Truesday: The Long March

You need to witness the parade of drunken disappointment that is the 6th St. Halloween parade.

It’s sort of the same as Times Square: you hear about it all the time, and it gets all these “ooh, man it’s a one-of-a-kind and so amazingly badass” descriptions, but when you get there, you will inevitably say aloud “what the fuck is this? A third world country? This shit’s chaos. Like an Uzbek prison yard.” Even though you have no idea where Uzbekistan even is.

The short of it is this: they block off 6th the same way they do any other Friday night: barricades somewhere between I35 and Congress. They set up a track of sorts, with more saw-horse barriers, inside the blockaded section of the street, so that you cannot actually CROSS sixth. You must take the full circle, all the way around. Which is extremely convenient and, well, whatever.

And then a few thousand collegiates descend upon the site, where as usual, they get all kinds of fucked-up and cops on horses have to scare everyone to keep the peace because some barely clothed dude dressed as The Hulk is violently vomiting all over some group of teeny-titty sorority girls with balloons under their Hooters outfits, two sweaty-drunk cowboys from Llano are about to either make out or kill each other as they roll around on the sidewalk, and twelve separate crews of menacing and mustachioed high school boys won’t stop threatening, rather loudly, to beat the shit out of any and everyone who has ever existed on the planet.

Oh, and bars (BARS) that had never charged a cover before will suddenly require some cash for entry. To a bar. Where you have to buy booze. And the toilets are STILL broken like they were last week when it was free to get in. And you’ll wait in line to pay that cover. For a long time.

I don’t want to crap all over the event. Not entirely. I have certainly done my time marching along the oval trail of costumed tears, and I certainly had my fun doing it. The first time I went, back in 1995, it was an absolute disaster. I had been to 6th on many occasions where the streets were packed with pissed-pants drunken idiots, and I had felt perfectly at home.

But Halloween was a different animal altogether.

A massive horde of Hanna Barbara characters, DC Comics whatevers, Transformers, and hastily crapped-together zombies were trudging around some cones that were set up (I don’t remember them having the barrier-system currently employed by the local authorities), with the equestrian police and their horses shitting all over the place in the middle. After about ten minutes of just staring at the scene, a fight broke out behind/over me.

Two extremely drunk frat boys, both over 6 foot and 200+ pounds, got into it because drunk #1 frat boy was trying to inhale the face of some seemingly random drunk girl, and when she protested, drunk #2 frat boy stepped in to be the hero.

#2 kindly directed #1 backwards, away from the girl while #1 protested her protest with the whole “no means yes, you stupid whore bitch!” defense. When #1 was safely away from the girl, #2, without saying a single word, ham-handed #1 with a closed-fist that hit so hard, it sounded like 400 people simultaneously slapped watermelons. #1 literally flew into the marching, costumed masses, obviously not expecting to have his ass handed to him like that. After ignoring the handful of Halloweeners he knocked over, #1 righted himself, and started to stagger back toward the girl, his mouth and nose bleeding.

Meanwhile, #2, after sucker-clocking the shit out of #1, immediately made his way back to the girl to collect his well-earned protection sex. But the girl, though drunk, was apparently not really into racketeering sex.

Who would have known?

Her disapproval of the beating was obvious, but she didn’t really get a chance to voice it because #1 was already staggering back over for some more of the rough stuff from #2. And I think #2 totally underestimated the determination of #1. In fact, I believe #1 was the drunk girl’s date for the evening, and she was just being your typical drunken prude. So when #2, a total stranger, busted her date’s face and then came calling for some sort of consolation prize, she wasn’t terribly eager to toss him the trim.

But that didn’t matter, because #1 was returning, and #2 didn’t notice until it was too late to col’-cock him again. The girl backed up, a half-circle crowd formed an arc around the two, blocking them against a plate-glass storefront, and as they started to beat the fuck out of each other, I realized that I was the only person pinned INSIDE the semi-circle with them. I was leaning against that storefront. Alone.

My friends were yelling “Craig, get the fuck out of there, man! Get the fuck out!” But I was totally mesmerized by the sheer violence that these two drunken fuckups had wrought. They were obviously numbed and whisky bent, because they traded blows like it was the men’s room at a Basement Jaxx concert.

Before I knew what the fuck was happening, #1, bloody face and all, threw #2 against the window I was standing in front of. I ducked, and he pretty much went right over me. I kinda hoped the window would break, for effect if nothing else. But no. He hit the glass, and then just kinda fell down on top of my huddled body instead, which was no less awesome.

Then the kicking and scrambling started as #2 tried to destroy #1’s internal organs with his boots, and #1 tried to use me as a lever to stand himself back up. I, being an innocent yet apparently mentally deficient bystander, simply tried to kick them both the fuck off of me as my friends yelled unhelpful advice on how to get out of there.

“Just stand up, man!”

“My foreskin itches!”

I remember #1 did manage to get back up, so they could dance with each other properly. And while they continued to break their hands against each other’s faces, I escaped on all fours to the much safer outskirts of the extremely-thick semi-circle that had formed. My friends continued with the helpfulness.

“Dude, you shouldn’t have been in there.”

“Seriously. It itches.”

That’s when the horses busted in, cops came from nowhere, and both dudes got zip-tied, prone’d out on the curb within seconds. The crowd quickly dispersed and blended back into the Halloween pageant as if nothing had happened. A violently quick ending to violence. Like sucking all the oxygen away from a fire.

They drunkenly bled on the curb, fifteen lonely feet apart.

The drunk chick was nowhere to be seen.

And the parade of Super Heroes, cartoon characters, and “Free Breast Exams” costumes continued to shuffle past. Indifferent, immune, or indifferently immune.