Saturday Night of the Undead

Halloween came a week early at the second annual Silver Spring Zombie Walk, wherein undead enthusiasts from the DC area congregated in Maryland before proudly shuffling through a strip of restaurants and towards a movie theater to watch Shaun of the Dead.

Corpses at the front of the parade were more of the Romero persuasion, careening down the street with blood dripping from their mouths, banging on restaurant windows and pulling fake intestines out of each other’s pants. They presumably witnessed the more spectacular pedestrian reactions.

Stephanie and I were somewhere in the middle of the crowd. We were both more traditional zombies; slow, cadaverous and with a penchant for brains. In fact this became part of a very catchy chant for several minutes:

“What do we want?”

“BRAINS!”

“When do we want it?”

“BRAINS!”

And so on. Incidentally, there is an odd comfort which results from abandoning all thought and walking towards a common goal with a large group of people. It’s a surprisingly liberating experience, and was my first real glimpse into understanding why people join cults. I’ve never marched in a protest before, but based on Saturday’s festivities will probably do so regularly from now on. Except that I intend to continue wearing my bathrobe, with my arms outstretched in front of me and my head tilted to the left, periodically yelling “Brains! Braaaaaaaains!”

I think Zombie Guy will become unanimously accepted as hilarious, regardless of which groups I march with, which will be any and all who advertise. Gay Rights, Tea Party Rallies, the Fourth of July; I’m not making a satirical point, I just think Zombie Guy is innately funny when seen within a broader context. I’m sure other march participants will feel the same way.

Judging by her blood splatters and head wounds, Stephanie looked like she succumbed to zombiedom in an event most violent and emotionally traumatic. My costume indicated a more casual entry into “room temperature lifestyle.” I wore a dressing gown over an old undershirt, as if I had been out to fetch the newspaper one morning, been bit by some crazy neighborhood kid, then wound up a flesh-eating, ambulatory cadaver by sunset.

To complete the look, I half-chugged a can of V8, letting the juice amply guzzle down my chin and across the undershirt. Then I blasted my face with fistfuls of flour, adding a final zest of hoary eye shadow to give a hollowed-out eye socket look. A bit like Beatlejuice.

Here are my favorite costumes of the evening: 1. Zombie Lincoln. 2. Woman who may or may not have actually been a part of the Zombie Walk, but in any case stood on the corner across the street for an entire hour, suspiciously eye-balling us while holding a cricket bat. 3. Gentleman with “HAPLESS BYSTANDER” written on an index card duct-taped to his beer gut.

Presumably the speedier, rowdier Romero-style zombies got the really fun reactions from those pedestrians initially startled. I assumed as much, but I also figured there was a ten percent chance a nutball with a revolver would wind up gunning someone down. I myself have an itchy trigger finger, and for that reason avoid packing heat on holidays which might catch me off guard, like Halloween, National Jump out of a Closet Week or Columbus Day. (Incidentally, nobody got shot on Saturday night. This year.)

By the time the shuffling cavalcade of flesh eaters we had aligned ourselves with passed gawkers, most of the living had accurately assessed the situation and were enjoying themselves. We still encountered a variety of different and hilarious reactions.

For instance, the church bus full of screaming Hispanic children which sputtered by presumably did not wholly grasp the situation, and lacked proper instruction on the events outside. Welcome to America!

A lot of people cringed when they realized their car was stopped by a passing parade of lurching corpses, and did their absolute best to avoid eye contact. Which was difficult, because a lot of us were rocking their cars back and forth yelling “BRAINS! GIVE US YOUR BRAINS!” or in some cases offering unsolicited counsel on the pro’s and con’s of public health care.

One fine fellow, when confronted by a gang of zombies slapping his windshield and begging for organ scraps, had the presence of mind to roll down his windows and crank up “Thriller” by Michael Jackson. Then proceeded to rock out.

The parade of zombies was fairly non-confrontational with anybody actually unfortunate enough to be waiting for a bus when we stumbled by. Unless there was glass between us. For some reason we all interpreted a quarter inch of glass as free license to ruin a lot of folks’ evenings.

Pretty much every time we passed a restaurant, forty or fifty gut-splattered, soil-encrusted hobblers would start banging on the glass and screaming “Brains! BRAINS!” at whoever had previously been enjoying dinner. While I have no way of corroborating it, I think it’s statistically likely that someone inside was either proposing to or breaking up with their girlfriend on that particular night. I like to think I helped contribute to the magic of the moment.

Most of the restaurant patrons had good senses of humor, and several took pictures. People at Borders remained stubbornly, amusingly stoic. There were probably sixty or seventy of us all crammed up against the storefront, yelling and smearing crimson corn syrup all over the glass, and nobody in Borders would glance at us. No, not Mr. I-always-read-Popular-Mechanics-on-Saturdays guy. Noticeably agitated, yet he never looked up from that article on bio-diesel.

Although participating zombies were fairly elated by the end of the parade, warmed by tingly feelings from being part of something bigger than ourselves, Stephanie and I were in for a nasty shock when we found out Shaun of the Dead had already sold out. We decided to head back to the Zombie Walk starting point and hit up Piratz Tavern in between features.

We settled onto bar stools and ordered a drink special aptly christened “A Zombie.” I don’t know what is in this particular green concoction, other than cheap grain alcohol and dry ice. Judging by the following morning, I will further infer “headache juice,” although I’d like to note I only drank two Zombies, which does not constitute binge drinking under normal circumstances.

For those readers currently in college, I will here interject sage advice drawn from the rest of my evening for your benefit.

First, you probably shouldn’t drink anything colored green unless it has “Organic,” “Anti-Oxidant” or “Wheat Grass” built into its name. (Even then, stay vigilant when around hippies. They might try and slip marijuana into your cup while you’re playing darts or something. (Also, try not to play darts when you’re drinking. It seems like a good idea, but then, so does text messaging ex-girlfriends with cryptic Napoleonic history references. (Do not send weird text messages to ex-girlfriends under the influence.)))

Finally, it was probably a bad plan to drink a concoction literally bubbling and producing its own fog by means of sublimation. Dry ice exists at a minimum of −109.3 °F, so I’m still not entirely clear about how I could drink two pints of Zombie without freezing my tongue and shattering it into little pink bits the next time I said something clever. Retrospectively that was a poor decision. For that reason I urge you to drink irresponsibly only when in the company of biochemistry majors and guys with t-shirts reading “Don’t Worry, I’m a Pre-Med Student.” Presumably they’re taught about dry ice and headache juice and all the factors which thereafter complicated my evening.

To my credit, the tavern banter remained as sparkling and glib as ever. Here’s a snippit:

“All I’m saying is if I, as a zombie, want to marry a consenting zombie, I should have that right. Just like anyone else.”

“What do you mean? You guys can’t even vote.”

“Of course we can! Hell, I voted for this one guy, Gene Stipes, probably six or seven times after I died. In the same election.”

Then I went off on a tirade about how Right-Wing Voodoo Fundamentalists have hijacked the Zombie Movement, and, nearing the completion of my second and final round of bubbling, rum-flavored poison, enjoyed an extended discussion about String Theory, the Multiverse, and some related stuff about quantum mechanics which I now find difficult to recall in detail.

Brains.