I had quite the weekend this Halloween; much different than last year’s action-packed “Hide from the Trick or Treaters.” I decided, mostly at the last minute, to drive on up to San Francisco with a friend. I figured I’d get to bed nice and early the night before and be ready for the grueling 6 hour drive. This was not to be, however. When I came back from the movies, my friends B, Moodsquad and Newjen had already made themselves at home and were settling into a tournament bout of NBA Live 2004 on the ps2. To be honest, this is generally more entertaining than a movie, so I had to stop and listen to the trash talk and general nonsense that occurs during these “athletic” events. Now, Newjen goes by many names and none of them reflect well on him. His most recently earned name was Dirt Newjinski, a take off of Dirk Nowitzki, but more for his horribly cheap and dirty play. Moodsquad, on the other hand, has a reputation for playing fairly but also as a big whiner when things don’t quite go his way. B, who is the definitive Mouth from the South, is a guy who starts talking before the game even starts and stops only when he’s finally left the building. I may have to start charging admission to see these clowns in action. There’s singing, Moodsquad’s touching ballad “Computer Love” is highly effective in describing B’s uncanny luck, dancing, as B and Newjen complete victory laps around the couch, and more comedy than you can throw a controller at. I know. Moodsquad’s tried. Anyways, the three stooges managed to keep me up way past my bed time so I was hurting by the time I got to work…that wasn’t a good way to start a day where I had to drive 400 miles.

Once I finished up at work and picked up my friend, Willy, we headed on up to Oakland. It was a fairly uneventful drive and we consumed more Doritos than was good for us, but we balanced it out with a healthy Gatorade…at least that’s what we told ourselves. Once we got up to Oakland, we had to take the BART to San Francisco, or as the locals call it, The City! Yes, pretentious is actually selling those people up there short. They’re a lot like New Yorkers in that way; they believe the world revolves around them. How else do you explain those cities up north passing resolutions against the war? I mean, who the hell cares what a city thinks about a war, exactly? If you didn’t know, the BART is the subway system up there, short for the Bay Area Rapid Transit and a fairly efficient way to get around if you don’t mind standing next to the most bizarre cross section of humanity for half an hour. People were in their costumes heading on out to the City, which included a guy dressed like a giant penis. Yep…this is San Francisco, folks.

Once we got out onto Market Street, these two girls crossed…well, sort of wobbled past us. One was almost naked; she had painted on latex covering her top, a pair of black panties and the rest of her was painted red which also happened to be the color of her eyes. Whatever she and her friend was on, I wanted no part of. God knows where she woke up the next morning; probably in the middle of a porn shoot. That was our welcome to Halloween in San Fran…rather auspicious, wouldn’t you say? I know I did. I said, “Hey Willy, this is a rather auspicious beginning to the night.” Willy followed up with the question, “What’s auspicious mean?”

We were supposed to meet several people at the Marriot; our old friend Changomo and his wife, and one of his strange friend’s Andre. A word about Andre; he likes to take naked pictures of his girlfriends and show them to people. That really says it all, doesn’t it? He was dressed up as Dr. Evil; about 4 years too late, but hey, at least he was trying. I was dressed up as a shivering Los Angelinos. Did I mention it was at least 40 degrees up there? There were some brave and cold people up there with the costumes I witnessed. Andre’s Dr. Evil costume didn’t quite come out exactly right, though. He didn’t have a very good bald head covering; he bought a cheapie at Spencer’s Gifts so it actually looked like he was wearing a very flexible condom on his head. I may have been the first to mention this to him, but I certainly wasn’t the last. At least two other groups of people took pictures with the “condom head.” He was cool with it; he said it seemed to work better than his Dr. Evil attempt. Changomo showed up with the strangest hat I’ve ever seen; it was a giant hotdog in a bun sitting right on his head. In his left hand he carried a plastic trident which he said represented his power as the Hotdog King. I asked why he had started drinking without us, and how many would it take for me to catch up. His wife was dressed as a pirate, which was a pretty good costume and actually turned out to be the theme of the party we were set to go to. Unfortunately, Changomo never mentioned that little detail; seems he was busy sending out orders to his hotdog minions or something.

Setting out to take the Muni to Castro street turned out to be a bit of an adventure. None of us had ever taken the Muni, which is a local train that runs throughout the city. It turns out you need quarters and the machines had been changed to give out quarters if you typed in the special code. I say special code as it seems pressing the button marked H was too difficult for the guy in front of us. It took him at least 10 minutes to master this difficult puzzle at which time he picked up his quarters and angrily tried to enter them back into the machine. Changomo asked, “Hey, buddy, what are you doing?” The man said, “The guy over there said the Muni only takes coins. This damn machine gave me quarters!” We reassured him that quarters actually were defined as “change,” and then gave him the prerequisite 10 feet of space we all give to loonies. Once we jumped onto the Muni, we started discussing the costumes that we were seeing around us. There were some strange choices, including a guy dressed as David Beckham. Then again, maybe it really was David Beckham out to have fun wearing his own jersey…o.k., that just sounded stupid. I was telling my friends how I had seen two great costumes last week, one guy was dressed up as one of the Warriors and the other was dressed as one of the Furies, two of the gangs from that great 70’s movie The Warriors. None of them had ever even seen the movie. This shocked and depressed me; shocking because I thought it was a pretty damn common movie as our local channel 13 used to play it at least once a month for at least 5 years straight and depressing because it was yet another reminder that I’ve watched way too many movies. I then told them that it was based on the Anabasis, Xenophon’s account of his travels leading a Greek army through Turkey back in the 4th century B.C. You know, trying to salvage some intellectual points and to tell myself I hadn’t wasted my entire life. None of them had heard of Xenophon either. Damn…somehow, I have managed to make myself irrelevant to my own generation. This wasn’t supposed to happen until I was 40 and trying to use hip slang.

Once we arrived on Castro street, I have to say I was taken aback. There were thousands of people wandering about dressed in crazy costumes all the while loud dance music was pumping through the night’s air. It seems that the most popular costume for a woman was a Nurse; can’t argue with a classic. The most popular costume for a guy seemed to be a tag team of either Siegfried or Roy, complete with tiger gashes on the neck. Not exactly the most classy costume, but hey, it was pretty funny in a sick sort of way. We pushed our way through the crowds and started up towards Changomo’s wife’s friend’s house; the fella throwing the party. We found the place after some wanderings, and once we stepped in it was a pirate fantasy land. Most of the people were in various pirate motifs and there was even a ship deck with sails propped up in the yard complete with a steering wheel. Combine this with the fact that the party denizens were made up of internet millionaires and/or flamboyantly gay men, I have to say I felt a bit out of place. Marco, her friend, turned out to be a cool guy, if as queer as a three dollar bill. He was dressed as Liberace…or a pirate. One or the other. He had the craziest shoes; they had silver designs with sparkles all over them, a puffy shirt with lace, gold chains around his neck, fingers full of colorful rings and a foppish black curly wig. It was quite the sight, let me tell ya. We talked to several of the people there all the while loading up on alcohol. We ran into this particularly snobbish guy who was giving Andre a hard time about his costume. Andre managed to end that pretty quickly when he asked the guy if his costume was Andy Dick. The fact that his friend laughed at the joke only reinforced the fact that he really did look like Andy Dick. Andy wasn’t too amused, however, and retreated to another room. Score one for “condom head”! It turns out that Andy Dick was a guy who was in the ground floor of the web site Yahoo and got out before the crash. He’s one of the ”pretentious, snot nosed punks that thinks the world revolves around them just because they were lucky enough to pull out in time,” or so Changomo refers to them. Changomo’s not particularly impressed, as you can tell. It’s not sour grapes either; he’s pretty damn wealthy on his own. He just hasn’t gotten used to the snobbish name-droppers he gets to deal with now that he has money. Sounds like a nice problem to have, really. Anyways, the night was progressing pretty smooth until Willy decided to try and poison me with this drink he made. It wasn’t just that it was a strong alcoholic drink; it was the fact that it had at least 4 other flavors that were all fighting with one another. I swear, it was WWII in my stomach after I had some of it. Once we had our fill, we decided to walk on down to the wild street of Castro.