Gangster

I think I've mentioned that when Halloween rolled around back when I was a kid that I rarely was ready for the big night, and always had the worst ideas for a costume. One year I insisted on being a gangster. I wore some horrid white suit with weird red and blue pinstripes. The fact that my father had the suit in his closet is hilarious now that I think about it. It was huge on me. I had it in my mind that a gangster had to have a thin John Waters' mustache and a huge stomach, so I put a pillow under my shirt. My mother was assisting with the costume, and like she did with so many other events, she made it worse.

She felt the pillow needed to be realistically positioned so she tucked the lower fifth of it down the front of my very baggy pants. But the weight of it caused it to slip and push my pants down. So she came up with what I'm sure was a brilliant idea in her mind - the pillow would be held in place by a pair of her underwear to be worn over MY underwear. A yellow pair (relevant I think).

I was a young boy, so her underwear (refraining from using the word 'panties') was HUGE on me. As proportionately huge as the suit was. We did a few trial runs, with me walking briskly through the house. Even with a belt, I still had to grip the top of the pants to keep them from falling down. And this was a feasible solution for my mother, who sent us on our way.

Back in those days, the streets were PACKED with kids. A built-in audience. An hour or so into trick-or-treating, my pants were forced down by the pillow, which happily escaped my mother's underwear. So I stood there, with my pants around my ankles, a pillow on the sidewalk, wearing a giant pair of women's underwear. A yellow pair.

I don't remember what happened next. It must have been a dysfunctional scene... a small boy scraping up a Norman Bates mess of a life.