Parade

I was one of the lucky ones. I got to be in one of the first Macy's Day Parades, before it all went downhill. "The David Hartman Years," as I think of them.

It wasn't all cheap and gaudy back in my time. The floats were hand-painted, like works of art, not covered with smelly flowers to queer it all up. Why, just ahead of me the whole time, as I walked the parade, was a float that was a beautiful tribute to Michael Angelo's Sistine Chapel. Not the famous Italian painter guy, but Michael Angelo, a guy in New York famous for building a Gingerbread Sistine Chapel. And no one ever ate it either, since Adam's genitalia generally put everybody off their appetite.

We had balloons back then, too, but they weren't any damn Muppets or Woody Woodpecker or nothing. We had more respect than to put just anyone in a parade—we made balloons in the images of our most famous celebrities, like Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Rudolph Valentino. The W.C. Fields balloon was life-size. Even better than these cheap balloons they use today, ours were the main form of transportation between continents. If you looked out the window and saw Fatty Arbuckle sailing right toward you, you knew your country might soon be invaded by a massive army.

It took quite a bit of strength to hoist those balloons everywhere and not get lifted away into space. There weren't as many people back then, we knew how to control ourselves, sexually speaking, so only one person to a balloon we had. A hoister, which is what we called fellows who did the hoisting, had to secure themselves firmly to the earth with two pockets packed full of lead sinkers. Praying a little beforehand didn't hurt either.

I was a hoister in that parade, and you can probably just imagine how green jealous ol' brother Goose was. It had been his lifelong dream to be a hoister, even before we invented parades in 1912, and it drove him out of his mind to turn on the radio and hear me hoisting that Douglas Fairbanks balloon down Main Street, New York. He was so furious he punched the doorframe and hurt his hand, and it was in a cast for weeks. He also went down to the local corner bar with a gun and began randomly shooting people, but knowing Goose, that could have been for any reason. Sometimes he just liked to play a fierce game of tag with complete strangers.

But truth be told, outside of driving my brother on a mad killing spree, the whole parade thing seemed kind of empty. We weren't celebrating anything, since the Macy's parade was held on No Particular Day, which wasn't famous for anything, before they decided to have it on Thanksgiving. Nothing, that is, but our own hubris. We were an infant nation back then, still effectively sitting at the kids table. We threw parades just because we liked to create things, create them for no reason other than we had the will to do it and for the sheer delight. That's what made this country what it is today.

That and the several wars, I mean.

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