We had gotten friendly with a pair of guys who lived on the first floor. In those early days in Portland we'd spent many a night at the Belmont Tavern playing pool and eating bar pies. The downstairs neighbors both went to Lewis and Clark College. Dale was a music major and Mark was studying Serbo-Croatian language. They had lived in the neighborhood longer and suggested some folks to invite to the party.
It wasn't a large turnout. I remember we had a keg. Sam Clemens had a bozo mask and another friend showed up dressed in drag, which had proved interesting because at the time no one guessed that a few months later he'd come out. There were a couple of girls from the neighborhood and one was very pretty, but they were local and homespun, and our shared experience diverged in a number of ways. Still, it hadn't been a bad idea to invite them.
One of the strangest characters at the party was a poet who'd looked as if he'd stepped out of Medieval or Renaissance England. He had long neat hair cut like a knight's (or false representations of such) and a finely trimmed Vandyke beard. We had recently met his girlfriend in the neighborhood and invited them to the Halloween party. I recalled seeing the poet with his girlfriend playing pool at the aforementioned Belmont Tavern. The poet (a composer of sonnets, or vilanelles, or epics, I guess) told me he'd been reading all the novels of Sir Walter Scott. His girlfriend, who was beautiful and Jewish, made me think of Rebecca in Ivanhoe, which as we all know, was a thinly concealed attack on antisemitism in England dressed up as a tale of knights and jousting. Had Rebecca been the reincarnation of Sir Walter Scott's girlfriend for that reason? I couldn't tell. I noticed he seemed to have a mesmerizing effect on people, especially women. He also coveted my collection of Poe's complete works, 10 pocket-sized hardbound volumes printed in 1904 with an illustration or engraving, some by famous artists, on the front of each book. I had acquired the set in 1972 for 50 cents (a nickel a book) at a flea market. The poet held one or two in his hands, and with a wicked gleam in his eye, not unlike Rasputin or Svengali, or Mesmer or Manson, he offered to buy the collection for considerably more money than I had paid. It was a little uncanny and disturbing the way he tried to will the Poe books away from me. And it was Halloween, after all. I stubbornly held firm and refused to part with Poe. I still have those books.
But the biggest and funniest and scariest star of the party was a full-sized skeleton we had named Abdul. I forget the connection but the skeleton was on loan to us from someone Lane knew at Reed College and supposedly the skeleton was of a middle-eastern man, but to our untrained eye that would have been difficult to corroborate. For the Halloween party we propped the skeleton (Abdul) next to the keg and he was a big hit. And we kept him for a few weeks after Halloween which gave us further amusement.We took lots of photos---the skeleton sitting on the couch with us, wearing a hat, a lit cigarette in one hand, a can of beer in the other. Or the most bizarre thing we did was to take the skeleton with us on joy rides through the city. We would seat Abdul in the passenger's seat, one "bony" arm crooked on the open window. This play of the unexpected got quite a few reactions from other drivers, especially the ones stopped to the right of our car at a traffic light. Looking back on it, the humor seems in rather poor taste, and juvenile, but we were adolescents, or post-adolescents back then and in a strange far away rainy city on Halloween.
Do you still have the Poe books? And I want to see skeleton pictures.
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