Kentucky Slash
NOVEMBER 1, 2009
I was excited when Signe invited me to tag along with her to a Halloween party — especially interested to see what Signe’s “space ninja” costume looked like. But as I spent the afternoon working on my motorcycle, tinkering myself into a greasy mess on the cement floor of Jason’s garage, my enthusiasm began to wane. I hadn’t bothered to work out a costume anyway and didn’t feel like going to a costume party dressed as nothing more than an even dirtier version of the same old me. If Deborah had been around, I’m sure she would’ve cajoled me into going. After all, she was in Halloween high-gear. But she was in Kentucky, nearly 1000 miles away.
Deborah flew to Kentucky on Friday for her cousin Alex’s surprise 40th birthday party. After months of careful planning, the surprise remained intact until Friday night when Deborah’s aunt, after hitting the wine box, blew the whole shebang with one careless comment. Surprise party? What?
Before leaving, Deborah worked hard collecting the necessary elements for her transformation into Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses. Most of her costume was easy to find — a black concert T-shirt, a jean jacket with cut-off sleeves, a black curly wig, and various cheap leather bracelets. Finding a suitable top hat proved only slightly more difficult, mainly because she didn’t want to spend a lot of money. But by the time she was ready to head for the airport, her costume was complete. She stuffed it all into a carry-on bag and off she went.
Funny enough, while I was concerned about being the only person not in costume at a costume party, Deborah unexpectedly faced the opposite problem. She called me from the party — or rather, she snuck out to the driveway, sat in her cousin’s car, and called me from there.
“How’s your costume going over?” I asked.
“This is the Bible Belt,” she said, “and apparently no one celebrates Halloween around here. I’ve been dressed up all day, and no one has even acknowledged that I’m wearing a costume. We went out to breakfast, ran a few errands, I haven’t seen even a hint of Halloween whatsoever — no decorations, no candy, no costumes, nothing. It’s fucking weird.”
She told me later that her cousin took one of her kids to daycare dressed as the blue dog from the children’s show Blue’s Clues and was pulled aside by one of the daycare workers and told that the costume was inappropriate: “We don’t celebrate Halloween here.”
If dressing as a blue dog from an educational kids’ show causes trouble, imagine Deborah dressing as a notoriously decadent rock-and-roll boozehound.
“But what about the party?”
“Well, yeah, my sixty-six-year-old aunt is dressed like a princess, and my cousin Katie drew some stuff on her face like a zombie. I tried to persuade my nephew Zack to dress like Axl Rose, but he dressed as ‘a Mexican’ instead. He took his costume off about twenty minutes after we arrived. Other than that, no one is dressed up.”
“Not even the kids?”
Deborah’s cousin is married with a couple of young kids, and his friends are all married with kids, too. The party was scheduled to start early to accommodate them; however, one of Deborah’s nephews had a fever, and since no one wanted their kid to catch anything (swine flu), nearly everyone bailed at the last minute, wiping out half of the guest list and making the whole event almost exclusively a family affair.
“There aren’t many kids here,” she said. “Oh yeah, and did I mention that this is a dry county? Thankfully, my aunt thought ahead and brought beer. I should go back in, though. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
When she called again this morning, I asked her about the rest of the night.
“So get this,” she said, “after a couple of hours of sitting around, no music or anything, which was surprising because my cousin is a radio DJ — I go downstairs and guess what? I discovered that my cousin has a rec-room filled with a million CDs, records, 8-track tapes, there are all kinds of rock posters on the walls — it’s exactly how I remember his room being decorated when he was a kid — and there was a ping pong table and a pool table. A pool table! I was like, why the hell isn’t anyone down here? Everyone was upstairs, with no music playing, nothing.”
“So did you hang out downstairs?”
“Yeah, I spent the rest of the night playing pool with Zack and Sean. Eventually, my little nephew found us and started doing kid things, stealing the balls and stuff, but we had fun.”
When Deborah was ready to leave the party, she got a ride to the hotel with her cousin, Sean. Several years ago Sean was in a car accident that left him in a coma for several weeks. He made a rather miraculous recovery, but has suffered from short-term memory problems ever since. What should’ve been a fifteen-minute drive to the hotel became an extended tour of the highways, byways, and back roads of rural Kentucky. “We kept calling for directions, stopping, turning around, calling again,” said Deborah. “Why the hell nobody wrote down directions for him, I have no idea. They just didn’t want to be bothered. I don’t think anyone has ever been lost in the car with Sean before. They all have their own cars, you know? When Sean is late, they just shrug and accept it as the way things are. But to have to rely on him for a ride? Oh my god.”
“He needs a GPS.”
“He has one! It doesn’t work, of course. A few hours lost in the cornfields of Kentucky under nearly a full moon at midnight on Halloween!”
“But you made it.”
“We made it. I wish you could’ve come. It makes the Podunk farm town I grew up in look like the fucking epicenter of civilization.”
“Next time,” I said. “Hey, by the way, I know no one cared about your costume, but did you get any good pictures of it?”
“I got one good one,” she said. “You’ll see.”
Slash
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