Costume

And they marched in two lines of three through the village, heads held high, singing songs of love and death:

1. A paunchy man in bright pink, sporting a black mop wig, handlebar moustache, and eight-dollar Lennon shades. Gold brocade and epaulets adorn the suit, tassels swaying like a hundred orchestral batons pendulating to "Lovely Rita" as he strides down Avenue A. "I'm a high-school gym teacher!" he roars, ripping open his Sgt. Pepper suit to reveal a blue jogging jacket straight out of a 70's roller-skating movie. The wig and moustache will come off thirty minutes later. He sweats a lot.

2. A petite woman in a black sleeveless dress, high-cut, mod-style, that wraps her waifish figure like a tight wet sock. She wears pearls. Her hair is pinned up in a French twist, austere yet somehow appealing. She could only be Holly Golightly, with her oh-so-endearing insouciance, telescopic cigarette holder angled toward Capote's suite at the Plaza, heels clicking against cement. She flirts with everyone, shamelessly adorable, shattering men's hearts.

3. A dude in a lion suit. He roars twice, for effect. Someone throws a water bottle at him. He bounds into the street and pounces on the poor sap, sinks teeth into flesh, ripping arteries and cartilage. Blood pools on the asphalt. Cars honk in approval.

4. A badass bitty in a wifebeater and skin-tight jeans that show off her flanks. Lipstick that's practically jumping off her face, it's so bright, the color of scandal and internet porn. A wild blond wig cascades down to her shoulders from a drum major's hat. The strap hugs her chin tightly, forcing her lips into a permanent pout that reads, "Look what you can't have, motherfucker." Stickers peeled from bananas make trisecting lines across her stomach and bust. Nobody gets that she's Gwen Stefani from some music video but, no matter, her phermones are kicking...

5. An asshole in a green jacket. Too cool for school. Someone's drawn a ridiculous twist-tie moustache on him with an eyeliner pencil. He kicks a can.

6. And then the piece de resistance, the crazy woman in a black dress covered with cottonballs. She wears a bob-cut blond wig. A pair of oversized sunglasses ($11.50, purchased on Canal Street from a man who called himself Da Tropic Optic) make her face a windshield, protecting her from the storm she swears is on its way. An umbrella in one hand, a neon green water pistol in the other, she traipses a foot or two behind the pack and squirts the green-jacket asshole's nape. When he turns around to deliver a blow, she flashes him a grand-piano grin and chimes: "Partly cloudy, with chance of showers."


The song they sing at random (it's mostly #6 crooning) goes like this:

Since you've been gone
I can breathe for the first time
I'm so moving on (yeah, yeah)
Thanks to you
Now I get what I want
Since you've been gone

Recall

Someone called me at work this morning and told me I looked beautiful in a dress. He said he's never seen a woman look so good in a long, frilly number that looked like it was straight out of a Victorian novel; the light blue really brought out my eyes.
I was wearing jeans so I assumed he had the wrong number. Nothing in his voice signaled pervert. No breathy phone sex whispers, no teenage fluctuations, no stifled laughter. He could've been a father calling a daughter on her birthday, maybe a theatre director commenting on a costume. I told him he might've misdialed.
"Kathleen Verta," he said. "That's you."
That was me. I hung up.
He called me again two hours later while I was on the other line with a vendor. I put him on hold, finished the call, and came back to him with a sourness in my voice.
"I don't wear dresses," I told him. "And who are you?"
"Why not? Are you a lesbian?"
"As a matter of fact, yes," I lied.
"Oh, I'm sorry." The tone was pitying not apologetic.
"But that's not why I don't wear dresses."
He waited.
I didn't indulge him.
He told me I looked beautiful anyway and asked me how often I bleached my hair to get it that blond.
"Do you do this everyday?" I asked.
"What?"
"Call random people and pretend they're someone you've lost."
He hung up.
I took out a phone book from my file cabinet and looked up "Victor Jackson." There were six of them, three with middle initials. I picked the first one without and dialed the number.
"Victor here." A loud squawk with a heavy Brooklyn accent.

"Vickie, it's Mom. How was school today?"

Airplay

The Sipsing Motherfuckers are arriving in droves, spreading pestilence and undocumented ideology, sniggering, mystifying innocents with their cheap, what’s up buttercup retrograde argot, shirts tatter-tailored with iconographies of the occult patched from fabric to skin to nail, while Green Bean Kareem hardly notices sitting in his flying armchair over Emeryville, California on a tickly cold summer morning, June 3, 2003, to be exact. The pilot of a Phoenix C helicopter nearby is about to alert him to the situation via atmosphone when the happy crescendo of a surface-to-air projectile moving 350, 500, 700, and then a steady 880 miles per hour jerks him to attention. The pilot transmits anyway, “WE ARE UNDER ATTACK. PREPARE TO BOARD THE AIRCRAFT,” in the authoritative, impassive murmur in which men speak through machine. Kareem coughs violently from the missile smoke. A bird dies in his lap. In the distance are twenty-two more cloudbusters, all unmarked and construction-cone orange, rotors rooting in flatulent harmony, fixed in choir-boy formation behind the admonitory one, rotating now, revealing two figures in reflective, full-body suits swinging their arms dramatically above their heads as if they weren’t in a helicopter hovering thirty feet from the accosted in a cloudless sky. He waves back, sitting up in his armchair. One of the suits pulls a lever and a metal platform extends from the aircraft like the tongue of an insolent child, onto which both figures jump to resume their arm swinging. Another missile screams past Kareem, perilously close. He switches the chair from standby to engage, put-puts as quickly as he can to the platform, and lands rather awkwardly on the steel—the helicopter tips to one side for a horrifying, bile-drawing moment, men shouting and seizing the safety bars mounted to the hatch, before the pilot makes a quick adjustment and steadies the vehicle. The suits take him by the elbows and lift him inside, dragging him six or seven feet to the wall opposite the door, for safety’s sake. Once everyone’s breath is sufficiently caught, they check his identification thoroughly, scanning his UniBarSal pass, California driver license, passport, City of San Francisco Residency card, and Mobile Flight Unit license several times before they shake his hand and welcome him aboard Phoenix C-1411. Shaken, Kareem asks in the politest way possible what the hell is happening.
“Sipsing Motherfuckers, sir,” says one of the suits, a pudgy grunt fresh out of basic training. “Reported sightings are at a record high.”
“They’re shooting those missiles?”
“No, sir. We are.”
“Why?”
“Precautions, sir. Preemptive resistance. If the Sipsings go airborne, we’ll already be on the offensive.”
Makes sense, Kareem thinks.
“The missiles nearly hit me,” he says.
“We saw that, sir. That’s why we brought you aboard.”

Burn

I locked myself out on the fire escape. Didn't mean to but it happened. I climbed out to have a cigarette like I've done everyday for three years, shut the window behind me so the smoke wouldn't drift into my bedroom, and pushed it down a little too hard. I heard the click of the latch and instantly knew I was screwed.
So I lit up my cigarette and tried to enjoy it. The city looked like it was smoking too: chimneys belching thick columns of ash and soot, a gray mass of clouds tumbling in from across the river, gas flares of a distant refinery flickering on the Jersey skyline. I forced myself to smoke the entire cigarette to delay the panic, quell the anticipation of what was to come. I've never seen anything burn so fast.
When I was done I tried forcing the window open. I looked for loose runners, screws, mounting, but the sonofabitch wouldn't budge. A part of me was pleased that I had decent security, at least.
I started down the fire escape, cautiously at first, then quickly so I wouldn't be up there attracting attention for too long. Floor three's blinds were drawn but I could make out an old woman passed out on a sofa. Floor two was a cat. Then I jumped and broke an ankle.

Average

She was short. After 27 years of hemming pants and literally being overlooked, she'd finally embraced it.
One day she fell in love with a guy who was shorter than she was, a real Oompa Loompa of chuckles and crooked teeth, handsome only in an endearing kind of way. They met in the children's section of a bicycle shop downtown.
"There's one without tassels on the handlebars," he said. "Or sparkles."
She turned around and there he was, showing off his tiny dolphin choppers. He was pointing to a purple bike in the corner, which did sparkle a little when you looked up close, she later discovered. But the handlebars had been spared.
She smiled at him.
They rode together for an hour after buying their bikes, and when she was hit by a minivan making a right turn ("Didn't even see her, I swear") he went with her to the hospital. Twenty stitches on her elbow didn't seem as bad with him sitting on the stool next to her, his feet dangling. He flirted with the middle-aged nurses and belted out old show tunes to anyone who'd throw him a glance.
The policeman assigned to the accident asked him what his relation was to her, what the hell he was doing there making an ass of himself.
"We're both short," he said, plainly. "We need each other."