My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Halloween Party
Discover more from Books and Boos, with Nicolina Torres
My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Halloween Party
She was supposed to be a dominatrix.
Happy Macabre Monday!
I hope I’m doing this right. We’re supposed to write about a theme, yes? I guess my theme will be Halloween parties. I threw one in the early 2000s that went awry, so I’m going to call it My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Halloween Party.
Back then I was naïve and believed if I closed my eyes and covered my ears, things would just happen. I imagined my party would be something out of a teen movie—the good ones—but I needed to make it stand out. That’s when I got it in my head that hiring a dominatrix, a woman in a cute leather outfit just walking around and swatting at guests with a horse whip for ambiance, would make my party stand out. I found a woman wearing the exact leather outfit in an ad in the Entertainment Section of the PHONE BOOK and called and the guy who answered said he knew what I was asking for and I thought all was well. I was very clear about what I wanted. Nothing sleazy.
Word spread far and wide: Nikki got a dominatrix. Everyone from work was coming. My people at the coffeehouse were coming. My boyfriend, who I lived with, invited his friends.
At the party, I’m Alice in Wonderland and everyone showed up, everyone chose MY party to go to. It was the event of the season! Even my mom, who didn’t hang out with me back then, decided to pop in with her boyfriend. My sweet mother is a woman who wears cardigans, who thinks Tylenol is a gateway drug. Sometimes she sounds like the characters from Fargo. Acts like them too. So, I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t wear a costume. She entered my house in her cardigan, clasped her hands like she was freezing, and declared every decoration “cute”. She promised me she’d be gone quickly, before the entertainment showed up.
Shortly after our tiny male bookstore receiver almost got beat up by the Trojan Man (I guy I didn’t know wearing a Roman uniform covered in condoms), a car pulls up to the fire lane and a young woman and man get out. The man stands on the lawn, sort of skulking in the shadows, while the lady—dressed in normal pants, a jacket, a top— comes in carrying a duffel bag and a boombox. I’m stupid, remember? When she asks me “where do you want to do this?” I’m thinking she just needs a place to put on her leather outfit. So, I lead her to the basement door, and she waves her arms (by this time, my guests are gawking at her) and asks everyone to follow her. I think “that’s odd” but I figure it’s too crowded up here to start, I don’t know. Too crowded to start acting like a dominatrix, swatting people with her whip. That sort of thing.
Everyone has barely found standing room in the small basement, when the dominatrix turns on the boombox and just takes all her clothes off. Just like that. In the blink of an eye. There’s no sexy…what do they call it…burlesque moment, or even the sort of striptease you do when you’re drunk and in college. She just swooped her shirt off and tossed it. Tossed the bra, the pants, and the underwear. There was a completely nude woman, NUDE, shimmying across the nasty carpet in this unfinished basement. The crowd stared silently, their jaws dropped.
I look around, panicked, speechless.
My mom is there.
My co-workers are there.
My boss is there.
“Who has singles?” asks the “dominatrix” gleefully as she trots in place, wiggling her upper body at us. To give her credit, she never stopped smiling. She’s one of those girls who does well at parties, one of those glass-half-full people.
.
Okay, now I’m salty. I paid a lot of money for this lady. How dare she ask my guests for more??? But in those days, I hated confrontation and was never going to interrupt the carnage. I look around again. My mother has politely gone back upstairs, but her boyfriend is still there, grinning. Someone eggs on one of my co-workers, finds him some cash, and this leads the “dominatrix” to put him on his back, on the ground, and proceed to grab the bill out of his mouth not with her hands.
Suddenly, it’s like an ATM magically appeared in my basement. Bills were flying everywhere. People were cheering. Girlfriends got mad at boyfriends. Like Forrest Gump says, that’s all I gotta say about that.
Embarrassing? Yes. But I achieved my goal. No one will ever forget that party, and as for my mother, we just started talking about it again; sort of like a car accident too traumatizing to bring up until the tenth anniversary.
So. Have you ever thrown a Halloween party? Did one end in disaster?
#macabremonday I hope I didn’t forget anyone!
@Jeff Kinnard @The Chronicler @John Coon @Maribel @Michael S. Atkinson @Michael P. Marpaung @Andrei Atanasov @Daniel W. Davison @Andrew Smith @S.E. Reid @Brian Reindel 👾⚔️ @Honeygloom @Stirling S Newberry @Cole Noble @Susan Earlam @Shaina Read @Jenovia @Ross Bingham @Jennifer Morrow @Leigh Parrish @Macey @Jessica Maison @Edward Rooster @Koshmarov @Patricia J.L. 👻🧶🖊️ @John Ward @Carla Pettigrew @Lloyd Miner @A. B. Frank @Cyndi Gacosta @reinancruz @PC3 @Brian Schell @Robert Walrod @L.C. Marino @Lauren Salas @Ross Jeffery @Author Michele Bardsley @Daniel O’Donnell @Stephen A. Davis @A.C. Cargill, Author @Slow Burn Horror @Newton Webb
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