike in a black satin sheath. A gamin face with huge brown eyes peeped shyly from behind long, long lashes. He was Audrey Hepburn, a shy young faun.

Even the silly queens knew class when they saw it, and there was a tiny island of stillness around him for just a moment. Then respectful applause began, swelling into an ovation.

Annie found a lump growing in her throat.

It was silly and sentimental, and more than a little twisted, but then, she even cried at touching television commercials. She was a pushover.

Annie scanned the crowd. There was so much going on it was difficult to focus. Then she caught a glimpse of a familiar profile beneath a black cowboy hat. The crush shifted for a moment and she saw a black shirt, black pants, sparks of silver. Was it David?

How many people could they run into in one night whom they knew? But San Francisco really was a small town, so small that one saw people who were strangers over and over again in the same restaurants, bars, in movie lines, until they became familiar.

The man in black turned. She was right, it was David. But those weren’t gay drag leathers. He was in costume as her all-time favorite cowboy, Lash LaRue. She couldn’t see the long black whip, but she was sure it was there on his hip.

“David, David,” she called. Why did she want him to see her?

He turned and seemed to look her full in the face. She was positive there was eye contact, that she was not just a face in the crowd. But he looked away and, like quicksilver, disappeared into a crack in the wall of flesh.

*

It was getting late, and fighting to stay vertical in the crowd was exhausting.

“How about a Just Desserts run before we go home?” Sam asked. The dessert shop was only a couple of blocks away.

Annie grinned. She never had to be asked twice.

As usual, the pecan pie and chocolate brownies washed down with good, strong coffee were wonderful. They were wiping the last crumbs off their plates with their fingers when a young man dressed as Count Dracula came in, excitedly announcing a fire a few blocks away.

Annie and Sam exchanged a look. The combination of danger, dark blue uniforms, athletic bodies, and those shiny, long, red trucks spelled a fascination they shared.

They followed the sirens and the glow in the dark sky.

Street traffic was hopelessly snarled as one piece of fire equipment after another raced toward the exploding, three-story Victorian house. They couldn’t have moved Agatha if they’d wanted to.

It was a spectacular blaze. Flames shot out the top of the building, completely engulfing a utility shed on the roof. It stood out in black relief against the orange inferno.

The crowd buzzed with admiration for the firemen. How quickly they’d responded. How daring they were. Three of them scaled an impossibly tall ladder to the roof, with cheers and applause from the crowd below.

Two mustachioed young gays stood next to Sam and Annie.

“God, would you look at that!” said the one in the yellow sweater.

“I know. Isn’t it frightening,” said his friend in blue. “I’m terrified of heights.”

“No,” his friend pointed, “I mean
that.
Isn’t he a hunk?”

It was, after all, the Castro.

Of course, Annie and Sam were thinking the same thoughts.

“What do you think caused it?” someone asked.

“A torch job probably, for the insurance.”

“No,” piped up a short young man in Levis and a purple T-shirt proclaiming SEX
IS
LIKE
SNOW
.
YOU
NEVER
KNOW HOW
MANY
INCHES
YOU’RE
GOING
TO
GET
OR
HOW
LONG IT’S
GOING
TO
LAST
.
“I live over there,” he pointed a couple of houses down, “and this building was just being renovated. It was almost finished, a real beauty. I can’t imagine why anyone would
want
to burn it down.”

“Unless it was some nut,” volunteered a woman in a ladybug costume.

After half an hour Annie and Sam had had enough, and the crowd had begun to break up. They left the stragglers to their speculations, rescued Agatha from among the engines and hoses, and headed home.

“That really was fun,” Sam said on the drive crosstown. “Best Halloween I can remember in a long time.”

“Me too.” The Volkswagen protested the ski slope climb up Lombard to Sam’s house. “And here’s your front door, madam. Shall I see you in to check for tributes from your White Knight? Or ghosties or goblins?”

“No, thank you. I can handle them all by myself.”

Annie waited until Sam had unlocked her downstairs door and was waving good night from inside. It was a small courtesy they always paid one another at night. Not just door to door, but inside and safe.

*

The next morning Annie sat on the steps of her apartment building waiting for a ride from her friend Jacqui to exercise class. The door behind her opened and Rick, a young tenant she had seen several times on the elevator, brushed past her. She smiled and said hello. He smiled back sheepishly.

Then she understood. A few feet behind him was the young man he had obviously picked up the night before. His friend was dressed in a golden, gauzy fairy costume with a tulle tutu skirt, shimmery tights, and a golden wand. For whatever reason, probably because he might never see him again, Rick hadn’t lent him clothes to get home in.