Look out! Charlie’s in the chimney!!

Here is a Halloween story. I have told it before, but it’s too good to not tell again. A Halloween story set in the roller-coaster landscape of San Francisco, where I lived for a brief 2 months. This was right before my brief 3 month sojourn in Los Angeles (which ended when a certain Westfalia broke down.) I was all about brief sojourns for a while.

I lived in San Francisco with my boyfriend, who had gotten a job at a big corporate law firm. We had uprooted our entire lives in Philadelphia, drove across the country … I had never even been to California. I’m an East Coaster. I’m a Rhode Islander, for God’s sake. I missed my family. I was 22 years old, or something like that.

The boyfriend had been working in the public defender’s office in Philadelphia, and while it was grueling, upsetting, and not-well-paid work, it was what he really wanted to be doing, what turned him on about law. But then came the massive school loans – and so he took the corporate job – and felt like he made some Faustian deal … he worked 85 hour weeks, I had no job at the time … he and I were also breaking up as quickly and as messily as we POSSIBLY could …

All in all, the sojourn in San Francisco was a disaster.

In the middle of all of this came Halloween. Halloween in San Francisco is basically treated like a national holiday. I’ve never seen Halloween celebrated so ferociously, with such commitment. It’s like the Gay Pride here in New York. EVERYONE is in costume, costumes which have been lovingly prepared for months in advance.

My boyfriend and I were invited to a Halloween party, hosted by one of the other lawyers. I would have rather just wandered the streets, staring at the spectacle, but whatever. I joined the boyfriend at the party.

Boyfriend went as Atlas. His costume consisted of tank top, sweat pants, and he carried a balloon globe on his shoulders.

I was in a bit of a, shall we say, dark mood. So I went as Squeaky Fromme (aka Lynette Fromme), one of Charles Manson’s freak followers, who also attempted to assassinate President Ford, and is in prison to this day.

I like sick costumes. I like to dress up as someone who actually existed. A person from history. Someone messed up, complicated, someone I can embody. So that’s what I did.

I didn’t shave my head, but I wore a beret – like she did in the earlier days – and drew an X on my forehead – and wore a long flowing black cape. She and her good buddy Sandra Good (what a wack-job SHE was) would hang around outside the courthouse, the two of them wearing capes, like messengers of death with sweet little-girl faces. Squeaky Fromme is obviously insane, but Sandra Good always struck me as the more dangerous one.

But the REALLY sick part of the costume was the sign I made.

I got a huge piece of cardboard, and enlarged that wild-eyed picture of Charles Manson – the famous one. I’m sure you know it. So I made it HUGE. And then wrote under it, in red marker: “CHARLIE’S CHRIST.” (That was Squeaky’s whole thing.) And then on the other side I wrote in huge jagged letters: “PRESIDENT FORD – WATCH YOUR BACK.”

I’d probably be arrested for such a costume today.

The responses he and I got as we walked through the streets – I wish I had a photo of it. He staggered beside me, back bent, head down, with the globe on his shoulders. Every time I looked over at him, tears of laughter would stream down my face. But then there I was, stalking along beside him, carrying this insane and violent sign – with a big black X on my forehead … I remember people pointing and laughing at Atlas, calling out to him from across the street, “Hang in there, man!” or “Thanks for holding the world up for us!” But I got responses of much wider variety. Some people stopped and stared. One guy (who happened to be dressed as Spock, which just added to the humor of it all) came running over to me, and pretended to bow to me. But it was SPOCK. And then there were people who were downright pissed off. Or scared of me. Hysterical: some dude with a fake knife coming out of his neck, and blood seeping out onto his shirt – being freaked out by ME.

We got to the lawyer Halloween party which was a big ol’ yawn. Most of the women-lawyers just had on Playboy bunny ears, or were dressed vaguely as sluts, or something – You know, the kind of costume designed to get you laid eventually.

But there was I. Little Miss Scary Freak Squeaky Fromme. Drinking wine like a lunatic, and watching all the hot young lawyer-esses hit on my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. I said to him later, “That one chick who told you she wanted to lend you a book she liked … she’s gonna be the first one to make a move on you when I’m out of the picture.” He scoffed at this. “I am SO not interested in her. Stop it. No, she won’t.” But heh heh heh, I was right. The second I moved to Chicago, she pounced. He turned her down, but still. Do not underestimate women’s intuition about other women. I’m rarely wrong.

And she was the one, too, who kind of got pissed off at my costume.

“That’s not funny,” she scolded me. I already could smell the competition coming off of her … she wanted my boyfriend … she didn’t like me already …

“I never thought it was funny,” I said. “This isn’t a joke to me.”

“You know that that whole Manson family actually started here in San Francisco.” she informed me snottily.

“Yes. A freak show like that WOULD be started here in San Fran, wouldn’t it.” (She was originally FROM San Francisco, so she didn’t like that at all.) Meanwhile, in my mind, all I’m thinking is: It’s not the costume you don’t like. It’s ME. You want to get your paws on my man. Well, okay, babe – I’m gonna be in LA soon, and you’ll have your chance…

She kept staring at my sign, as though it were hypnotic. “That’s just … SO not funny.” she kept saying.

The party was, to put it mildly, very lame. My boyfriend and I both agreed. So we left. And wandered the streets. We had a blast, doing only that.

A couple of days later – Boyfriend was trying to get his fireplace to work, in his new apartment. But the flue wouldn’t stay open, or something … not sure what was the problem – but we ended up taking my CHARLIE’S CHRIST poster off the stick, and putting it up in the chimney. I can’t remember WHY we did this, or even if it was a working fireplace … Maybe he wanted to air it all out, I don’t know – but the CHARLIE’S CHRIST poster fit perfectly up there, and held the flue open, and all was well.

We promptly forgot all about it.

I moved to Los Angeles. He stayed in San Fran. I then moved to Chicago. He stayed on in San Fran. He lived in that apartment for another year, and finally met another woman (whom he is now married to) – and he moved in with her in some other apartment.

I never thought about the CHARLIE’S CHRIST poster. I was busy making a tear through Chicago, I couldn’t even really remember that dark autumn when I was racing up and down the coast of California, trying to find my own life. But then one day – I remembered it. Wait a sec … what ever happened to that poster? We put it up the chimney for whatever reason … did we ever take it out again?

Or … my God … did we leave it there … only to be found by the next tenants? Who would have had NO IDEA that this was part of a Halloween costume … they might think it was … real … a relic of some kind …

I pictured the scene. A nice young couple, moving their stuff in … They’ve got their IKEA furniture, they’ve got pasta in glass jars, they have a cat, they have a nice stereo system … You can see them, can’t you? And he decides to open up the flue, but something’s up there … he’s not sure what it is … He reaches up, and slowly draws out my insane poster … with the massive Charles Manson photo … the feverish warning to Gerald Ford …

If you found something like that in your chimney, wouldn’t you be completely freaked out???

Many years later, I asked my ex-boyfriend: “Do you remember if you ever took that Charles Manson thing out of the chimney?”

Funny how memory works. He didn’t know what I was talking about at all.

“Charles Manson? Chimney? What? I was Atlas for Halloween? What?”

No memory.

This tells me that that poster was left behind in that apartment when he moved out. Who knows … maybe it’s there still!