My Daughter's Halloween

From the murky depths of my declining memory rests the decomposing tale of a long-ago Allhallows eve, number twenty-seven in my fly-by-night, go-as-you-please life when somewhere out on the wispy fringe of creation came forth a newly-conceived spirit thirsting for a spooky spin on the planet. This fresh, flickering soul ready and waiting to roam the world turned out to be my one-and-only daughter.

Daughters are an exquisite breed of flesh and blood. They get under a father's skin, deep down in the fibers and tendons and pulsating veins and arteries of his heart. Once soundly implanted, daughters make no bones about tormenting their fathers with a rare, incessant kind of protective love. The sweet torment of my own fatherly devotion began on that fateful Halloween in 1986. Although my daughter was just an inkling of a human being, from the moment I knew her mother was pregnant I was instantly entranced and transfixed by the raw, bare, paternal beauty and burden of her existence.

The exact time and place I learned of her mother's pregnancy escapes me. The days and hours leading up to All Saints' Day that year are now as dull and desiccated as the mummified skin of a 25-year-old cadaver. At some point I was simply told we were expecting and that I had sired the child. The concept of my daughter's conception and the terror of becoming a father are now forever tied to my faded recollections leading up to Halloween night '86, when her mother Darci and I, along with our neighbor and landlord, Steve, went to a big costume party at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in San Diego.

We had decided to be a dead bride and groom that year. I wore an old tuxedo and black top hat from the Salvation Army and Darci donned a white wedding gown of the same thrift-store variety. We made ourselves up with the sunken eyes and pale skin of rotting corpses who had risen from the grave. During many dreamy and intermittent periods of happiness in our brief two-and-a-half-year marriage, we had always enjoyed the silly machinations of America's most celebrated and popular autumn festival.

Despite our happy times as husband and wife we were more akin to the bloodless apparitions we dressed up as that year; we were lost souls trapped on a ghost ship bound for stormy waters. Lurking beneath my mask of contentment was a dark and menacing secret: I was a quitter who would carelessly abandon his first marriage and baby daughter a mere three months after her birth.

But this is not meant to be a sad story. The mistakes of those days are long gone and are called to mind now more as a lesson rather than a punishment. My reminiscence is cinched neither to the chagrin of regret nor the suffering of scorn, but rather to the curious and whimsical nature of life excogitated as a theatrical production with many retrospective acts. The play's the thing, wherein we learn the essence of our being.

My daughter's name would be Jessica. I admired the actress Jessica Lange, who had been in a number of my favorite movies in the 80s including Tootsie, Frances, Country, and Sweet Dreams. She had also played the femme fatale in 1976's King Kong. As a male moviegoer Lange's voluptuous beauty was easy to fall in love with; her curvaceous figure and tender demeanor were seductive and nurturing at the same time. Most of all I loved the cadence of her voice, which combined the luscious ring of a hussy in heat with the comforting tone of a mother in love.

The fact that Jessica was the top baby name of 1987 never crossed my mind. In hindsight I sometimes wish I had chosen a less common or more unique name, but the names we give our children are nearly impossible to take back as they quickly become a fixed aspect of their personas.

Popular baby names may be commonplace but they by no means portray the full extent of a child's ethos and personality. While creatively inspired names, including Jessica's half sister, Sierra's, have long since become all the rage in American society, my daughter's name remains as singularly apropos as ever.

And so destiny brought forth another pink cigar named Jessica.

The monster bash at the Del Mar Fairgrounds has morphed into one of San Diego's biggest and most popular Halloween events. Now billed as the Heaven and Hell Music Festival and Costume Party, it's the sort of chic shindig that rousts hordes of ready and reveling ghosts, ghouls, and goblins from all cobwebs of the city. The '86 rendition featured a costume contest sponsored by a local radio station giving away thousands in cash and prizes. That sort of bread brings the dead.

Just before driving to Del Mar, Steve and I ingested about a gram of magic mushrooms apiece. For some reason we decided to keep Darci out of the loop. Would our psychedelic shenanigans make her feel upset, angry, disappointed…what? We ate them in Steve's livingroom while Darci took her last pee before the 30-minute trip.

By the time we got in line I was feeling the first twinges of mind-altering expansion. Our costumes were a far cry from the wow factor of the winners that year, but while queuing up with other creepy and kooky partygoers at the fairground's entrance we seemed to fit in just fine and then some. Wearing worn overalls and army boots, Steve went as a chainsaw-massacre hillbilly with a ghastly hatchet sticking out of a blood-spattered head blow to his skull.

As a threesome we were adequately gruesome. We came as three dead people alive and kicking with the thrill of human quintessence. The stars had aligned; the cosmic lights of fate had given us the green light for gung-ho. We were fresh and free and filled with the thrilling embalmment of having more life ahead of us than behind.

My daughter Jessica was there. She was in her mother's body and in her father's mind. She had suddenly and miraculously arrived to that predetermined time, place, and lineage by way of some unknown destiny's choosing. She was there, in the dead bride's belly and the dead groom's mind. She was not yet awake yet fully alive, positively conceived and thoroughly designed to grow into an ebullient female embryo. She had joined the party that Halloween night as the developing daughter of a tragically dead couple.

Never in all the years since then have I witnessed such scary and realistic Halloween costumes. In a hallucinatory blur I marveled at monsters and creatures from all walks of horror. Two costumes stood out: an alien from the movies of the same name with an inner mouth and set of pharyngeal jaws so lifelike I stood mesmerized staring at its extraterrestrial tongue extending towards me for so long Darci had to physically pull me away from the mind-bending getup; and an eerie pumpkin-head troll whose frightful, film-quality guise looked so demonic and unearthly it chilled me to the bone.

We drank, we danced, and we frolicked the night away. For all her exterior deadness, Darci beat the drum as a deceased but secretly fecundated newlywed with all the natural and unrestrained loveliness of a flower that blooms and blossoms from the inside out. She was drenched in maternal love and beaming with happiness. Just a few months beyond her twenty-third birthday, my ephemeral spouse had received her first endowment of conception.

The mushrooms gave that Allhallows eve an unnerving, over-the-top edge. At one point during the mind-blowing experience I remember going to the toilet and taking off my white wedding gloves to pee. Peaking on the shrooms, I was unable to put the gloves back on my hands. When I walked back outside Darci lovingly helped me put them back on. Her adoring attentions cut instantly through the psilocybin.

"What the matter, honey?" she asked, the rising intonation of her slightly inebriated voice cooing with the sweet pitch of doting affection. "What's wrong with your gloves, honey, you can't get them on? Here let me help baby. Okay honey let me pull them on now. There you go baby all better now."

On the ride home we lounged in the back of Steve's used 325i, reposing in the intoxicating afterglow of our bewitching late-night affair. The car's motor lulled me into a strange, exhilarating sense of weary contentment. We had spawned a child, a daughter, who in nine months time would be born into the world. I would hold our newborn girl in my hands and peer down into her tiny, wrinkled face. She would peer up at me with such an extraordinary expression of vulnerable tranquility, as if to simply say, here I am.

In the back of the BMW I rested my dead groom's head upon my dead bride's chest and wondered in an oddly grave and euphoric silence if the strangeness of becoming a father would ever go away. It had been so easy to become one, yet felt so hard to actually be one.

"Darci is pregnant," I exuberantly announced to Steve and the rest of the world. I looked up into my wife's painted face of death and saw only life and beauty there. She looked down into my eyes and held my made-up face between her soft hands. In her clear, luminous, steel-grey eyes I saw an angelic soul and the divine maternal look of a mother in love. She was with child and it made her the loveliest dead bride in the universe.

The gravity of those three words still beats and rings in the dark and decaying depths of my dead bridegroom's mind.