By Michael Rutschky
Published on November 7, 2007
‘Vultures on a Carousel’ is about going where the action is. Undoubtedly that had to be wherever all of the transvestites, pirate-cats, and sperm-zombies were headed to.
On the way back from dinner with the Army Times crew in Washington, D.C. we drove past a book store that I wanted to see before it closed. The other stores in the area all had such fascinating things from a plethora of different cultures, and I had assumed from a brief glimpse at the storefront that this store had some occult or counter-culture themed books and paraphernalia. It was called Lambda Rising, which I took for granted as a silly New Age name.
So, thinking that this would be a cool place to look, I took a walk down the road to the store. I walked up, took a big step inside, and saw a whole lot of men kissing. Not in person, just in pictures. It was a book store all right, just not the one I was looking for. I took a second to peruse around, since I didn’t want to look like a total idiot that had just walked into a gay man’s book store expecting postcards of Aleister Crowley.
I don’t really have too much of a problem seeing stuff like this, I see it mostly as a glimpse into another culture, just as I would the other shops on the street. So I took a little while to shop around, then I very nonchalantly made my exit back outside where the cold air could cool off my blushing face.
So that idea was a bust, but it was still night time in beautiful Washington D.C., and I wanted to know why everywhere I looked saw people dressed in full costumes all walking towards the same place. I walked up and down Connecticut Avenue, taking routes that I hadn’t before just to get a broader experience of the city on my last night here.
As I moved further into town I saw more and more tiny groups of people trickling down and forming massive groups of costumed freaks. There were thousands of people in their full Halloween costumes running like a river through Washington D.C.
I stopped across the street from the road they all seemed to be going down, waiting for the road to clear so that I could cross. A few guys without costumes were hooting at the women walking by, and one guy came up and started talking to me. He was a black guy in a trench coat; obviously drunk. He asked me about my Doktor Sleepless shirt, which he thought was a punk band (it’s actually a comic book). You see, he was born and raised in L.A., where he’d go catch all of the hardcore punk acts like Black Flag and Social Distortion.
I don’t doubt this guy’s honesty for a second; he even knew names of the members of the band. His name was Tim, and he was “between gigs” at the moment. Apparently he was living on the streets while his boyfriend (if I heard that right, although Tim was very overtly harassing the skimpy devil-girls that walked past him) stayed out in Florida to surf. Tim invited me to have some whiskey with him, but I told him I wasn’t there to drink, just get a story.
He took this as me hoping to score with one of the devil-girls across the street while my girlfriend was in another state (I didn’t even tell him I had a girlfriend), but I assured him that wasn’t the case. Tim was an incredibly decent fellow, and I was tempted to have him be my sidekick throughout the night; the two of us running through the streets of D.C., using per diem to get drunk with under-age Transvestite Pirate Hooker Ghosts. I gave him a pat on the shoulder and left him across the street.
Halloween parties aren’t anything special, but when you see thousands of people in full costumes covering the streets of a big city, it becomes quite a spectacle. So I ventured into it as far as I could go with no costume and no real reason to be there since I wasn’t allowed to drink on the trip, and I’m not much of a party animal anyway, at least not anymore.
At first I noticed most of the people were waiting in huge lines outside of office buildings and restaurants. As I walked further down I started to see where the less fortunate partiers were headed. A small section of town had its streets cordoned off by the police and a few of the smaller eateries were using their upstairs as dance clubs. I went inside one and it pretty much seemed like any party I’ve ever been to at a friend’s house, save for the fact that I didn’t have any friends here.
It would be easy for me to make some, but people aren’t going to care about buddying up with a sober college student from Pensacola, much less one without a costume. I did a little more walking around, just savoring the weirdness all around me. Granted, most of the people just wanted to get drunk, but there are always going to be those people who see Halloween as the only time they can really be themselves.
For instance, as I was walking up a road I heard repetitive tribal drumming, and looked at the corner to see that a homeless man was playing the drums on a set of upturned trash cans and plastic buckets while a man dressed as Jesus was being grinded on by a woman in short, slutty dress.
‘Vultures on a Carousel’ has always been about bringing weirdness to the masses, and undoubtedly that weirdness was under-age Pirate Hookers Ghosts dancing up on Jesus Christ to the beat of a trash can while George W. Bush is across town trying to sleep.