Trigger Warning

This Halloween haunt has a safe word. But I didn't use it.

Ever since I moved to Los Angeles nearly a decade ago it’s been a tradition to go to a Halloween haunt with Clint. It’s really perfect - in the 90s the two of us would do drugs together and go to goth clubs, which Clint always knew about, being a goth MODEL as well as a writer, and a performer, and a hardcore goth, not to mention the type of personality that gets you those glamorous ‘host’ jobs at clubs. Like, its your job to just be at the club and be awesome. I had been very, very goth, but at that point my overall culture, from fashion to music, was dyke. It was low-key hard for me to go to the clubs in my cut-off jean shorts and my scruffy what-even-is-it hairdo, drifting among all the high-goth finery knowing I used to have the wardrobe to get in that mix, not to mention hair of a length that could be teased into a stormcloud. I guess I wanted everyone to know I wasn’t a poseur, I had really good goth cred - I’d tried to run away with Christian Death once, but the tour bus driver had screamed GET THE FUCK OFF MY BUS when they found me. I might have looked like I only listened to L7, but truly my soul was a tangled mess of cobwebs and poignant thoughts of my own mortality and, like, vampires. But, it didn’t show.

Clint + Me in one of our many eras.

But I digress. (But, that’s the point!) Clint never thought I was a poseur, and he even invited me to be a goth model once, but I had been angsty about a girl the night before, and had abusively eaten so much pot brownie, just to see what would happen, how my angst would be transformed, and I got so wickedly sick my roommate Sash had to call Poison Control and make sure you couldn’t die from THC poisoning. I was in no shape to make the early morning goth-model call time the next morning. Somewhere in the multiverse I did go to bed normally, and woke up in time to goth model, and who knows who that Michelle is. I could have, like, an Elvira-type career in that other timeline. Oh, well.

Anyways, Clint and I have been to Universal Horror Nights, and Knot’s Scary Farm, not to mention a really arty haunt at The Row called Creep which was supposed to be a sort of artsy insane asylum where bunches of sympathetic madmen and woman were being kept by a sadistic ward, and the inmates were all very cute and quite touchy for a haunt, where normally you are menaced by aggro chainsaw-wielding zombies who get this close to you but ultimately stop short of physical contact. At Creep I was blindfolded and guided by had into a room where I was assisted in sitting down, and then just sat there while people sort of hovered and lurked around me, whispering creep! right into my ears, giving me chills, giving me mad goosebumps, turning me on not a little, and I realized that what I really wanted was a sort of haunted house/play party where people of indeterminate gender dressed up like Beezelbub and greasy psychos would menace and try to kiss me. I know this is probably a much better fantasy than reality, but there, having all these strangers blindfold me and mess with my erogenous zones, it seemed like the very best idea and why hasn’t anyone done it? have they? Why haven’t they invited me?

Clint has for years been threatening to make me go to a haunt that seemed a little closer to my thrill-me-chill-me-fulfill-me dream haunt, an Extreme Haunt where the scarers can touch you and you have to sign a waiver promising you won’t sue them. For what? Grabbing my butt in a phony cemetery? Have at it! This joint is called 17th Door, and Clint insisted that this was the year it was going to happen. He went and got us tickets, I Venmo’d him, it was on! What would I wear??? I was imagining something super slutty. Heels to stumble about on like a real B-movie bimbo? I was saddened when Clint told me, sternly, to not where anything nice, and to be sure to bring a change of clothes. Last time he went he found himself up to his neck in dirty water, and that was after surviving a rain of cockroaches and other bugs all over his body. Yikes.

This was maybe when I realized I was in fact treating my trip to the haunt like a weirdo play party. And guess what? It was not. It was, to hear Clint talk about it, closer to a Tough Mudder, where freaks freakier than I crawl through mud and dodge live wires - why? I dunno. Why do people do athletic things? To prove some internal and physical mettle? With a Mars and Moon in Sagittarius, I am not immune to the pleasures of pushing myself to the brink, but historically I’ve enjoyed the challenge to be more sexual, or drug-fueled. With drugs out of the picture now for both Clint and I, braving an extreme haunt is a fairly worthy replacement. I stopped non-consensually sexualizing the Halloween experience and relented to a pair of pants and sneakers.

Before.

17th Door was located waaaaaaaaay out in Buena Vista Park. The directions told us to park in the shopping center parking lot and take a right at the 24-Hour Fitness. How evocative. But the scares started right away, with some chain-rattling ghoul lunging at us as we walked to the door to be scanned with metal detectors. A truly terrible noise was coming from within, sort of buzzing and industrial. We were admitted into the lobby, to fill out our waivers. I looked longingly at the signs advertising a little glowing red necklace one could purchase for $7, which guaranteed no one would touch you, and you would not be electrocuted. Clint saw me looking. NAH-UH! he barked in his perfect gay-goth-from-Arkansas accent. No Pussying Out! He gave me a look, checking if I cared that pussy was used in such a derogatory context. I did not. Considering how faggots such as he have elevated Cunt to the ultimate compliment, I think I can let it slide.

Bummer - the theme of this year’s haunt is a brutal, sadistic prison. I thought about that part in Roger and Me where you see all the rich people who paid beaucoup bucks to party down in an actual American prison wearing cutesy striped pajamas, how completely loathsome they were, how this wasn’t too different. I thought about the brutal images and heart-ripping facts I ingest seemingly all day everyday from the the current genocide in Gaza, and felt more than a little sickened at the head-fuck of what I was doing. This is a particularly American phenomenon, is it not? Though Ireland invented Halloween, we went ham on it, pumping it up to Mardi Gras levels in spots like Salem, simply because a bunch of malnourished puritans went off their cake and famously killed a bunch of women. England seems the rightful home of the original haunted house, but America has ‘roided them out to be true chambers of horrors, where civilians get to cosplay their worst fears and our government’s most atrocious policies. I spent some time feeling weird and grossed out with myself, and then it flipped over to wondering if the spectacle is perhaps the most honest investigation of our fears; if that’s what Halloween is meant to be, a staring down of the worst that can happen to us during this life on earth. But is that what it’s meant to be? Maybe it’s just supposed to be about black cats and bags of candy?

After.

I was shocked out of my existential crisis by a 7-foot-tall scarer in all black and a bloody skull mask jabbing me in the thigh with a taser. OUCH. I shrieked and rubbed and rubbed the spot on my pleather pants (waterproof!) where he zapped me. At this point we’re not even in the haunt; technically we are in line, a chain-link maze funneling us to the faux-prison facade. A guy on the other side of the fence, who saw me get tased, stared at me with incredibly wide eyes. Did That Hurt? he gasped. I nodded. Yes. Yes, It Did Hurt. And not in a sexy way. Maybe if he’d flung me up again the chain link and told me how pretty I was before tasering me it would have resonated in a spicier fashion, but to just have a lunk sidle up next to you and jab you, it wasn’t sexy.

On A Scale Of One To Ten, How Much Did It Hurt? asked the guy, clearly nervous. I thought about it. A Six, I said. I could still feel the hot sting. Seven, said Clint’s husband Vinnie, which made me think about women having a stronger pain threshold and all that.

Folks were being admitted into the haunt in small groups, and while we waited our turn we were menaced by zombied-out inmates with orange jumpsuits and peeling faces. It took me an embarassingly long time to recognize the tallest of them as a queer somewhere on the masc/non-binary spectrum, and I promptly tried to catch their eye and flirt, but they were wearing these cataract contact lenses so I couldn’t ever see where they were looking, and plus, my marriage’s monogamish clause is currently only good when we are out of town, and I’m not sure that Buena Vista Park counts as out of town. It does seem that what happens in an extreme Halloween haunt stays in an extreme Halloween haunt, but we just haven’t had that conversation, nor have I read any case studies in the ample polyamory literature available.

Okay, let’s get into the rooms. This is how it works - you move through the haunt, room by room, 17 in total. Each room has a light above its closed door, and you’re not to enter until the light is green. We get a tiny orientation by a lady who dressed her warden drag in a German accent, which, I didn’t appreciate. Am I too much a feminist killjoy for these sorts of things? Inside me are two wolves. One says, There is enough terrifying inspo to draw from without referencing Germany. The other says, c’mon, c’mon, scare me! After all, there was a plethora of trigger warnings all over the lobby, including printed int he waiver I signed. The woman told us that if at any time it’s too much for us, the safe word is Mercy and the hand signal is crossing our arms in an X across our chest. See, this place has a safe word. It’s not my fault it’s registering as a sex party to my psyche.

The first room is a police van. We climb in from the back, and a deran ged cop follows us on. For some reason he focuses on Vinnie’s nipples, which he is in no way freeing, so I don’t understand. Vinnie is the best-natured person in the whole wide world, literally becoming instant besties with whoever has the good fortune of being in his radius all day, every day, so he goes along with it. Suddenly, the van starts bouncing and bucking, sliding us around on the metal benches. Then it stops. We climb off and into the next room.

The next room was the prison barber shop, helmed by a cute bear of an undead barber with a brill-creamed hairdo and a Glasgow smile. He entreated one of us to please sit in the old-fashioned barber shop chair, so that he might cut a lock of our hair and hang it from the ceiling with his other trophies. What the hell; I plopped down. I have a lot of hair, I could spare a lock. Plus, when Clint and I went to Creep, my favorite thing other than everyone whispering in my ears was getting shut in a glass box with a super cute hipster pretending to be a psychokiller. He had cut a piece of my hair off, spit on it, and stuck it to the glass. Hot. The barber dug into the hair at the nape of my neck, selected a tangle and snipped. He laughed with delight. You’re Hardcore! he brayed respectfully. My pink lock looked great hanging there amidst the black and brown and blonde.

Onward, we walked into a wide area, were man-handled into little individual pens against the wall, and had hoods draped over our heads. It all happened very quickly, chaotically.It was so loud, I could not make out what the man who handled me was yelling in my ear, but I think it was ARE YOU PREGNANT??? I really wish people would stop asking me that! I couldn’t hear over the horrid, booming noise of the place, and shook my head. Swiftly, I was fired upon by a hundred little balls. Just as swiftly, my hood was ripped off, and I was pushed along into the next room.

Universal Horror Nights 2018

It was a laboratory of sorts, also with little pens we each were placed in. These ones had waist-high wooden doors that locked. A lab assistant with bleached ponytails and a face full of pussy blue boils came over and told me to put my arms at my side and keep them there. A canvas sack attached to the inside of the door suddenly became powerfully inflated, pinning me, compressing my belly and my chest. A new ghoul appeared before he, their hands full of live tarantulas. The offered the tarantula to my face, cackling maniacally, but the joke was on them - I was in my happy place, bound and squished like in one of Temple Grandin’s hug machines, getting a close-up of one of my favorite furry creatures. I angled my face to nuzzle the tarantula’s shaggy legs with my cheek, but the ghoul dashed away. The canvas sack deflated, and we were escorted into a hallway full of glowing tanks where another ghoul stood holding a giant, living cockroach. She put it on Clint’s shoulder; he screamed his funny quick, gutteral scream, hunching and flinching away. I used the moment to prepare.

All day I had been preparing, actually. Knowing that Clint had encountered bugs on his last visit, I got my head on straight about each and every living thing being a manifestation of the divine. Including and maybe even especially cockroaches. I welcomed its blessing upon my shoulder. I stood still and waited for the haunter to get to me, and she did, and I recived darshan from the bug goddess, not flinching or writhing. I wasn’t much fun to torment, and she moved on. I thought about how last time Clint endured a rain of bugs from the ceiling all over him, and I thought about how this time the bugs were being rather delicately handled, and I decided someone must have reported the place for creature cruelty, and they changed their way. I approve.

Truly, the dead creature room was much worse than the live creature room. This space was ice-cold, lit with harsh, white lights and occupied by a couple of twin ghoyls in lab coats with infected faces. Reader, the animal corpses were real. The dead chickens, their feet bound with rope, hung upside-down from the ceiling and being playfully pushed towards us like toys by the ghouls, were real. The curled raccoons, whose frozen body I felt when it was pushed up against my neck, was a real, dead frozen raccoon. Ditto the lamb or goat head. I was full of relief when they pushed me into a freezing metal locker and turned on a spray of cold water. It was actually refreshing. If I’m remembering right, the room before this one wasn’t the bugs, it was a room designed to be a prisoner’s cell, occupied by a fucked-up looking women who told us about her plan to escape, how she’d smuggled some spoons from the cafeteria in her prison wallet. Then a warden burst in and she had us run, run run! We ran into a room with a caged generator in the center, which she tried to get going by connecting various sparking wires. When she finally succeeded in whirring it to life I realized it was the deafening, awful sound I’d been hearing this whole time, coming and going. But that wasn’t the worst. The concrete walls suddenly started to close in on us, and then the heavy, wire ceiling began to descend, forcing us all into crouches, making us crawl behind the generator and out of the room, down twirling corridors sparking with electricity, some ungodly maniac on our tail. So, yeah, a time-out in the refrigerator was sort of relaxing.

Knotts Scary Farm 2021

Next, a dank little room with an undead janitor talking animatedly about the overflowing toilets, swinging his plunger around for emphasis, the brown slime, spattering all over us. Next, a room with crazy clowns, where we are ordered against the wall, and then the room begins to tumble and tumble and tumble. That was fun. Less so - a NASA-grade wind tunnel, the power of which is demonstrated by a ghoul who holds onto a pole and is lifted into the air by the gust. We had to walk though it. He warned us to hold onto our glasses, and I did, laboring to move my hand againt the crushing wind to press them to my face. I made it halfway down the tunnel and then the wind just blew me like a paper bag, backwards, crashing into Vinnie, who himself is but a little bit of a thing, but he gripped my arm and somehow we muscled through and got out of there. Damn. NOT SEXY.

Earlier that day, before we drove out to Buena Vista Park, I looked up 17th Door on the interweb. I wanted to know what I was in for. I knew Clint would be in full peer-pressure-mode, and I would not get away with using a safe word or having a panic attack. In order to really come to terms what I was in for, to accept it and get my head in the game, I needed knowledge. From what I saw, the most harrowing room would be one where you are suffocated. In this room, you are bound to the wall, and then a series of latex sheets descend upon you, and you are vacuum-sealed like a sous vide steak. Okay, that might be hard. In the video, I heard a voice counting down from 22, 23 seconds. For the rest of the day, the whole day, I practice holding my breath for 22, 23, 24 seconds. In the shower, I hold my breath. Playing words with friends on my phone, I hold my breath. Giving my husband a blow job, I hold my breath. I can do it. As long as I know I can do it I won’t freak out wondering if I can do it, and I’ll be fine.

Clint is pissed when he learns I peeked ahead at the haunts. NAH-UH! he scolds me again. Having a gay-goth-from-Arkansas accent is the best accent for scolding, I think. That’s Cheating! he accuses. Then he asks, Will You Still Be Able To Enjoy It? I peeked so I could enjoy it. Clint is an Aries.

Knotts Scary Farm 2019

When the strips of stretchy blue tourniquet come down over us, pinning us to the wall, I get super mindful about my breathing. Low, slow, deep. Next the first layer of latex comes down. I want to get sealed with my lungs full, so I’m trying to time it, but I’m wary of accidentally hyperventilating. The second layer of latex descends. I fill my lungs and - vhrooop! - the material is now airtight against my face. I can’t breathe. The electronic voice begins its count-down: 10, 9, 8 . . Ten?! I would chuckle if exhaling were possible. I got this! But - I didn’t remove my glasses! They are being crushed against my face, the frames grinding against my cheekbones, the bridge crushing my nose, the top about to cave in against the hollow of my eye sockets. I imagine the lenses shattering from the pressure. The glass in my eyes. I couldn’t even sue, because I signed the fucking waiver! The electronic voice isn’t counting down fast enough. Finally it all releases, and the latex rises off of us, we are freed. My whole face feels instantly bruised.

There are more rooms you guys - there are 17 rooms! One is an earthquake room; an alarm sounds, and the space begins to shimmy and shake and all there is to hold onto are the body-bagged corpses hanging from the ceiling. At one point we’re led into a glass-paned room outfitted with projectiles, and see on the other side a crew of people being roughly led in, hoods jammed over their heads. Oh! I’d been shot at by other attendees! We’re ordered to shoot at them. I aim for feet and calves, wiggling my gun back and forth, low-impact. Leaving the room, Vinnie shares that he aimed for heads and necks, and I thought about that famous psychological test where people were told they were electrocuting others, and they didn’t really seem to care, didn’t protest or anything, even as they watched the people - actors - writhe in phony shock. Who knows how psychopathic your friends are???

MOMO 4-EVA

We’re coming to the end of the haunt. We’re now eligible for ‘parole.’ We step inside a dark room, where behind a panel of plexiglass a sinister, authoritative clown readies us for our release. We have to take an oath that we’ll be good citizens or something. We have to hold hands. There are bibles mounted to the wall, topped with silver crosses. The two on the end are told to place their hands on the bible. Did I even mention there was a random, solo man in our group? He was fine. Chill vibes. I was happy for him that he got us. He was on one end and balked at putting his hand on the bible. I didn’t get it. Everything happend so fast, and you were constantly being shoved from one low-key harrowing room to the next, so it was all a whirl of overwhelm. Which I enjoyed. Real overwhelm, which I encounter regularly, at the thought of paying rent, or getting cancer, or being behind on work, or having given birth to a perfect creature who is doomed with having to grow up and make a living under capitalism - this actual overwhelm hurts the spirit. This fake horror overwhelm is dizzying and weirdly relaxing.

The guy puts his hand on the cross. On the other side, Clint puts his hand on the other cross. All of us convulse as an electrical current passes through the lot of us. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK. I was truly unprepared. It was truly the weirdest physical sensation I’d ever experienced. I’ve played with electricity, once, at a dungeon, with my husband, and it was a delicate little zapper - you felt it, it stung, it was perfect. This was a wallop. I felt like a ghost had stormed through my body. It doubled me over - not in pain, in - what? I can’t stop thinking about it. It didn’t not hurt, but pain just isn’t right. It was a paranormal THUMP. It was like the breath got knocked out of me, except it didn’t. It was like I got shot. Was I dead? I looked around at everyone. What Happened?!?! What Was That, What Happened?!?! No time to process, we were kicked out into the final room, a small square room with high ceilings, occupied by a single clown in club gear. Up high, behind glass, a skeleton was made to look like a DJ. House music blared. YOU WANNA GET PAROLED???? the raver clown cried. Yeah! We yelled. YELL IT WITH ME: PAAAA-ROLE! PAAAA-ROLE! She waved her clowny hands in the air. I, at this point, am seriously high off of being electrocuted, not to mention the other horrors I’ve endured. I raise my hands in the air like In just don’t care. PAAAA-ROLE! PAAAA-ROLE! From the top of the wall, a cascade of black balls, like a kid’s ball pit, only goth. Like a kid’s ball pit, but the balls keep coming. The balls don’t stop. The balls are at your throat. The balls are at your nose. The balls are now over your head, you have been consumed by the balls, are breathing through little pockets of air between the orbs. I saw this when I peeked, too. I decided to just trust that I wasn’t going to die. The house music blared, and I settled into the strangely cozy feeling of being buried in balls. After not too long, a long door along the floor flapped open, and the balls poured out. As they drained, we were revealed, like those corpses in Lake Mead during the drought. The clown then exhorts us to help her kick the balls out of the room, clearing the dance floor for the next batch of recently - electrocuted Halloweeners.